RACTICAL POLITICS A LAY SERMON DELIVERED AT ALL SOULS CHURCH, SEPT. 13, 18 PUBLISHED BY THE PUBLICATION COMMITTEE OF ALL SOULS CHURCH CHICAGO PREFACE. At the urgent request of friends, this "lay sermon" is put in permanent form. Much of it is of merely tem- porary moment, as any such direct utterance must necessarily be. I am strong in the faith that within a year matters will have been so changed that no such Jeremiad will be descriptive of our national or local situation. The thought falls into two categories: The National Issue, upon which earnest and disinterested men may, and do, hold honest differences of opinion, and the Local Government, concerning the scandals and abomi- nations of which there can be no divided opinion. As one who knows and feels acutely the suffering of the present time, and has with open mind earnestly sought the causes; as one whose selfish interests would be benefitted by the silver propaganda, if it could benefit any one, I am absolutely unable to accept it as either good morals or correct mathematics. There are multitudes of honest men who hold the opposite view, but I am unable to follow their logic. Concerning the condition of municipal and local affairs, I would state that every detail of the arraign- ment is founded upon personal knowledge. The half 3 1734653 has not been hinted. The situation is so utterly bad as to stagger anyone not accustomed to it. The most un- just criticism that can be made is that the evils are ex- aggerated. I could produce evidence and witnesses of every crime charged, if there were any use in so doing, or if my duty lay in the line of public prosecutor. If I could not see the way out, I would not have burdened the Chicago public with a statement of conditions which are already public property, as evidenced by the news columns of responsible journals friendly to the administration. The outlook is hopeful and the sermon optimistic, but to know where the fighting line lies and the char- acter and strength of the enemy, is the first move toward the victory over what? ourselves! PRACTICAL POLITICS. For that the leaders took the lead in Israel, For that the people offered themselves willingly, Bless ye the Lord. * * * Curse ye, Meroz, said the angel of the Lord. Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof. Because they came not to the help of the Lord, To the help of the Lord against the strong and mighty. Song of Deborah. We look about us upon a scene of national disaster, trembling lest worse things come upon us ; dishonor and disgrace hang like a cloud over the future of Amer- ica, and want and misery, already at our doors, make riot inevitable and revolution more than probable, unless the verdict of the people is for financial solvency. We ask the question, "Is not representative govern- ment a failure? " and, in the pleasures of self-satisfied pessimism, forget that we are dealing with our own delinquencies. We, the misgoverned, are the mis-gov- ernors ; we cannot attribute our civic ills to any power of darkness outside ourselves. In this bountiful country of ours there is too much of everything, too much corn and oil and wine, too many clothes and too many shoes, too many mouths to feed, too many hurrying feet to wear out the shoes. We find it all reduced to a paradox, a reductio ad absurdum, and we are face to face with the only solu- 5 tion that we are victims of a system of distribution unjust and inadequate. It is due to misgovernment. The best thought of our nation is bent upon production, more and more and more, but our government is left to take care of itself. Occasionally, in times of aggressive emergency, we have been roused from our lethargy, but all times are times of emergency, and the crop of tares now choking our fields has long been growing in the unplowed corn rows. Our government, our mutual legal relations, concern law and order. Predatory wealth and envious poverty have bred class animosity ruinous to all. They con- cern a system of national finance and credit, and that has become a patchwork of inconsistent heresies, threat- ened with utter annihilation. There is no coherence in the plan. Tariff to-day, free trade to-morrow, gold, silver or paper money, de- pendent upon a vote utterly unskilled in political econ- omy, largely controlled by selfish interests. A few motives run through it all. The greed of wealth, the bitter envy of ignorant poverty, the craving of the politician for an office. "For that the leaders took the lead in Israel. For that the people offered themselves willingly. Bless ye the Lord." Nothing could by absolute negation better describe our situation. For that the people pay no heed. For that the in- competent stand in the high places, and for that selfish- ness hath debauched the officeholders ; we are in no state for thanksgiving. And now, after years of this sort of thing, dema- 6 gogues, having rolled all human woes into one ball, with a list of symptoms in one hand and a cure-all nostrum in the other, are abroad in this pleasant land of ours, and the well-to-do, the competent, those who have ordi- narily purchased immunity and obtained plenary ab- solution from the results of civic treason, these are shaken in the midst of their prosperity, and many who are already suffering believe that their betterment must come from any policy which will injure those whom they regard as antagonists. Whom can we blame ? Have not the people been laboriously taught that partisanship is patriotism ; that the government can create value, that it is its duty to spread prosperity like butter on a sandwich, that money is capital and a fiat is wealth ? Is this the first time that the patient stump has groaned under the burden of the liar and the demagogue ? Many a man, whose only