rates better than a
butchers' "beast," as the English say. In the meantime,

THE CHILDREN OF THE LABORER

have sailed across the ocean and settled in a land where the fields
yield steady harvests and where the genius of the inventor has exceeded
with its results the wonders of the Arabian Nights. In this land of
freedom and plenty the day laborer gets $1.50 a day. He pays 90 cents to
$1.30 for a bushel of wheat, and if he desire such food, he can pay $80
for a monster ox weighing 1600 pounds. He thus pays less than a day's
labor of ten hours for his bushel of wheat, and about fifty-three days'
(530 hours') labor for his ox. He does not need this high grade of
meat, however, as few English laborers ever buy from even the round of
such beef, and no ordinary American householder in city or country gets
as good once a year.

PROGRESS IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred
years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or
seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to
267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!

But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time _did not
work_, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he
lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a
vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never
unforeseen.

FOR INSTANCE:

"Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the
life of your child. Will you have it? No!! you will not pay one single
dollar to save the life of your little child! Here is a man, who, for
one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents,
will let his child be lowered into the grave--will listen to the clods
falling on its little coffin! But ah! I am provided against such men!
They cannot escape me! Here is a smaller package which will save your
child's life for fifty cents. It is yours. Death has missed his mark!"
Now, with the inevitable forethought of

THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND

whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the
laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve's surrender to "that
first grand thief who clomb into God's fold." Under a statute of Richard
II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to
another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor. This law
stood for centurie