Py 
PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION F. 149 
term a tendency to smooth down any temporary inequality. I 
and my fellow-workmen are now unemployed ; many of us, with 
our families, are in great distress—without zustant employment 
or relief from some source, many of us will die of starvation. We 
have no means, and if we had we do not know where to go to 
better our miserable condition. Do you mean, if many of us 
succumb and die from want and misery, thereby thinning our 
own ranks as competitors for the existing small field of employ- 
ment still remaining, that this is the smoothing down process to 
which we are referred for comfort? Good heavens, surely not 
this? Remember that we are human beings, not machines. The 
machine may stand idle for a time and “ive. Men cannot. 
Friction in inanimate machinery means dissipation of power in 
heat ; with men friction means distress, misery and death. Men 
are not machines, and loose analogies based upon the laws of 
physical processes cannot be grimly applied to men fighting for 
life and exposed to suffering. You say that Government is not 
bound to protect its own workmen, and that there can be no right 
having a juster claim than that every individual should have the 
most absolute freedom in buying in the cheapest market and 
selling in the dearest, irrespective of any local claims of sympathy 
or rational or racial ties of common interest. Such a commercial 
Law, not Bond, cannot be consistent with the conditions which 
necessitate the maintenance, defence and independence of indi- 
vidual nationalities. To be logical, it would necessitate the 
breaking down of all individual States, all individual race 
conglomerations, and the fusing of all human elements into one 
grand State of the world. Until that time arrives there must 
of necessity be localised interests, governed by the same local 
general condition, which maintain separate nationalities. All 
the social organisations of the State, such as Railways, Roads, 
Bridges, Harbours, Post and Telegraph, Schools, Defence and 
Protection, Poor Laws, &c., can only be logically maintained 
upon the admitted necessity of some common local rational 
interest, having special concern for the general welfare of the 
particular nation ; and these special local interests are so inter- 
twined by so many bonds more precious than mere questions 
regarding absolute cost of products in money, that it seems absurd 
to say that the destruction or suffering of any of its members 
are locally only of equal concern to a corresponding evil in a 
foreign State similarly constituted. The necessary gravitation 
and concentration, interests and sympathies around home and 
fatherland are as natural as perspective in optics; the greatest 
density must be near the centre of self, home and family, 
becoming weaker and weaker as the related rings of friends, 
relations, club, townsmen, nation, race are passed through, to the 
thinner sympathies lying beyond, embracing humanity generally, 
where foreign races and states are bound, and they themselves 