participation in govern- ment has been useless, or worse than useless, now raises his voice and says : "Representative government is a failure. Let us curse politics and die." But it is no time for either. It is a time for work, for encourage- ment. Thank Heaven! the competent are forced into the arena for self-preservation, and, when this storm blows over, they must stay in the arena and work in unselfish devotion or they will go down in the general wreck. The disease is near the heart of our system no longer a question of details of tariff, of revenue, or whose business the government should assist, but whether or not the American people should stand before the world, singly and collectively, as unworthy of credit. ->J It seems almost incredible that, at this period of the world's history, a nation calling itself enlightened should bring up for discussion as the issue of a national campaign, the multiplication table and the Eighth Commandment. What a sorrowful waste of energy ; what a damper on Fourth of July oratory, perhaps wholesome after all, for we are taught that the relics of the fathers of our country have no fetisch efficacy to preserve us if we do not labor to hold to the paths of sanity and upright- ness. Representative government means constant watch- fulness on the part of the governed. There is nothing vicarious about it. If there were ever as cowardly a question asked as the historic, " Is life worth living ? " it is its correlative, "Is representative government a failure ? " Representative government cannot be a failure. It is the ultimate truth of men's mutual relations. It may be overthrown and the human race set back for centuries, but as the cloud tends to the sea, so must men return again to self-government. There is no other solution. Perhaps 1 ought to apologize for bringing into this pulpit the national issues, in which many of you are better versed than I, but the great question before us is of such overwhelming importance that it cannot be dismissed from our minds, and the causes working to our national injury are largely identical with those which disgrace the municipality. 8 In each case the competent, who have allowed our country to reach its present danger point, have evaded their responsibilities and considered "practical poli- tics" as synonymous with "dirty business." There is a large, impractical forum builded for them somewhere in the clouds, where men may kick against reflections of mundane pricks, with no hurt to their feet, no effect upon the thorns. We have so far advanced in thought that the super- natural has been obliterated. God is nature, and if ghosts were demonstrated to exist, we would welcome them into the realm of natural history and a careful classification. In the same way, all is practical, and the man who sneers at practical politics is creating the condition which his dainty existence shuns. I have no apology to make when the question of our local government is under consideration; it is apestilence of which I have been a part, with which I am thor- oughly familiar. I wish I were capable of drawing two companion pictures of the results of municipal neglect. The first would delineate the machines you permit to manage the politics of this city, and the second would show the officers placed in nomination by the machines and elected by you, the agency through which you are mis- governed by the grace of your own stupid votes. The first picture, the machines, would show three groups of figures two republican factions and one democractic. There are in them, as leaders, the worst of our alder- men. There are franchise jobbers, and there are 9 brokers in corruption. There are men who never had a visible means of support. There are gamblers and other known criminals. Were it the time or place, I would heap up against these men a list of charges that are as clearly proven as human evidence can prove them, criminal charges, penitentiary offenses ; but, alas, they could not be clear enough to be effectual in a state's at- torney's office, the function of which has been for years, with but few intervals of decency, to shield public brigandage. It is only fair to say that the machines grade up from this level to reputable men who associate with these workers of iniquity, and who, in the name of party or factional loyalty, wink at their misdeeds. The ma- chines are not entirely composed of criminals, convicted or otherwise, but the ideal is selfishness, and they are supported by loot. Perhaps these reputable men imagine they can re- form such organizations from the inside ; they say so, at any rate. Perhaps they are actuated by political ambi- tion, and see no other means of gratifying it. The first proposition has been described as analogous to reform- ing a bad egg by the injection of more egg. It was said nearly 2,000 years ago : "What will it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? " Does not this answer the other excuse? The sole idea of these machines is plunder. "What is there in it for me ? " is the question everywhere and always. Offices of meager salary are eagerly sought, provided chances of spoils are great. Reward a faith- ful heeler by making him an alderman at $3 a week. " Oh, for a job in the assessor's office just for a month ! " 10 And this view is so common as to as to render callous any one not sensible of the awfulness of it all. There is not a statement I have made but that, by itself, most politicians will recognize as true, but the bald wording and grouping together, they might pos- sibly resent. The other picture is of this city as it is now governed by the officers whom these machines have graciously per- mitted you to elect. I would be grossly unfair were I to put before you as something new in our municipal