radle to the coffin they are ignorant of any luxury of
life. If the man is sick, if one of the children dies, how can
doctors and medicines be paid for? How can the coffin or the grave
be purchased? These people live on what might be called "the snow
line"--just at that point where trees end and the mosses begin.
What are such lives worth? The wages of months would hardly pay
for the ordinary dinner of the family of a rich man. The savings
of a whole life would not purchase one fashionable dress, or the
lace on it. Such a man could not save enough during his whole life
to pay for the flowers of a fashionable funeral.

And yet how often hundreds of thousands of persons, who spend
thousands of dollars every year on luxuries, really wonder why the
laboring people should complain. They are astonished when a car
driver objects to working fourteen hours a day. Men give millions
of dollars to carry the gospel to the heathen, and leave their own
neighbors without bread; and these same people insist on closing
libraries and museums of art on Sunday, and yet Sunday is the only
day that these institutions can be visited by the poor.

They even want to stop the street cars so that these workers, these
men and women, cannot go to the parks or the fields on Sunday.
They want stages stopped on fashionable avenues so that the rich
may not be disturbed in their prayers and devotions.

The condition of the workingman, even in America, is bad enough.
If free trade will not reduce wages what will? If manufactured
articles become cheaper the skilled laborers of America must work
cheaper or stop producing the articles. Every one knows that most
of the value of a manufactured article comes from labor. Think of
the difference between the value of a pound of cotton and a pound
of the finest cotton cloth; between a pound of flax and enough
point lace to weigh a pound; between a few ounces of paint, two or
three yards of canvas and a great picture; between a block of stone
and a statue! Labor is the principal factor in price; when the
price falls wages must go down.

I do not claim that protection is for the benefit of any particular
class, but that it is for the benefit not only of that particular
class, but of the entire country. In England the common laborer
expects to spend his old age in some workhouse. He is cheered
through all his days of toil, through all his years of weariness,
by the prospect of dying a respectable pa