, every candidate tries to show that he is a
laboring man, or that he was a laboring man, or that his father
was before him. There is in this country very little of the spirit
of caste--the most infamous spirit that ever infested the heartless
breast of the brainless head of a human being.

_Question_. What will be the effect on labor of a departure in
American policy in the direction of free trade?

_Answer_. If free trade could be adopted to-morrow there would be
an instant shrinkage of values in this country. Probably the
immediate loss would equal twenty billion dollars--that is to say,
one-third of the value of the country. No one can tell its extent.
All thing are so interwoven that to destroy one industry cripples
another, and the influence keeps on until it touches the circumference
of human interests.

I believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will
be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for your wife and
children, for your father and mother, and for the ones you love.
It is a blessed thing to have an object in life--something to do--
something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your
faculties and to make you a man. How beautiful, how charming, are
the dreams of the young mechanic, the artist, the musician, the
actor and the student. How perfectly stupid must be the life of
a young man with nothing to do, no ambition, no enthusiasm--that
is to say, nothing of the divine in him; the young man with an
object in life, of whose brain a great thought, a great dream has
taken possession, and in whose heart there is a great, throbbing
hope. He looks forward to success--to wife, children, home--all
the blessings and sacred joys of human life. He thinks of wealth
and fame and honor, and of a long, genial, golden, happy autumn.

Work gives the feeling of independence, of self-respect. A man
who does something necessarily puts a value on himself. He feels
that he is a part of the world's force. The idler--no matter what
he says, no matter how scornfully he may look at the laborer--in
his very heart knows exactly what he is; he knows that he is a
counterfeit, a poor worthless imitation of a man.

But there is a vast difference between work and what I call "toil."
What must be the life of a man who can earn only one dollar or two
dollars a day? If this man has a wife and a couple of children
how can the family live? What must they eat? What must they wear?
From the c