conditions the picture of our present administration. We had expected a great change for the better in the ousting of the former regime, but another machine took its place, and our disappointment makes the picture dark, not by com- parison with what has gone before, but judged by hopes betrayed. Here are franchises worth millions given away by a shameless majority of the council, sometimes vetoed and sometimes encouraged and signed by the mayor. Pay-roll scandals ; frontage frauds and forgeries ; every form of violation of civil service laws ; highway robberies every day ; a police force, some of the mem- bers of which are worse than the criminals they are supposed to watch ; policemen who are not permitted, if they would, to suppress public gambling ; and who, inspite of all forms of malfeasance, are kept in position by political pull ; justice shops that blackmail the un- fortunate, that sell verdicts to good customers ; consta- ble who are the lowest of the low ; saloons running in prohibition districts on payment of blood money ; a drainage board given over to spoilsmen ; park boards 11 who have to heed machine clamor in employing men; judges whose tenure of office depends upon complying with machine demands ; a board of education still a victim of jobbery, though nobly striving to climb up out of the mire ; revenues deficient from tax dodging on the part of citizens, and corruption in the offices of assessors; and a county commission known of all men. The food you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe are tainted by politics. Your rights, your property, the very education of you children, have long been at the mercy of the spoilsmen. And still there are men who, in the midst of all this incompetency and theft, woi'king away at their desks doing their best, are giving the city some sort of government, which is better than no government at all and better than the average voter deserves. In this picture there is sunshine, mostly of hope it is true, but the hope is justifiable. We have on our statute books the best civil service law known. It is being enforced as far as it can be by an ideal commis- sion. As far as any mechanical agency can promote betterment this law will promote it. Its working will within two years place the public service upon a busi- ness basis, if it is supported and upheld by men who desire such an end. The law will, doubtless, be assailed in the next legis- lature. We must hold this gain at all hazards. If any attempt is made to curtail or repeal it, Springfield should be swamped by an indignant Chicago public; and and every politician who would abridge or abrogate this municipal declaration of independence from cor- ruption should be made to feel the heavy hand of public wrath. This is the one great gain, the most important step toward better things. We have a council infinitely bettter than that of a year ago, and we now know that we can clean out the council chamber without using a rope. For the fall election the local republican ticket is saddening. This was considered by the dominant ma- chine a "yellow dog" year, and the ticket is largely a yellow dog license, a year when any one could be elected, a year for rewarding the faithful. In this Senatorial district, comprising the Third, Fourth and Thirty-Second wards, one of the Repub- lican candidates for the Legislature has the worst sort of public record, and, if his business career and private life are considered, his nomination is an insult to your intelligence. An independent nominee will permit you to omit him from your choice. The lists of county commissioners should be care- fully considered in the light of trustworthy information. It is your duty to learn how to scratch your ticket and to rebuke the sublime impudence of the county machine if Republicans ; and the Democratic machine, if Demo- crats. If, in this pivotal State and crucial election, the cause of National honesty goes down to defeat, those of us who are Republicans can blame ourselves for per- mitting the county machine to nominate a local ticket, which is only a dead weight to carry, and around which men cannot rally with any real enthusiasm ; and those of us who are Democrats, how can they explain their pai'ty's position at the present juncture ? And yet, the politicians have but rushed in to fill a 13 vacuum caused by the neglect of the honest and com- petent. They are not so much sinners against us, as our embodied civic sin. And the worst politician, in the midst of his self-seeking, does more for the commu- nity than the citizen who is too fine to take up the < 'dirty business" of practical politics. Nor, are the hands held up in horror at the misdeeds of officials all clean hands. They may be too soft for the stern task of guiding the tiller of the ship of state, but the stain of the bribe is not to be sought on the palms of the recipient alone. I have seen, in my short public life, the most shame- less corruption that can be conceived. I have heard it made a jest by men who should wear prison stripes for selling their constituents. I have heard it lightly dis- cussed by men of capital, who should adorn the stocks and whipping post, if the prison is good enough for the commodity they have purchased. Lecky has said: "There is one thing worse than corruption it is acquiescence in corruption." The young look up to some one in the community, to financial success or to official position. Shall we choose the street car magnate, who has debauched public officials and repudiated private obligations ; or the city official who has betrayed his trust, as the model for our children to follow ? When so much of so- called success is the sequence of moral failure, we have chosen a hard school in which to bring up our