EDWARD ATKINSON, 765 



have faith in each other, the anarchist and nihilist might be a cause 

 of dread. 



"As I walk through the great factories which are insured in the 

 company of which I am president, trying to find out what more can 

 be done to save them from destruction by fire, I wonder if I myself 

 should not strike, just for the sake of variety, if I were a mule-spinner, 

 obliged to bend over the machine, mending the ends of the thread, 

 while I walked ten or fifteen miles a day without raising my eyes to 

 the great light above. I wonder how men and women bear the mo- 

 notony of the workshop and of the factory, in which the division of 

 labor is carried to its utmost, and in which they must work year in 

 and year out, only on some small part of a fabric or an implement, 

 never becoming capable of making the whole fabric or of constructing 

 the whole machine.""* 



We thus find him quite ready to turn his varied knowledge and his 

 executive power towards schemes for the relief of the operative, schemes 

 of which he left many. 



Mr. Atkinson, a year or two later (1890), wrote a similarly popular- 

 ized statement of social science for an address on " Religion and Life " 

 before the American Unitarian Association, In his usual matter-of- 

 fact way he had prepared himself by inquiring at the headquarters of 

 different religious denominations for a printed creed of each. He first 

 bought an Episcopal creed at the Old Corner Bookstore for two cents, 

 an Orthodox creed at the Congregational Building for the same amount, 

 then a Methodist two-cent creed also, a Baptist creed for five cents, 

 and a Presbyterian one for ten, Unitarian and Universalist creeds 

 being furnished him for nothing ; and then he proceeds to give some 

 extracts whose bigotry makes one shudder, and not wonder much that 

 he expressed sympathy mainly with the Catholics and the Jews, rather 

 than with the severer schools among Protestants. And it is already 

 to be noticed how much the tendency of liberal thought, during the 

 last twenty years, has been in the direction, whither his sympathies 

 went. 



As time went on he underwent the test which awaits all Northern 

 public men visiting the Southern States, but not met by all in so simple 

 and straightforward a way as he. Those who doubt the capacity of 

 the mass of men in our former slave States to listen to plainness of 

 speech should turn with interest to Atkinson's plain talk to the lead- 

 ing men of Atlanta, Ga., in October, 1880. He says, almost at the 

 beginning: " Now, gentlemen of the South, I am going to use free 



^ Address to Workingmen in Providence, April 11, 1886, p. 19. 



