avery was
more noble than this: it was to the master's interest that the slave
should be well fed. Capital was shrewd, selfish, experienced, astute,
strong: labor was kept in ignorance lest it might learn its worth, its
rights; it was half-starved that it might be weak; it was driven from
pillar to post with a more cruel than slave-driver's whip, that it might
never be able to perfect a successful organization."

And so on and on. The crowd increased. The six-o'clock bells rang, and
the procession from shops wended their way thither, many from curiosity,
some from a hope of a new truth, and not a few filled with a secret
sense of wrong and dissatisfaction. Mr. McPherson was still belaboring
capital. Now he had declared it "a stupendous fraud, a hollow bubble, a
reputation for wealth where no wealth existed, a fictitious claim for
what was not, but which still managed to hold the workman in its iron
grasp; the concentrated labor of the men, not the lawful working
interest of money. Some way this system of evil was going to be uprooted
by men standing firm, refusing the wages of sweat and blood; and in the
general overturn by legislation of state and country, every man was to
have a farm or a factory, to quit work in the middle of the afternoon,
and sit with folded hands on his own door-step, his own master, a free
man!" [Great shouting and applause.]

He talked until seven, and wound up at last with a desperate but covert
onslaught on Hope Mills. "No two men or six men, or company of any kind,
had a right to band together to starve not only the men in their own
town, but the laborers throughout the world, by so reducing wages for
their own sole benefit; and every workman who submitted to have these
chains forged around body and soul, no matter by what specious
expedient, was a worse traitor, a more cruel oppressor of wife and
children, than the red-handed capital that stood ready to make him a
slave!"

There was an immense deal of cheering and applause. Mr. McPherson was
invited to supper at the Bedell House by a deputation of working-men,
though I think there were few horny-handed ones among them. Liquors
flowed freely, and the feast was rather noisy. A purse was handed to him
when he went away--he was too noble to make any charge when he spoke in
behalf of a cause so near his heart.

The seed was sown, and it is too true that "foul weeds grow apace."
There were club-meetings and union-meetings. The shoe-factory, wh