266 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



politicians are weaving the warp and woof of destiny for the generations that are 

 moving on to take their place. The child in the mine, and the child in the gas- 

 lighted parlor, the child of the hungering beggar and the child of the devotee of 

 fashion, the child on the high road to prison and the child climbing the convent 

 walls, the child of the faro dealer and the child of the stock-gambler, whose 

 homes are dark with poverty and want and toil, or rich with sparkling gold and 

 bright with folly's ease, will never learn therein the duty which they owe to 

 righteous law. With horizon lifted but a span, the shrunken circle of their lives 

 is filled with self, and as the ship of state sails on, they laugh or curse, and little 

 care who guides the craft, as long as freedom lasts and suns are bright and winds 

 are fair, the puppets of designing men, the heavy freight of human dross. 



Let not the State become a painted ship upon this painted ocean of moral 

 degradation, indolence, ignorance, and politic d death. A little freedom may 

 become a dangerous thing. You say that from the northeast there come the 

 muttering thunders of a deadly war between Capital and Labor. Is it not possi- 

 ble to lift the one up to the softened tenderness of the other. If we could but teach 

 those who control the millions of the earth the value of a single human soul, think 

 you that capital would oppress the virtuous poor? But what, you say, can the 

 State do? Religion alone can compass this Who can improve the mind when 

 the body is racked with toil from morn till night? Can the State expect intelli- 

 gence from its subjects when it does not provide from out the beautiful sunlight 

 of heaven a single hour in the day when the groping mind may turn to science, 

 or literature, or politics? Speed the time when the law shall lay its hand upon 

 unfeeling wealth and say "the laborer is worthy of his hire;" respect thou the 

 untutored child, and know that honest toil shall not be measured by the greed of 

 gold. Let the State answer the question of the English Dickens, " Oh, ermined 

 judge, whose duty to society is now to doom the ragged criminal to punishment 

 and death, hadst thou never, man, a duty to discharge in barring up the hundred 

 open gates that wooed him to the felon's dock, and throwing but ajar the portals 

 to a decent life ! " 



The question of vvages and wealth is paramount with us now. The inaliena- 

 ble rights of life, not passive animal existence, of liberty — not freedom of body but 

 of the thinking soul to soar starward, of the pursuit of happiness — not to accu- 

 mulate property, but to search with unwasting energy for the highest good — are 

 threatened with destruction, and if the State does not preserve them whole and 

 true, the doom of the Republican idea is sealed forever. Long ago, Charles 

 Dickens, who from the dust in the highways of life searched out the pearls, 

 wrote : 



"If those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember this — if 

 they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in 

 their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they 

 live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never 

 found — if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares and great 

 houses, and strive to improve the wretched dwellings in by-ways where only pov- 



