nattainable by
either alone. If capital would smoke this in his cigar and labour the
same in his pipe, the soothing effects might tend to more amicable and
effective use of what is now dissipated energy.

However, universal panaceas are not to be hoped for. The mailed fist
puts irritating chips upon swaggering shoulders, and the unresentful
turning of smitten cheeks is conducive to a thrifty growth of gelatinous
nincompoops.

The preceding _status quo_ existed in general at the Rainbow mines and
mill, besides having a few individual characteristics peculiarly their
own. Miners and millmen, for the most part recent importations from all
countries of Europe, had come from the realms of oppression to the land
of the free with very exaggerated notions of what freedom really was.
The dominant expression of this idea was that everyone could do as he
pleased, and that if the other fellow didn't like it, he, the other
fellow, could get out. The often enunciating of abstract principles led
to their liberal application to concrete facts. In this application they
had able counsel in the ambitious Morrison.

"Who opened these mountain wilds?" Morrison was wont to inquire, not for
information, but for emphasis. "Who discovered, amidst toils and dangers
and deprivations and snowslides, these rich mines of gold and silver?
Who made them accessible by waggon trail and railroads and burros? Who
but the honest sons of honest toil? Who, when these labours are
accomplished, lolls in the luxurious lap of the voluptuous East, reaping
the sweat of your brows, gathering in the harvest of hands toiling for
three dollars a day or less? Who, but the purse-proud plutocrat who sits
on his cushioned chair in Wall Street, sending out his ruthless minions
to rob the labourer of his toil and to express his hard-won gold to the
stanchless maw of the ghoulish East. Rise, noble sons of toil, rise!
Stretch forth your horny hands and gather in your own! Raise high upon
these mountain-peaks the banner of freedom's hope before despairing eyes
raised from the greed-sodden plains of the effete East!"

Whereat the sons of toil would cheer and then proceed to stretch forth
hands to unripened fruits with such indiscriminating activity that both
mine and mill ceased to yield expenses to the eastern plutocrat, and
even the revenues of the Blue Goose were seriously impaired, to the
great distress of Pierre.

These rhodomontades of Morrison had grains of plausibl