children. Pulpit and reform platforms ring with vituperation of the saloon and the saloon power in politics. Is selfishness the peculiar property of the saloon ? The saloon may be the poor man's club ; it may be the poor man's gambling house ; it may be a leading cause of his 14 poverty and the suffering of his family. Were I an omnipotent being, I would wipe out alcohol from the list of human commodities until men were fit to use it without encompassing their ruin, but if you want to find the place where politics is not neglected between elections, go to the saloon. You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that the talk is largely of measures for the general good, and you would feel that, to-day, the saloon is more nearly the forum of our local government than the church or the club. Even the average saloon discussion is better than no interest at all. It is argued that the vote that controls our local politics comes from the saloon, that it is drunken, sod- den and ignorant. What an admission ! Do the drunken, the sodden, the ignorant, manage the private business of this community ? Public control must come from some source. It might come from the counting-room and the pulpit. By the very meaning of the word, the competent may rule if they will, and will to rule justly ; for men must have leaders, and the neglect of the intelligent and honest is the opportunity of the demagogue. If those who should take the lead in Israel hang back from their duty, let them hail even the rule of the saloon as better than anarchy. Do the bribe-givers come from the saloon ? Are they the dregs of Europe ? Are not many of them of the best blood of this Nation ? Creatures of the greed of America a verdict tempered by mercy for the poor wretch to whom a bribe may represent family comfort. What should the verdict be for him who, from the raised platform of education and intelligence, seeking 15 only to play the game of greed, debauches government and perverts justice ? You say the task of reformation is hard, that it is too complicated, that common decency in government is an iridescent dream. A change is a matter of vital necessity; it is better- ment or absolute ruin, just government or revolution, common sense or chaos. Politics is not too complicated for the worst among us. Are you unequal to the problems solved in their own way by the saloons and the slums? You say that the corrupt machines are too firmly intrenched. They are periodically ousted by machines as corrupt. They have been recently shaken by a machine which worked unselfishly for decency; join the forces of de- cency and finish the task, and work and work and work to hold the gain, for there is no end of labor under the sun. "You cannot run politics with a meat axe," said a machine leader, disparaging the courageous work of the Voters' League. "Not if you're making a living out of politics," retorted the president of that body. Were I to outline a practical course of duties from a nonpartisan standpoint, from now until after the spring campaign, I would advise that every man to whom civ- ilization has loaned a competence or an intelligence and an education, should at once offer himself, and what funds he can spare, to the cause of educating the un- thinking who will suffer first and most from their folly, if it prevail. Either the sound money organization, which is non- 16 partisan, the Republican headquarters, or the honest money Democrats, can use you. If they cannot see where to use you, find a place of usefulness for your- self, and work, remembering that our national honor is at stake. In the national issue drop all minor differ- ences and vote for McKinley, which is a whole vote, and not a half vote, for a sound money system of cur- rency. If your legislative candidates are not satisfactory on the essential point of civil service reform, or if you cannot trust them, nominate others by petition, and see to it that the voters of the district are informed of their chance to elect a decent man. Go over your ballot carefully and scratch it con- scientiously. There may be small choice between the leading parties below the top of the ticket, but there is some. You will not have the chance to vote for township abolition, owing to the action of your Republican county machine. The present scheme is the roosting place of a flock of buzzards, who should be making an honest living, and is the proximate cause of our unjust and unequal taxation. Remember it in voting for county commissioners. After the November issue is settled, and you have learned whether you live in a solvent nation fit for commercial fellowship with civilized people, join the Municipal Voters' League. Try to aid party nomina- tions of decent men for the mayor's chair, men who are not politicians, men of honorable records in this com- munity, who are capable of carrying that gigantic re- sponsibility, men who are not to be tied down with 17 campaign promises, whose only pledge will be the solemn oath of office. You may not succeed in this. The League will see to it that there is at least one candidate worthy of your suffrage. Vote for him, elect him, and you will see a new city. There are many other officers to be treated in the same way, they must be so treated, and they will be. In your ward pick the best man for alderman, not a good fellow, but a staunch, sturdy man and a man of means. The jail ought to be full of good fellows who have gotten out of place. To nominate a poor man for alderman is either to abuse the man or to let him abuse you. Three dollars a week is hardly adequate pay for handling millions of dollars. No honest poor man can afford in justice to himself to take the position. An idiotic charter, by limiting the salary to that ridiculous figure, has