When our village becomes
a city, we, like other denizens of cities, must see prison houses rise
before us, and to-day we are educating inmates for these walls. Remember
also, that the laces our wives shall wear in those days of so-called
prosperity, will be bought with human life. I will not stand amenable
before God for crime like this.
"If you will drop your present schemes, if you will be content to share
with these men and children a portion of your profits, to let them toil
eight hours instead of twelve per day, and if on every Saturday you will
give to them one full long day in God's dear sunlight, I will invest the
amount of capital necessary to cover all which you as a body have
invested, and I will stand beside you in your mill. I would to God,
gentlemen, you were ready to accept this offer, for it comes from my
heart, but I can anticipate your reply. You will say I am speaking ahead
of my time, that the world is not ready for these theories, much less
for the practice I desire. And in return I would ask, when will it ever
be? Has any new and valuable dispensation sought us through time, when
hands were not raised in holy horror, and the voice of the majority has
not sounded against it. You are to-day enjoying, in the machinery you
use, the benefit of thought which against much opposition fought its way
to the front. And shall we rest on our oars, and say we cannot even try
to do what we know to be right, because the world, the unthinking,
unmindful world, sees no good in it? It would be easier for many acting
as one man, to move the wheels, but if this cannot be, I must wait as
other hearts have waited, but I will work in any and in all ways to
break the yokes which encircle the necks of our people.
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