mes of wealth and
poverty. There are beautiful residences on the one hand and miserable,
crowded tenement hovels upon the other hand. There are people who are
so rich, whose incomes are so great, that their lives are made
miserable and unhappy. There are other people so poor, with incomes so
small, that they are compelled to live miserable and unhappy lives.
Young men and women, inheritors of vast fortunes, living lives of
idleness, uselessness and vanity at one end of the social scale are
driven to dissipation and debauchery and crime. At the other end of
the social scale there are young men and women, poor, overburdened
with toil, crushed by poverty and want, also driven to dissipation and
debauchery and crime.

You are a workingman. All your life you have known the conditions
which surround the lives of working people like yourself. You know how
hard it is for the most careful and industrious workman to properly
care for his family. If he is fortunate enough never to be sick, or
out of work, or on strike, or to be involved in an accident, or to
have sickness in his family, he may become the owner of a cheap home,
or, by dint of much sacrifice, his children may be educated and
enabled to enter one of the professions. Or, given all the conditions
stated, he may be enabled to save enough to provide for himself and
wife a pittance sufficient to keep them from pauperism and beggary in
their old age.

That is the best the workingman can hope for as a result of his own
labor under the very best conditions. To attain that level of comfort
and decency he must deny himself and his wife and children of many
things which they ought to enjoy. It is not too much to say that none
of your fellow-workmen in Pittsburg, men known to you, your neighbors
and comrades in labor, have been able to attain such a condition of
comparative comfort and security except by dint of much hardship
imposed upon themselves, their wives and children. They have had to
forego many innocent pleasures; to live in poor streets, greatly to
the disadvantage of the children's health and morals; to concentrate
their energies to the narrow and sordid aim of saving money; to
cultivate the instincts and feelings of the miser.

The wives of such men have had to endure privations and wrongs such as
only the wives of the workers in civilized society ever know.
Miserably housed, cruelly overworked, toiling incessantly from morn
till night, in sickness as well as in