BENJAMIN KIDD: The development that will fill the history of the twentieth century will certainly be the change in the relations of capital, labor, and the state.-Social Evolution, Lecture IV. 219.

HENRY GEORGE: Political economy has been called the dismal science. In her own proper symmetry political economy is radiant with hope.-Progress and Poverty, 400.

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A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D. D.: The present state of the working classes may be described as one of alienation rather from the churches than from religion, [due to] the belief that the churches are not religious realities, not bodies organized for the teaching and doing of righteousness, but for the maintenance of vested interests and conventional respectabilities... In Protestant countries the social development has cutrun the religious, and it will only be by the religious development overtaking the social that the Church will be able to reclaim the masses. If wealth were wise, there is nothing it would more dread than the separation of classes in the house of God, or the separation of different houses of God to different classes; and if it were good as well as wise, there is nothing it would so little allow. The master who goes to worship where only other masters are, does his best to alienate himself from his people, to lower religion in their eyes, and to bring on the social revolution; for the only salt that can preserve society is sympathy and communion in the most serious things of the Spirit between all classes.-Religion in History and in Modern Life, pp. 49, 18, 22, 35.

CHARLES D. KELLOGG: Is it your secret heart's conception, perhaps half unsuspected, that you will always meet the poor on missionary or asylum ground, and not on social or brotherly ground? Is there a gulf between you and them that you do not wish to see closed? If so, you cannot do the poor much good.-Christianity Practically Applied, vol. ii. p. 373.

GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH: There is hardly any more pathetic figure than that of the strong, able worker crying plaintively in the midst of our palaces and churches, not for charity, but for work; asking only to be allowed the privilege of perpetual hard labor, that thereby he may earn wherewith to fill his empty belly and silence the cry of his children for food. Crying for it and not getting it; seeking for labor as lost treasure and finding it not; until at last, all spirit and vigor worn out in the weary quest, the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which is to come.-Darkest England and the Way Out.

DAVID MACALLISTER, D. D., in The Christian Statesman: True reform must be radical, reaching to the character and spirit of both employers and employed. The supreme need, therefore, of the hour, is a church which shall teach fearlessly the responsibilities and the duties of the rich. Herein lies the great opportunity of the church of to-day. If she could rise to the occasion, and deal with the wealthy classes who fill her pews in the plain and faithful spirit of her Master, she could work a great reformation among them and at the same time attract the poorer classes powerfully to herself. She is preeminently fitted to be the mediator in this great conflict. The service which she might thus render to society is of incalculable value.

IV. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF CAPITAL AND LABOR (Continued).

§1. WHETHER in conferences or otherwise, the labor problem should be studied with more regard to history and less to prophecy than has been the custom.

Utopias.

There was a time when labor leaders were chiefly prophets of future Utopias. High ideals are of great value. Without them there is sure to be low achievement. But impossible and extravagant ideals, or ideals whose achievement is too remote, are of doubtful utility. The early communistic ideals usually represent their industrial heaven on earth as achieved with impossible suddenness and impossible sinlessness. Labor leaders have abandoned such ideals, but their critics are still bombarding the empty forts.' Intelligent labor now interprets the future by the past, and so expects an evolution of justice that shineth more and more unto the perfect day."

2. The individualism which preceded the present solidarity of the race was well represented by "the independent farmer," who could have lived and The Individuflourished if the fence around his farm had alistic Farmer. shut him out from all the world, and all the world from him. He produced his own meat, drink, lodging, and raiment. In the period when the farmer was only a shepherd, the sheep furnished him his tent, his coat, and his food, the last supplemented by natural growths of fruit. When he learned to till the soil and locate in a house, he made his own lumber and was as independent as before. Homespun took the place of skins for gar

ments, and home-ground flour supplemented fruit; but he was still independent.'

Now the farmer is dependent on mills a thousand miles away for his bread, for his garments, for his lumber, and is also at the mercy of bad roads and worse railroads, and grain gamblers, who are worst of all. Every farmer in the world suffered in 1893–94 because of bad financiering in Argentine, Australia, and India. It first affected the world's heart, London; whence the industrial poison went to every fireside in the civilized world.

Nor is the once independent farmer left, as formerly, to instil moral ideas into his family without other difficulties than those of natural depravity. The Sunday paper is thrown off at the nearest railroad station, at which his family is also tempted to Sunday excursions. The saloon has also come to the neighboring village, or else the city saloon has come to be so near by the building of the railroad that it has poisoned the country as well as the city.

Labor Problem

tional.

§3. Production has come to be almost entirely a social act since the discovery of steam power introduced factories and railroads, multiplying cities and Interna- making all rural regions their surburbs. Electricity, which has already brought all the world into speaking distance, is about to narrow the world still more by increasing the rapidity of both production and distribution. Once a man's only competitor was across the street; now he is everywhere, and the single employer's contract with the single employee is necessarily governed, not by local conditions, but by national or world competitions or combinations. first essential in any wise or effective study of the labor problem is the clear recognition that, in the main, it is not a personal or local, but chiefly a national and international problem. A manufacturer in St. Paul cannot considerably increase wages unless his competitors in

The

Minneapolis and Milwaukee do the same. Not even by States, much less by cities, can a general eight-hour law be introduced." An effective movement to that end must, therefore, be at least national in its scope, whether it seeks its goal by strikes or by joint legislative action of States and nation. So I said in St. Paul in an address to the Labor Day parade of the trades unions, whose members did not dissent from my statement. In the case of monopolies the eight-hour law need not wait for general adoption. I helped to secure from Congress such a law for letter-carriers and spoke at their eight-hour jubilee.

§ 4. Local strikes are mostly as useless as the attacks of a single Indian tribe on a United States military post. When any proposed labor reform Strikes or Balhas enough men and moral force for a lots? successful national strike it can better accomplish its end by the ballot. It would be an abuse of popular government for any class to use the brute force of numbers, even at the ballot-box, for securing an unjust class advantage;' but surely the class that has a large majority of the votes has no excuse for turning civilized society into the savage chaos involved in the actual, if not in the theoretical strike, when they have only to reach some conclusion that satisfies the sense of justice in their own majority to secure orderly relief through political action," if, indeed, the courts cannot give them speedier justice. The starting point in labor reform is, then, the recognition that industrial production and distribution is a social act whose abuses can only be remedied by social action on a scale as large as itself.

Eighteenth Century's Industrial Revolution.

§ 5. An intelligent conception of the labor problem as modified by this new solidarity must be based upon knowledge of the new era that was introduced by the steam-engine 10 and related machinery " during the second half of the eighteenth century, under the laissez faire