unfortunately barred such a man from hold- ing the office. Vote for the best man nominated in matters of city administration. National party lines in municipal government are an evil unfortunately still with us, but to be ignored in behalf of fitness and char- acter. It has been well said that the union of national parties and city government results in the disgrace of the one and the demoralization of the other. The solution is so simple. Unselfish work not a little of it, but a great deal of it. Look back over your lives and consider how much you have done toward the perpetuation in purity and honor of this government for which a million lives have gone out in the agony of strife. Back of our short life as a nation the long birth pangs of constitutional liberty in 18 Europe, and back of that the dreary reaches of the climb of evolution. You can never repay the debt. Pay honest interest upon it in the best efforts of your lives. A few men in this community have pointed out the way, and, by grace of their intelligent leadership, our city will be farther along in the process of redemption next spring. Similar vigilance would soon force decency into the politics of the state, for, though one man may vote wrong for self-interest, another's self-interest will nullify the result, and the altruistic vote will infallibly hold the balance of power. The practical politics of these selfish machines is a colossal bluff. The politician spreads the shade of his branches over a large section of the earth, but his tap root is in his own precinct, and his foundation as narrow as his ward. He must listen to the voice of honesty, if it is audible, or his destruction is at hand. The uninitiated look at the branches and believe the task of removal is impossible. If we hew at the root with the strength of right the branches will wither and rot and blow away, and the tree will not long encumber the earth. There is nothing esoteric or mysterious about politics ; a good cause and enthusiasm will beat any machine of self-seekers. Organize your district, hang one motto on the wall, of one word, "Unselfishness," and live up to it. Learn where and how nominations are made, and use your influence to secure proper and adequate ones. If primaries and party machinery are controlled for evil, it is easy to go outside of party machinery and to 19 break it in pieces. The right to nominate by petition enables you to ignore primary judges and primary clerks in local matters, if they are disposed to prevent popular choice. Party machinery without votes is a pitable sight, but one to be diligently sought for until the machinery contains one element now almost utterly lacking unselfishness. Most of us have scarcely given our government a thought between elections. It is supposedly instituted for all of us, as directed by the best of us, but has be- come largely the rule of the purchasable among us for the benefit of the purchasers, or an indiscriminate hodge-podge of sometimes well-meaning ignorance. All that we have accomplished in a material way is threat- ened by neglect of this one thing needful. The connection between national and city affairs ought not to be based upon the line of party policy, but it manifestly exists on the ground of citizenship. The same elements of dissolution are seen in both. The whole is the sum of its parts, and our national distress is, in no small measure, due to the civic sins of this community. What wonder that our land is full of discontent ? Where are the poor and the unfortunate of this city before the law ? Their highest court is the justice- shop, the creature of dirty politics ; the officials they meet are of the worst. They hear nothing but the blackest side of government, and are usually its saddest victims. They know that they suffer ; they know that they are wronged. They listen to the voice of the demagogue, who has learned the story of their sorrow, and accept the quack remedy which he holds out to them. And the farmer, the man we sometimes call a repu- diation! st in what school has he been educated ? A railroad has recently been built without government aid upon honest capitalization from San Francisco to Fresno, up the San Joaquin Valley. Despite the economic waste of parallel railways, it can make six per cent, by charging just half what the Southern Pacific Railway has charged, and the farmers have paid, all these years. Having contributed by taxation his share of govern- ment expense, and having paid in addition extortionate rates to a merciless monopoly, can one wonder that he now asks who is in possession of the fruits of his toil, or that he favors a sort of retaliation, unable to see that the form taken by retaliation would be worse for him in the end than the injury he seeks to remedy. Too many Vanderbilts have damned the public, too many rich men have been kept out of jail by expensive lawyers. There have been too many Northern Pacific railways and too many Union loops. Were there nothing but unreasoning anarchy behind the demon- stration of class hostility, it would be founded upon the whirlwind and blow away, for the game of politics is nothing but a bluff and a bubble. Upon the very real danger of an alien, irreconcilable population, Dennis Kearney founded the Sand Lot Party; upon the abuses of railways the populists have their footing. Our governor, the inconsistent and contra- dictory, finds in the real evils that beset the poor through the oppression of the well-to-do, whether 21 directly or through the officers of the law, a fertile field in which to sow the seeds of anarchy. When we hear the clamor of the unfortunate, we are apt to fall back with complacency upon the dogma of the survival of the fittest, ignoring the fact that we in a certain measure create