"We do not take possession of our ideas, but are possessed by them. They master us and force us into the arena, "Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." Go men! OD never made anything greater than the people. How sublime is the history of the evolution of the rights of We are met at the threshold of the twentieth century with the greatest question of all the ages-the just coöperation of capital and labor. And over its gateway is the word "organization." The key-note of the hour is combination and cooperation. Shall this powerful force of organization be for the benefit of the few or for the benefit of all? In liberty-loving Switzerland, whose snow-capped Alps echo to the huntsman's horn, is the great glacier. Long years in forming, it moves so slowly that only the nice ear of the man of snow and ice can catch the music of its motion. But in the fulness of time it becomes the swiftly-moving avalanche, in its terrible force sweeping all before it. The evolution of the rights of men through all the ages has been the slow motion of the glacier, but it comes upon the twentieth century with the swiftness of the avalanche. Two thousand years ago a Flower Divine closed its petals upon the Cross at Calvary, and to-day it bears its ripened * Address delivered by Lieutenant-Governor W. A. Northcott, at Springfield, Illinois, on Labor Day, September 2, 1901. fruit in the spirit of brotherly love that is the basis of all that is best in our present civilization. And, above the avalanche of human rights that has come to bless our times, we look beyond the centuries to the Cross borne by the lowly Nazarene on the far-off hills of Galilee. The strength of a nation is not in its armies and navies, but in the number of happy homes throughout the land. The strength of a community is in the distribution of political power, religious liberty, intelligence, and wealth among the masses of the people. Not that one man is stronger than his fellows, but that the many are strong. Not that one man is intellectually great, but that the many are intelligent. Not in the universities whose spires kiss the sky, but in the publicschool houses on the hills and in the valleys. Not in great wealth concentrated in commercial centers, but in the fact that our laborers have "three square meals" a day and are able to clothe and feed their little children and send them to school. Not that a king is powerful, but that political power is distributed among and rests with the people. These are the conditions that make a nation truly great. Slowly came the evolution of religious freedom down the ages. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther challenged religious intolerance and the Reformation began. Contemporaneously, the licentious arrogance of Henry VIII. of England opposed with all the strength of his kingdom the power of papal despotism, and, once broken, it slowly gave way to religious freedom. The builders of our Republic, remembering the flight of the Pilgrim Fathers from the religious oppression of the Old World, in making the Constitution, divorced Church and State and gave to our people the greatest religious liberty the world has ever known. How inspiring has been the march of political equality! Nearly a thousand years ago the Magna Charta was wrested from King John by his haughty barons on the plains of Runnymede, and to the English people was given the right of trial by jury. In the seventeenth century Oliver Cromwell gave the first challenge to the "divine right of kings." The teach ings of Voltaire and Rousseau inspired the French Revolution, and when the streets of Paris ran red with blood the people answered Louis XIV. back across the century and said, "Nay, sire; we are the State." The glories of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown made America independent of the tyranny of kings. But when the boys in blue marched with Grant to Appomattox and the Emancipation Proclamation came from the hands of the immortal Lincoln, like the voice of God into the grave of Lazarus, then all our people became absolutely free. Then the spade and pick, which in the hands of the slave had been emblems of disgrace, became in the hands of free toilers the emblems of honor. Then was lifted into the forum of our Constitution, to shine forever and ever like a star, the great principle of the equality of all men before the law. Then for the first time in all the ages there was a perfect political equality of all men. In equal advancement with religious and political equality has come the diffusion of the means of education among our people. "The public free school is the fountain whose streams make glad all the lands of liberty." The tinkling of the school bell calls upon the children of the people to advance. The glad laughter of the school-going children of the Republic is as musical as the bells hung on the golden-shafted trees of Eden, shaken by the eternal breeze. Wonderful has been the material advancement of the world. For ages science moved but slowly, creeping on from point to point. Then in the nineteenth century it came as the avalanche pouring its ripened fruit into the lap of the twentieth century: "At the command of science the spirits of air, water, earth, and fire have been made to do man's every bidding. They propel his steamships, railways cars, and mighty engines; they make his garments; they build his houses; they illuminate his cities; they harvest his crops. For him they make ice in the summer and grow oranges amid snow. For him they fan a heated atmosphere into cooling breezes or banish icy winds. They flash his news around the globe. They carry the sound of his voice for thousands of miles, or preserve it after he is dead. Verily, the fairies and genii of old did not so much for Solomon in all his glory." During the last hundred years the increase in the aggregate wealth of the world has been more than that of all the preceding centuries. In France and England the wealth accumulated in the nineteenth century is more than five times as great as the total accumulations of all preceding ages. The wealth of the United States in 1800 was about one billion dollars, while now it is nearly ninety billions, the rate of increase being six times more than the growth of population in the same period, the per capita of wealth having risen from $200 in 1800 to $1,200 in 1900. We have reviewed the evolution of political equality, religious liberty, and the popular dissemination of knowledge among the masses of the people. What about the diffusion of wealth? What about industrial equality? Have they too kept step with the onward march of civilization? On the contrary, wealth has concentrated into comparatively fewer hands, till one-half of our people own comparatively nothing. One-eighth of our people own seven-eighths of the wealth, or forty-nine times their equal share. Four thousand millionaires or multi-millionaires have twenty per cent. of the total wealth, or four thousand times their fair share if the principles of partnership or brotherly love were applied. Says Professor Frank Parsons: "The vast increase of wealth and the congestion of it, along with the vast increase of knowledge and the large diffusion of it and the rapid growth of political liberty, constitutes the paradox of the nineteenth century and the source of the deepest troubles it bequeathes to the twentieth. The congestion of wealth in the presence of diffused intelligence is the underlying cause of the great unrest of our time. There are only two paths to social equilibrium: the diffusion of enlightenment must vanish or the concentration of wealth must cease. Democracy of intelligence and aristocracy of wealth are incompatible. Industrial privilege must destroy free government and popular enlightenment, or free government and popular enlightenment will destroy industrial privilege." This is essentially an age of the combination and concentration of capital. The capitalization of the trusts in America to-day aggregates ten billions, and, together with the railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, comprises more than onefourth of our country's wealth. The trusts are the natural results of industrial evolution, and if properly coördinated with labor are not evils to be condemned. "They make possible the maximum of product resulting from the minimum expense and effort. The trust is scientific production. The modern trust is competition finished." Brain and muscle should never be too cheap in the American Republic; and the organization of capital, improved machinery, and facilities of transportation, all, if rightly directed, give higher wages to labor and a lower cost of the product to the consumer. Since the communism and socialistic condition of the tribes of primitive men, there has been no industrial equality. History tells of no golden age of labor. In all these hoary ages labor has been a commodity to be bought in the market the same as horses, coal, iron, etc. Governed by the law of supply and demand, labor has rested under the yoke of the Ricordian law that the wages of toil would always be brought to the level of the cost of the bare living of the toiler. Trusts in the future can do no worse than competition has done in the past in carrying out this "iron law" of wages. Organization and coöperation under the ameliorating influences of our present civilization can, and I believe will, do much better. If the forces of political equality, religious freedom. and the diffusion of intelligence cannot successfully contend with the greed of organized capital, then indeed will come the fulfilment of Byron's gloomy prophecy: "Here is the moral of all human tales, 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past: First freedom and then glory-when that fails, |