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tells you this ? Probably those who have the advantage in some way 

 over what I have called the plain rights of free labor, or else it will 

 be those who have stopped growing, and thus do not care. An old 

 soldier who fought at Gettysburg told me what he was thinking of 

 at the crisis of that battle. Those of you who live here can picture 

 the scene far better than I can. This man told me that he stood with 

 his regiment waiting for the long irregular line of Confederate sol- 

 diers coming across the valley at a charge. Had that great line 

 broken through it would have swept on to Philadelphia. If it were 

 beaten back, the tide could never rise again. The guns above him 

 were roaring, and this man, waiting for the shock, thought out the 

 cause of it all. The night before he started for the war his old 

 father, a lame man, who could not go to war, back on a New 

 England farm had told him this: 



*'John, this war is at bottom an industrial conflict to see 

 whether this nation is to be ruled by plain hand working people, 

 or by an aristocracy of some sort. Probably not more than ten or 

 fifteen percent, of the Southern people are really slave holders, 

 but this small proportion has created a monopoly of political power. 

 This war is to settle the question, shall the plain working people 

 rule, or shall there be a government of the aristocracy which our 

 ancestors ran away from?" 



This man said he heard that above the roar of the guns, and 

 when at last the tide went back he felt that his children and his 

 children's children were to have forever the free and fair chance of 

 plain manhood. 



"Well," I said, "you earned it for them." 



"No, I was mistaken. All we won that day was the chance to 

 gain true freedom, but not freedom itself, because freedom is a 

 growth; it cannot stand still. It goes up or down and we will go 

 down into the hands of the ruling classes unless those for whom it 

 is designed, and who pray for it, are willing to give a part of their 

 lives in order that it may live. We nearly threw away our chance 

 because we did not watch it, and because we could not make our 

 children understand just what citizenship means. The glory of 

 what we had done overpowered us. We lived in it for years, and 

 while we lived in this fool's paradise, silent, sleepless and strong 

 forces were quietly at work with graft, special privilege and "joker" 

 legislation, gathering the power in their hands. They have bought 

 that most precious thing in life — manhood, until we have an aris- 

 tocracy and power more dangerous to free labor and harder to 

 fight than the old slave holding aristocracy. That was localized, 

 and an entire section could be aroused against it. The new indus- 

 trial aristocracy enters into every township of the country. We 

 let it get by us when we substituted the glory worship of the old 

 flag for our plain hard duty, and we were not able to make our 

 boys understand it as we did." 



Now at heart this old soldier is right. There is no man here 

 who will deny that gigantic evils have grown up in our country 



