242 BANQUET. 
the men employed and the employers, but I went over to the place where your chair- 
man was with’ his parents, as I understand it, into Glasgow, two years ago, and went 
to Dumbarton on the Clyde and saw my uncle, who worked for forty-seven years in 
McMillan’s Shipyard, and another uncle who had been there thirty-six years. They 
were going on a general strike on the Monday following my arrival there, and I said :— 
“Uncle Jim, what are you striking for?” He replied:—“‘I will tell you, John, I do 
not like to leave, after being there forty-seven years, but the old governor, when I was 
an apprentice boy, used to get to the works at the same time that I did in the morn- 
ing and he left a little bit after I left, but his grandson comes at nine in the morning 
with his limousine and leaves at three. So the boys begin to feel, 1f the governor works 
thirty-six hours a week, they ought to work only thirty-six hours a week, too.” 
Now that seems strange, at first blush, but may I suggest to you that perhaps we 
have lost sight of the fact that there is a human element involved, and that if the men 
employed notice the slacking up in the high places, they may slack up in their places. 
Uncle Joe Cannon put it perhaps in such a way that you will appreciate it as I did. 
A young man got up in Congress and began to talk about the hard times and the oppres- 
sive conditions under which our people lived. He said that the times were such that 
the men and women could not bear them any longer and that they must have relief. 
A remedy must be found for the intolerable conditions under which men and women 
existed. 
I, as a young man, sat and listened and thought it was a pretty good speech until 
Uncle Joe, with his eighty-four years, got up in the front of the hall, looked at the young 
man and said:—‘‘This is a patent bill; we are discussing patents. When I was a boy 
we did not have any electric lights, did not have any telegraphs, did not have any 
telephones, no steam railroads such as you have, no airplanes. We did not even have 
a big McCormick reaper. When we wanted to flail corn we went into the barn and 
took the flail in our hand and flailed it on the barn floor. Young man, if you have a> 
hard time now, we must have had a hell of a hard time then.”’ (Applause.) 
Men, I simply suggest to you this—that the complaint among employers and among 
employees will, to a great extent, be stopped if we can only turn the thought of our 
people back along the path which we have come as a nation; if we can only teach them 
that macadam roads have not been the way Americans always traveled, and what we 
have now is not ours because we have made it but because we have inherited it from 
the toil and struggle and labor of others. 
In this year, the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, it 
will be well for men who employ and men who are employed to throw their mind’s 
eye back to the landing of the Pilgrim ship, and ask:—What do we bear compared with 
what they bore? What do we stand compared with what they stood, that this nation 
might be? Then there must always be a remembrance that the human being is in 
government as well as in industry. ; 
A young man got up one day in Congress and said:—‘‘What we want is men who 
will never falter, men who will never yield to temptation, men whom you can depend 
upon in any emergency to do the right thing.’’ Uncle Joe Cannon arose and, stand- 
ing right in front of him, he shook the ashes from his cigar, then leaned over and said— 
“Let us subpoena God Almighty.” That was the answer, the complete answer—on 
earth, in industry, in government, human beings are going to do the work. 
But we ought not to think too pessimistically about the future. Times have 
