go where
the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives. See what is the
condition of the streets there. See what they do with the poor, with the
helpless, and the mean. If the top of society bends perpetually over the
bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of
the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but
if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the
population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.

There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of
wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true
that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the
community. If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any
other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he
treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain
sort of religion, a religion of particularity and carefulness; if there
is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts
without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees,
scholars, and priests of the temples. He told them in so many words,
"The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you."
The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of
the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from
the poor and ignoble. They are our wards....

I am not a socialist. I do not preach riot. I do not preach the
destruction of property. I regard property as one of the sacred things.
The real property established by a man's own intelligence and labor is
the crystallized man himself. It is the fruit of what his life-work has
done; and not in vain, society makes crime against it amongst the most
punishable. But nevertheless, I warn these men in a country like ours,
where every man votes, whether he came from Hungary, or from Russia, or
from Germany, or from France or Italy, or Spain or Portugal, or from the
Orient,--from Japan and China, because they too are going to vote! On
the Niagara River, logs come floating down and strike an island, and
there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won't go over.
But the rains come, the snows melt, the river rises, and the logs are
lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. The stream of
suffrage of free men, having all the privileges of the State, is this
great stream. The figure is