I have sympathy for weakness of
body or mind, and patience for those over whom inheritance has cast a
baleful spell; but I have neither patience nor sympathy for a strong man
who rails at his condition and makes no determined effort to better it.
The time and money wasted in strikes, agitations, and arbitrations, if
put to practical use, would better the working-man enough faster than
these futile efforts do. I have no quarrel with unions or combinations
of labor, so far as they have the true interests of labor for an object;
but I do quarrel with the spirit of mob rule and the evidences of
conspicuous waste, which have grown so rampant as to overshadow the
helpful hand and to threaten, not the stability of society--for in the
background I see six million conservative sons of the soil who will look
to the stability of things when the time comes--but the unions
themselves.
I remember my first summer on a farm. It lasted from the first day of
April to the thirty-first day of October, and on the evening of that day
I carried to my father $28, the full wage for seven months.
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