competition, you will be able to give each other a 'square deal' and nobody hurt."

You would at the same time wipe out, practically, all disputes between capital and labor, which are causing so much inconvenience and distress to all classes.

If the President had talked that way, he would have told them an obvious truth, besides something that was in perfect accord with his advice that "all should live for each and each for all." As it was, he left half of what he should have said unsaid. He did not tell them how they could do it.

Mr. Cleveland should have said, if he was not afraid of wounding the business side of the brain of his auditors, "gentlemen, I warn you that when you enjoin unsharing contentment upon the masses of our people and invite them in the bare subsistence of their scanty homes to patriotically rejoice in their country's prosperity, you are making a fatal mistake. "This is too unsubstantial an enjoyment of benefits to satisfy those who have been taught American equality, and as a perfectly natural result, they have become dissatisfied and insist upon a more equal distribution of the results of our vaunted prosperity.

"This has greatly impaired the harmonious relations that formerly existed between capital and labor, and depend upon it, they will continue to grow worse at ruinous cost to both, unless something right is done to avert it. And some day, not far off, there will come a death struggle between you and labor for the mastery, and no one can predict the outcome.

"Laboring men have organized, or are rapidly organizing, and it is for a purpose. You have not been just to them. As you got control of the land and machinery, they, as individuals seeking employment, were placed more and more in your power and you dictated the terms and conditions of employment and scaled down wages, yet boasted of the country's prosperity until you forced them to organize for their cwn protection, and to force you to do better by them than you had shown a willingness to do voluntarily.

"That, gentlemen, is the situation that confronts you and the whole of it. You know you and your hired men have been pulling and hauling over the subject of wages for years; you also know, there never was a feeling of stability and security among you, even after you had come to an understanding, because of market fluctuations that affected the value of your goods or the cost of their living, and there never was any law that either of you could appeal to for the proper adjustment of the peculiar and alarming differences that arose between you.

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'As a result of this absence of law, you have relied upon your ownership and control of things and your wealth, infleunce and power to force your hired men into submission to your terms; while they have relied upon the perfect discipline of their great and growing organization to force you

into submission to theirs, and conditions have become more serious every year. It is now either a strike or a lock-out all the time, greatly to the annoyance and detriment of the country and at great loss, even ruin, to those directly affected, besides loss of life resulting from inevitable collisions.

"It is manifestly wrong and disastrous for either of you to continue trying to be a law unto yourselves (for that is what you are both trying to do). Such a course can never satisfactorily solve your disputes. It is impracticable and impossible.

certainly is, that no law There is no such thing as

"If it is true, as I say, and it reaches your troubles, make one! a condition that the law of the land cannot be made to cover, and it would be a reproach upon the intelligence of our people to admit that they are unequal to any emergency that demands one. Make the law! And when it is appealed to by either side, its decision will be respected because the whole power of the nation will be behind it. It would aim to do justice, and your respective rights and interests would suffer far less than under your present methods of guerilla warfare where you invoke the assistance of only such outside laws and forces as serve your purposes to conquer.

"A law broad enough to hear and consider every grievance of every side would bring with it an era of good feeling and industrial harmony that would reduce all labor trouble to a minimum."

But, Mr. Cleveland did not make that kind of a speech to the Commercial Club. Why he did not, you are left to guess. My own idea is, they did not want it, nor did they want, nor do they now, any law. They probably thought their wealth and power would be sufficient to worry the hired men into subjection; and then the laws, as they are, with the police, sheriffs, United States marshals, hired detectives and militia always at their service, they could keep them in subjection while they skinned them indefinitely.

If that is their idea and they can make it work, there is no doubt but what, from their standpoint they are right, for, as they look at it, as the Weekly Examiner (San Francisco) says: "To ruin competitors, to reduce a man from competence to poverty, is considered as but an ordinary incident of business," and that being such a small matter, of course the consumption of hired men by overwork and insufficient pay is also an ordinary incident of business no more to be thought of than the consumption of cordwood and coal in their furnaces; both are plentiful and were made to increase the profits of capitalists.

HAS A HIRED MAN ANY RIGHTS?

If we judge of his rights by the treatment he receives froin his employer, we must say, yes, he has about the same rights his employer's cattle have, not much more, and the more is of no particular benefit to him. He gets what his employer

decides to give him and the cattle get the same.

Do you say that is not so? Well, don't the employer fix his wages, and don't the wages he gets regulate his bed, board and clothes? If he fixes his wages, then he specifies what kind of a room and bed he may occupy, what kind of food he may eat, and what kind of clothes he may wear, as much as he specifies what kind of stable his ox or horse may occupy, what kind of feed shall be given him and how much grooming he shall receive.

It would not be so if the man had the option of refusing the wages, but he has not, any more than the ox, or horse has of refusing to work for what he gets-both have to eat.

"But does not the law protect the hired man?"

If it does, you stop and think and tell yourself how it does. I cannot, but I can tell you how it does not.

There is a law for the punishment of the employer if he cruelly overworks of underfeeds the ox or horse, but there is none to punish him if he cruelly overworks or underpays a man, boy, woman or girl.

If he hires with no agreement as to how much his wages shall be, and his employer trys to pay him off when he quits with less than reasonable wages, he may sue and the law will compel the employer to pay reasonable wages.

