ankers or leading business men?
No, they are laborers from factories, furnaces, fields and work-shops,
spending their money for what is worse than nothing and giving it to a
business that pays labor less and robs more than any other
capitalization in the world.

The New York Sun says: "Every successful man in Wall Street is a total
abstainer. He knows he must keep his brain free from alcohol when he
enters the Stock Exchange, where his mind goes like a driving wheel
from which the belt has slipped." The laboring man needs brain as
clear and nerves as steady as the capitalist if he expects to win in
this age of sharp competition.

What the laboring classes in this country spend for liquor in twelve
months would purchase five hundred of the average manufactories of the
land; what they spend in ten years would purchase five thousand, and
what they spend in twenty years would control the entire manufacturing
interests of the country.

A few years ago a strike occurred with the Pullman Palace Car Company.
What the laboring classes spend for intoxicating liquors in three
months would purchase the Pullman Palace Car Company and all its
rolling stock. Instead of a strike, in which laboring men are out of
work and families suffering for the necessaries of life, why not stop
drinking beer and whiskey for ninety days, buy the whole business and
let the Pullman Company do something else. How to husband the
resources of the poor is far more important than the right use of the
fortunes of the rich. There is less danger in the massing of money by
the rich than there is in wasting the wages of the working world in
saloons.

Now I have already thrown the searchlight upon enough problems for you
to realize I have given you an incongruous picture. You must be
impressed with the conflicting forces at work upon our republic. Never
have we had so many advocates of peaceful arbitration for differences
between nations and never such armament for war; never such an
accumulation of comforts, never such a multiplication of wants; never
so much done to make men honest, never so many thieves. In 1850 seven
thousand in our penitentiaries; in 1860 twenty thousand; in 1870
thirty-two thousand; in 1880 fifty-eight thousand; in 1890 eighty-two
thousand, and in 1900 one hundred thousand. In London, England, last
year with over seven millions of people, twenty-four murders; in
Chicago, one hundred and eighteen. There are more murders in this
republi