AMERICAN LABOR AND ITS POSITION. 37 



a day for out-door work, and boys small sums in proportion. 

 The men breakfast before they leave home on tea-kettle broth, 

 which consists of an infusion of bread and water, with a little 

 milk if they can get it. For luncheon and dinner which they 

 can take with them, they have coarse bread and a little hard, 

 dry skim-milk cheese. For supper, on their return home, they 

 have potatoes and cabbage, with a small slice of bacon cooked 

 with it to give it seasoning. Butcher's meat they seldom if 

 ever see. They never lay by anything. They are not long 

 lived, but often in their prime are feeble, and at the age of 

 fifty are generally past labor — the result of poor living, sour 

 cider, a damp climate, hard work and anxiety combined. 

 There remains for them nothing but parish pay and the work- 

 house," This is a statement made before one of the leading 

 associations of Great Britain, and is endorsed by the association 

 as in accordance with the facts. This is the condition of the 

 English system of labor, which is far superior to many of 

 the systems of nations on the Continent of Europe. To say 

 nothing of the intellectual and social and moral condition of 

 such men, how fearful is the pliysical ! For these men, for 

 their children and their children's children, there is little 

 hope, except from the rays of light thrown across the trackless 

 Atlantic by our American labor which is struggling still for 

 complete emancipation from the tyrannical hands of aristoc- 

 racy, monopoly and capital. 



You need no statement from me of the condition of the 

 American laborer to enable you to compare the one with the 

 other. Our laborer, with equal rights with all other men, — 

 at the ballot-box, in the school-room, in the halls of legislation, 

 in the chair of state, in the learned professions, in the mechanic 

 arts, everywhere, — he may rise or fall as his own energy, ambi- 

 tion, industry and prudence are developed. It is upon his own 

 and not another's will that his success depends. 



