ustries of the country--with all its
grandiloquent exhibition of happiness and prosperity, the laboring
classes of the country starve to death, or eke out an existence still
more horrible.

The factories of the land run on half time, and the men, women and
children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from
insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud
of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding
pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to
satisfy the exactions of the landlord--a monstrosity in the midst of
civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our
pretensions to civilization.

Yet, "competition" is the cry of the hour. Millionaires compete with
each other in the management of vast railroads and water routes,
reducing labor to the verge of subsistence while exacting mints of
money as tolls for transportation from the toilers of the soil and the
consumers who live by their labor in other industrial enterprises; the
manufacturers join in the competition, selling goods at the least
possible profit to themselves and the least possible profit to those
who labor for them; and, when no market can be found at home, boldly
enter foreign markets and successfully compete with manufacturers who
employ what our writers are pleased to style "pauper" labor. Every
branch of industry is in the field _competing_, and the competition is
ruining every branch of industry. The constant effort to obtain the
maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon
employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation,
caused by the competition, reduces, in every branch of industry, the
wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it
produces those "hard times" which bear so hardly upon the poor in
every walk of life. Even the laboring man has entered the race, and
now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to
make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child. When things reach
this stage, when the man who is working for one dollar and a half per
day is underbid by a man who will work for a dollar and a quarter,
then the condition of the great wealth producing and consuming class
is desperate indeed. And so it is.

Frederick Douglass, the great Negro commoner, speaking at Washington,
April 16, 1883, on the "Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in
the District of