or any day when you might be idle, and to take
your stand at the busiest corner in the city. There, I would have you
count the people as they pass by, hurrying to and fro, and every tenth
person you counted I would have you note by making a little cross on a
piece of paper. Think what an awful tally it would be, Jonathan. How
sick and weary at heart you would be if you stood all day counting,
saying as every tenth person passed, "There goes another marked for a
pauper's grave!" And it might happen, you know, that the fateful count
of ten would mark your own boy, or your own wife.

We are a practical, hard-headed people. That is our national boast.
You are a Yankee of the good old Massachusetts stock, I understand,
proud of the fact that you can trace your descent right back to the
Pilgrim Fathers. But with all our hard-headed practicality, Jonathan,
there is still some sentiment left in us. Most of us dread the thought
of a pauper's grave for ourselves or friends, and struggle against
such fate as we struggle against death itself. It is a foolish
sentiment perhaps, for when the soul leaves the body a mere handful of
clod and marl, the spark of divinity forever quenched, it really does
not matter what happens to the body, nor where it crumbles into dust.
But we cherish the sentiment, nevertheless, and dread having to fill
pauper graves. And when ten per cent, of those who die in the richest
city of the richest nation on earth are laid at last in pauper graves
and given pauper burial there is something radically and cruelly
wrong.

And you and I, with our fellows, must try to find out just what the
wrong is, and just how we can set it right. Anything less than that
seems to me uncommonly like treason to the republic, treason of the
worst kind. Alas! Alas! such treason is very common, friend
Jonathan--there are many who are heedless of the wrongs that sap the
life of the republic and careless of whether or no they are righted.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1886, p. 429.

III

THE TWO CLASSES IN THE NATION

Mankind are divided into two great classes--the shearers and
the shorn. You should always side with the former against the
latter.--_Talleyrand._

All men having the same origin are of equal antiquity; nature
has made no difference in their formation. Strip the nobles
naked and you are as well as they; dress them in your rags,
and you in t