s in the markets, and through brilliant
business faculty, and every dollar of their estate is as honest as the
dollar which the plumber gets for mending a pipe, or the mason gets
for building a wall. There are those who keep in poverty because of
their own fault. They might have been well-off, but they smoked or
chewed up their earnings, or they lived beyond their means, while
others on the same wages and on the same salaries went on to
competency. I know a man who is all the time complaining of his
poverty and crying out against rich men, while he himself keeps two
dogs, and chews and smokes, and is filled to the chin with whisky and
beer!

Micawber said to David Copperfield: "Copperfield, my boy, one pound
income, twenty shillings and sixpence expenses: result misery. But,
Copperfield, my boy, one pound income, expenses nineteen shillings and
sixpence; result, happiness." And there are vast multitudes of people
who are kept poor because they are the victims of their own
improvidence. It is no sin to be rich, and it is no sin to be poor. I
protest against this outcry which I hear against those who, through
economy and self-denial and assiduity, have come to large fortune.
This bombardment of commercial success will never stop this quarrel
between capital and labor.

Neither will the contest be settled by cynical and unsympathetic
treatment of the laboring classes. There are those who speak of them
as though they were only cattle or draught horses. Their nerves are
nothing, their domestic comfort is nothing, their happiness is
nothing. They have no more sympathy for them than a hound has for a
hare, or a hawk for a hen, or a tiger for a calf. When Jean Valjean,
the greatest hero of Victor Hugo's writings, after a life of suffering
and brave endurance, goes into incarceration and death, they clap the
book shut and say, "Good for him!" They stamp their feet with
indignation and say just the opposite of "Save the working-classes."
They have all their sympathies with Shylock, and not with Antonio and
Portia. They are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal. They are
filled with irritation and irascibility on this subject. To stop this
awful imbroglio between capital and labor they will lift not so much
as the tip end of the little finger.

Neither will there be any pacification of this angry controversy
through violence. God never blessed murder.

The poorest use you can put a man to is to kill him. Blow up to-morr