th
are founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and
servile insurrections are today what they ever were: the most cruel and
ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he can not
consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it falls.
It will profit you to understand, my fine gentleman with the soft hands,
the character of that which is confronting you. You are not threatened
with a bombardment of roses.

Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on his
picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his "shut soul"
to our searching. He will say something like this:

"In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own use
or disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able to
procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of
the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
the objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually done
elsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born,
and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from all chance
to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that you can be
born at sea and eat fish.

"I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize
yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by
withdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you have
been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to
procure work.

"In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the right
to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your
misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its
expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more
I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to
give you in wages.

"I claim the right to ignore the officers of the peace and maintain a
private army to subdue you when you rise.

"I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage an
artificial scarcity of the necessaries of life.

"I claim the right to employ the large powers of the government in
advancing my private welfare.

"As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with which
you