Con VENTioN — Conditions of progress. 
119 
let us pray God that while intelligence, economy and industry 
make us capitalists, wisdom, sympathy and good will may make us 
beneficent ones. 
If farmers take up the cry of “ Down with capitalists,” nine of 
them will become dolts and the tenth a knave. They will be as 
kites which follow vultures: these will eat the carcass, and those 
will whet their bills in emptiness and quarrel over the bones. 
If there should ever be among us that worst of household feuds, 
the feud between labor and capital — the rich and the poor, I should 
east in my fortunes with the poor, for they are the many and most 
need help. But the first thing that I should strive to persuade 
them to would be, not to cut off their own fingers or bite off their 
own tongues, that they may cast the bloody trophies of rage and de¬ 
fiance in the face of their enemies. If I have known capitalists 
whom I would not willingly trust with another’s money, I have 
known workmen whom I would not willingly trust with their OAvn 
money. There is one thing pretty evenly and pretty liberally 
•divided in this world, and that is, faults. 
With all our sympathy for the poor and unfortunate, let us 
be just. Nature, not man, has laid a trap for the unwary and 
the indolently hopeful in the years just past. Good crops have en- 
oouraged the borrower and the lender, and made them open and 
<jasy; a series of bad crops have closed in on them like winter, and 
now they spend their leisure in cursing each other. Is it not true 
that both alike have been imprudent, and both are alike losers? If 
a farmer cannot, on his own farm, pay the interest of the money he 
owes on it, does he suppose that the lender, a stranger and remote, 
can take that same farm and pay from it the very interest and prin¬ 
cipal which the farmer himself could not meet? If any farmer does 
think this, he must also think himself a very poor sort of a man. 
xYll that I wish to impress on you is, that we are all in the same 
.-ship, and that we may much better go kindly to work together to 
navigate it, than to spend our time in recriminations. The man 
who swears most freely at his fellows is not the most philanthropic. 
The farming interest, then, needs three industrial conditions for 
permanent prosperity: a large and slowly enlarging division of 
land, an increasing variety of production, and close contact and 
perfect harmony with many forms of industry. To secure these 
■three things, it needs intelligence and fair mindedness; an in- 