the standard of the fitness. Yes, we have been victims of the doctrine of the sur- vival of the fittest when we have elected to choose as the fittest those with the most dollars. We have set up a standard of excellence that may be begged, borrowed or stolen. Yes, one that may be contracted, expanded or wiped out of existence; and, in passing, it might be remarked that the free coinage idea can hardly be called a reform in the standard, for we have no reason to believe that those with the most half dollars will be any fitter. If we had before us lives ten times as long as the present expectancy, and if we had reason to believe that future generations would profit more by our experience than we have profited by the experiences of the past, we could hail with joy the awakening force of a victory of all the doctrines put forth in the name of class ani- mosity, by the party that threatens the overturning of every vessel of commerce and the waste, not the redis- tribution, of accumulated industry, capital. But we have forgotten the mistake of the French rev- olution ; we have no remembrance of the history of the earlier struggles of our country with irredeemable money; we cannot see in the experiences of any other nation texts for our own guidance, and now we must fight the battle out for ourselves, as though history had never been written. 22 Not in bitterness and epithets, but in patience and kindness, must we labor to undo the consequences of neglect. We must teach the mutual dependence of men and the mutual necessity of trust, and of confidence that is justified. I have tried to put before you a picture of the present situation. It could be nothing but a rough sketch, a bare outline. The inexcusable greed of wealth, the un- discriminating envy of poverty. Corruption in office, corruption in elections, corruption in nominations. Stupid neglect on the part of the competent, bitter ignor- ance of the incompetent. The lying appeals of the demagogue to low impulses and lower intelligence. The insatiable appetite of the politician. We have had one standard of morals for our churches and charities, another for our business dealings, while our mutual relations, through the sacred forms of law, have been forced to do without any system of morals at all. Our government is not representative of the average morality, though it doubtless is what we deserve. If we do not put ourselves in the way of deserving some- thing better, oh! the weary way our children must travel up out of the Slough of Despond where we will have left them. Whether we look at the broad field of finance, where stock-watering and merciless trickery prevail, or the narrower life, where the farmer and the country buyer play hide and seek with the scales we have no cause to congratulate ourselves upon our honesty as a people ; but our private morals are still pure and holy in compar- ison with our civic life that is an ulcer steadily eating 23 into nation's stamina. It must be burned out by the fire of unselfish effort. The fact must be self-evident that matters are terri- bly in the wrong. Whether we look at our interests as stockholders in this corporation of Chicago, whose officers and board of directors are looting it under our eyes, or whether we scan the wider field, where we are struggling to hold to the very alphabet of political economy, there is more than enough to sicken our souls. The path to climb up out of this valley of shadow is before us. There is hard work, but satisfactory, strengthening work, and there is a pleasure in feeling that we are equal to the task. Let each do his indi- vidual duty and study how he may co-operate with others. It is absurd to abuse machinery and bosses, per se. The motive is the salvation or the damnation of political machinery. What we most need are trusted leaders, deserving our trust. What we next need is a method of expres- sing our opinion by an organized, thoughtful majority. We are pledged, as citizens of this nation, to abide by the verdict of that majority, whether thoughtful or not. We must labor all the days of our lives to increase the intelligence of that verdict, and in the growth of in- telligent interest must rest the hope that we leave for our children after us. We cannot reconstruct the human race, but we can drag political life up to our average level ; if we do not, it will level things by dragging us down, If selfish greed is our standard, truly we must acknowledge failure in advance, and may expect nothing but misery in reaching that end. The outlook is dark enough, but it is the darkness 24 before the dawn. Beneath all the sins of wealth and the besetting crime of ignorance, there is still character, thank God, yes, and sense in the American people. They are awakening to their position and they will rise to the emergency. We must not wait for an impersonal something to do the work. We have been the neglectful ; we, the greedy ; we, the ignorant. Here and now is our op- portunity ; our duty is before us ; not here, but wher- ever we may be ; not now, but ever day. We must work. We must learn, and our nation will live. Let us shatter the stupid dictum of those who, in the weakness of inanition, despair of popular government, as it was said that the outworn creed of an ancient bigot was shattered when his hope of Hell was taken away. Would to God I could burn the lesson into you as it has been burned into me. The awf ulness of our trea- son to the sufferings of the past, the heritage of misery we are leaving to our children, by this criminal neglect of our mutual relations. Would that every man who continues such neglect could feel upon him the brand of Cain in that he has been false to the nearest duty, to his own self-respect, and to humanity. 25 A 000 090 401 1