36 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



women and children. The Chinese works so cheaply because he 

 •expends next to nothing in the support of wife and child. I be- 

 lieve it is understood that most of the women who have accom- 

 panied our cheap Chinese laborers to this country are not in the 

 marriage relation. That is the one main reason of the cheapness 

 of Chinese labor. 



The cost of the Chinese wife is at the rate of the simple sup- 

 port of the animal woman. As between the wisdom of the hood- 

 lum and that wisdom which would solve the labor prot>lem by 

 remanding woman to the position she holds among the Chinese 

 emigrants, commend us to the former ; it is not so earthly, sen- 

 sucd and devilish. 



The end of our difficulties will not be by communism as dis- 

 ruptive, nor by the bullet as preservative of the old order. Neither 

 will settle anything. The one is as irrational as the other. We 

 shall begin to build well when we discern what has gone to pieces 

 under us. It is clear that the present condition of things has 

 brought into derision the poliiical economy which ha^ paraded its 

 columns of statistics — the tombstones of dead acts — as the 

 gauge of human possibilities; which has taught us that there is 

 only one principle — competition — the law of demand and sup- 

 ply, which presides over the regulation of labor. 



That political economy sounded very well in the mouths of 

 doctrinaires. But society is breaking up under it, capital is 

 shriveling, and labor idle, incommunicative, sullen. We have ex- 

 cellent scientific authority that the will amounts to something in 

 the modification of environment. 



The statement might have been added that the extent and. 

 quality of modification depends on the intelligence and moral 

 intent. 



Given these in high degree and of pure tone and all things are 

 possible. Given these and we shall cease to speak of labor as a 

 commodity. It is not commodities we are t-ilking about, " but 

 human creatures' lives." A remarkable commodity this which 

 requires a national army and a slate constabulary and local police 

 to keep it from appropriating all the dear earned possessions of 

 man. The end of that wisdom is anarchv. 



