e snows of winter. He is ridden by anybody who wishes a
ride. He is cared for by nobody. Our rich will do anything for the poor
except to get off their backs. The negro has a master in sickness and
health. The wage slave is honored with the privilege of slavery only so
long as he can work ten hours a day. He is a pauper when he can toil no
more.

"Your Abolitionist has fixed his eye on Chattel Slavery in the South. It
involves but three million five-hundred thousand negroes. The system of
wage slavery involves the lives of twenty-five million white men and
women.

"Slavery was not abolished in the North on moral grounds, but because,
as a system of labor it was old-fashioned, sentimental, extravagant,
inefficient. It was abolished by the masters of men, not by the men.

"The North abolished slavery for economy in production. There was no
sentiment in it. Wage slavery has proven itself ten times more cruel,
more merciless, more efficient. The Captain of Industry has seen the
vision of an empire of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He has seen
that the master who cares for the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lame,
the halt is a fool who must lag behind in the march of the Juggernaut.
Only a fool stops to build a shelter for his slave when he can kick him
out in the cold and find hundreds of fresh men to take his place.

"Two years ago the Chief of Police of the City of New York took the
census of the poor who were compelled to live in cellars. He found that
eighteen thousand five hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in
these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of
the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are
near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When
the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and
furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with
men, women and children the right to the shelves above the water line.

"There are cellars devoted entirely to lodging where working men and
women can find a bed of straw for two cents a night--the bare dirt for
one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one
dirty mass. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the
damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species
of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity
that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts are beyond