"There. Don't you admit the law protects him?"

Certainly, in that case it would, if it would pay him to invoke it.

In the first place, it is seldom the employer is caught in that fix. He usually takes advantage of the man's eagerness to work, and tells him beforehand how much wages he will pay. If the man goes to work after being told, the law calls that a contract and holds him to it. The courts are sticklers, you know, about impairing the obligations of a contract, because they say that would be unconstitutional.

But it is a rare thing that this law, which is nothing new -it is older than the Bible-does the hired man any good, because he is so poor he cannot afford the expense and loss of time to go to law with his rich employer, and therefore takes what he can get rather than do it.

"Well, that is not the fault of the law; the law is all right." Certainly, the law is all right, for the rich; it provides also a docket fee to be deposited when complaint is filed and that the officer serving the papers shall demand his fee in advance; and if the man wants a jury, which, of course, he would in

order to get justice, it requires him to put up twenty-four dollars more (if in the Justice of the Peace Court in California), altogether about thirty dollars, even if his lawyer asks no retainer. The law therefore contemplates that all hired men have a bank account, which, of course, we all know is the fact. Of late years, the law has become very solicitous for the rights of hired men, by giving them liens on certain things for their wages. Of course, that is a great boom. The only trouble with it is, the Supreme Court has construed it and the Legislaure has amended it until even lawyers do not know what it is; and if a hired man wished to avail himself of its benefits, if it has any, it is such an expensive and uncertain quantity, that, in most cases, he would rather lose the debt than try it.

As to law that would give a hired man damages for injuries, or his family damages if he were killed, being the result of the negligence of his employer, it is so far beyond the limits of the depleted purse of either that it cuts more of a figure on the statute books as an ornament to our vaunted civilization than a practical benefit to crippled hired men, widows or orphans. A trip to the moon in Darius Green's flying machine would be about as encouraging an undertaking to the hired man, or his widow, as to undertake by law to make his employer pay suitable damages for injuries or death.

He

What the hired man wants is laws that are within his reach. No amount of law would benefit him a particle if the machinery to set it in motion to inquire into his wrongs was so heavy and complicated that he could not start it. But that just suits his employer, he wants it that way. wants it as it is. And his paid orators can and do, in glowing eloquence, call the hired man's attention to our beneficent laws for their welfare, of the jury system and all that, but they are very quiet as to the cost and other difficulties of getting the welfare.

Ever since ships have sailed the ocean sailors have been the wards of the admiralty courts because of their peculiar helplessness, and I would ask, is it not about time that hired men, in their helplessness, be made the wards of the law courts?

Sailors have always been looked upon as children in the hands of ship owners and masters of vessels, and the admiralty courts of all nations have always been open to them, without fees or costs, to libel a ship for wages and have it seized and sold to satisfy them; and I would ask again, are the hired men on shore anything more than children in the hands of such men as George F. Baer, John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan or Charles M. Schwab, or any railroad company or corporation? There are no employers nowadays, you know, to speak of, but corporations and the very rich.

Think of it, you toilers! Think of a poor man with a hungry family of little ones, telling one of those men or corporations that he would be willing to consider a contract to work for him or it at certain wages; or, put it the other way, think of one of them asking such a man if he would be willing to consider employment (shoveling dirt, for instance) at certain wages. Yet the law treats every hired man as if he was hired in just that way, although every judge knows he is not. Well, you may think, but you will never see it.

They arbitrarily fix the wages they will pay, knowing there are plenty of destitute men whom the gnawings of hunger will drive to them seeking work at any price; and it is nothing less than the meanest hypocrisy for any court or the law (if the law does) to pretend that that kind of a bargain is a voluntary contract.

If they were to use violence to get men, they could not get them any quicker, but they would not dare do that. The law would wake up instantly, if they did, and punish them; so they have a way that is more effective than violence, less expensive and no law to interfere.

It is a kid-glove way, polite and highly honorable, because the law, as it is made or construed, makes it so; yet violence, in any form, could not be more effective to make men work at an arbitrary price fixed by the employer, or more disastrous to their welfare. Controlling every industry that employes men, the capitalists control the output and can shut down and lock-out at any place or time they please, and remain so until want has driven part of those discharged to wander in search of work, and those who stay, to welcome it at any price.

In this lawful way, they may starve men to work on their terms or force them from necessity to reluctantly go and help out some other capitalist, who is involved in a strike, by becoming strike-breakers, thus defeating the efforts of their brothers to obtain just wages or fair treatment from their employer; which, but for this timely co-operation and assistance, he would have been compelled to grant.

Here is just such a case according to an Associated Press dispatch, November, 1903:

"The Colorado Iron and Coal Company have laid off the men in their iron works, and are trying to get them to take the places of the striking coal miners."

Another Associated Press dispatch says: "Shamokin, Penn., Nov. 30, 1903-The Centralia Sioux & Mt. Carmel Collieries, owned by the Lehigh Coal Co., closed down tonight for an indefinite period, throwing 2500 men and boys out of employment.

No explanation or excuse is offered, but as winter is just setting in, it is not because people will not want the coal, so it must be done in pursuance of the plan of the coal trust