they felt, the bounden duty of
every true American to amend reality.

Out of a combination of the principles of individual rights, individual
self-determination, equality of opportunity, and political equality
enumerated and suggested in the Declaration, arose the first and most
persistent American labor philosophy. This philosophy differed in no
wise from the philosophy of the old American democracy except in
emphasis and particular application, yet these differences are highly
significant. Labor read into the Declaration of Independence a
condemnation of the wage system as a permanent economic regime; sooner
or later in place of the wage system had to come _self-employment_.
Americanism to them was a social and economic as well as a political
creed. Economic self-determination was as essential to the individual as
political equality. Just as no true American will take orders from a
king, so he will not consent forever to remain under the orders of a
"boss." It was the _uplifting_ force of this social ideal as much as the
propelling force of the changing economic environment that molded the
American labor program.

We find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very
beginning of the labor movement. It then took the form of a demand for a
free public school system. These workingmen in Philadelphia and New York
discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the
Declaration, America had developed into an "aristocracy." They thought
that the root of it all lay in "inequitable" legislation which fostered
"monopoly," hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. But they
further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on
an educated and intelligent working class. No measure, therefore, could
be more than a palliative until they got a "Republican" system of
education. The workingmen's parties of 1828-1831 failed as parties, but
humanitarians like Horace Mann took up the struggle for free public
education and carried it to success.

If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and
political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the
program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic
opportunity. This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land
free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life.
The government should thus open an escape to the worker from the wage
system into self-employment by way of