From this interview grew
a Government contract with Messrs. Winslow and Griswold for the
construction of the 'Monitor,' the vessel to be placed in the hands of
the Government within a hundred days at a cost of $275,000. The work was
pushed with all diligence till the 30th of January, 1862, when the ship
was launched at Greenpoint, one hundred and one days from the execution
of the contract, thus making the work probably the most expeditious of
any recorded in the annals of mechanical engineering."

At the assembling of Congress in December, 1861, Lincoln presented his
first Annual Message. Among its most noteworthy passages was that which
touched upon the relations between labor and capital--a subject so
prominent in our later day. It was alluded to in its connection with the
evident tendency of the Southern Confederacy to discriminate in its
legislation in favor of the moneyed class and against the laboring
people. On this point the President said:

In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to
omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning
despotism. It is not needed nor fitting here, that a general
argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there
is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most
others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place
_capital_ on an equal footing with, if not above, _labor_, in the
structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only
in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody
else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of it, induces him to
labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that
capital shall _hire_ laborers, and thus induce them to work by
their own consent, or _buy_ them, and drive them to it without
their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded
that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves.
And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is
fixed in that condition for life. Now, there is no such relation
between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing
as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired
laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from
them are groundless. Labor is prior to and independent of capital.
Capital is only th