hemselves workingmen, to talk about political
means and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the
single right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine
title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding
scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which
his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor
collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about,
and want maybe staring him in the face, yet--if he be a true man--with
a little bird singing ever in his heart the song of hope and cheer which
cradled the genius of Stephenson and Arkwright and the long procession
of inventors, lowly born, to whom the world owes the glorious
achievements of this, the greatest of the centuries. We are all
workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, the doctor--toiling
from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for our toil, to
represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less than the
farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the team
afield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with a
hoe to laugh a harvest.

"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments
of exuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the
American editor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by
the majesty and the mystery of his pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no
less than the poor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils
of the midnight rounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more
perilous temptations of the town, yet carries with him into the darkest
dens the love of work, the hope of reward and the fear only of dishonor.

"Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington begging a bit of that pie,
which, having got his own slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would
eliminate from the bill of fare, he likewise is a workingman, and I
can tell you a very hard-working man with a tough job of work, and were
better breaking rock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on a
quarter section out in the wild and woolly West.

"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat--as Artemus
Ward once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it no
longer--at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But
first of all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not
a policeman or a dude is a workingman. So, by you