uses the pen with which, just now, the coal-man scrawled his bill, and
turns off an epic with the fife that in the band so sadly pierced our
ears. He moves our trudging lives to the beauties of golden measures. He
laughs heartily at our absorbing charities and meetings, upon which we
waste our health and grow thin. He answers our distressing plea for the
rights of the oppressed, and the "all-men-born-to-be-free-and-equal" with
a smiling strength, which assures us therein lies the wealth and the
equality which we are trying to manufacture out of such materials as
association, organization of society, copartnership, no wages, and the
like. While this may be done, why should we retire from the field behind
the walls which you offer? Let us die battling or victorious. And this,
true for me and you, is true to the uttermost. The love which alone can
make your Phalanx beautiful, also renders it unnecessary. You may insure
food and lodgings to the starving beggar, I do not see that strength is
afforded to the man. Moreover, a stern divine justice ordains that each
man stand where he stands, and do his utmost. Retreat, if you will, behind
this prospect of comfortable living, but you do so at a sacrifice of
strength. Your food must be eternal, for your life is so. I do not feel
that the weary man outworn by toil needs a fine house and books and
culture and free air; he needs to feel that his position, also, is as good
as these. When he has, by a full recognition of that, earned the right to
come to you, then his faith is deeper than the walls of association, and
the desolate cellar is a cheerful room for his shining lore. Men do not
want opportunities, they do not want to start fair, they do not want to
reach the same goal; they want only perfect submission. The gospel now to
be preached is not, "Away with me to the land where the fields are fair
and the waters flow," but, "Here in your penury, while the rich go idly by
and scoff, and the chariot wheels choke you with dust, make here your
golden age."