any of our employers
are kind and sympathetic men, but others of them are not. I envy no man
among you the wealth he has gathered, but the selfishness of some of our
manufacturers is maddening to the working man.

"Some of you know nothing of our trials and our difficulties, and, what
is worse, you do not want to know. You pass by the men who are making
you rich as though they were the dogs of the street. You sit next pew to
them in the kirk, and yet treat them like the dirt beneath your feet. It
is doubtless your conviction that you have discharged your whole duty to
us when you pay our wages every fortnight. I tell you," he cried
passionately, "that is the great fallacy which is yet to prove the
undoing of the employers of labour.

"You forget we are men, as well as you, and have higher claims upon you
than your pay sheet acknowledges. If our employer dies, we follow him in
a body to his grave. If one of us dies, you drive past his hearse with
your haughty carriages, or bolt down a side street to avoid the
association.

"Tom Lamplough, who has worked for Mr. Thoburn twenty years, buried his
only child last Thursday, and his employer spent the afternoon speeding
his thoroughbred on the race-track beside the cemetery. At the very
moment when Tom was groping about the open grave, struggling with his
broken heart and following his daughter with streaming eyes, Mr. Thoburn
was bawling out that his filly had done it in two and a quarter--and the
clods were falling on the coffin all the while."

At this juncture Thoburn arose, his face the very colour of the corpse
he had disdained.

"Will no man throttle this fanatic?" he hoarsely craved. "Must we be
insulted thus by a mere working man?"

"I insult no man," retorted his accuser, "when I tell him but the truth.
It was you who insulted the dead, and outraged her desolate father
because he was but your servant. Is what I say the truth?"

"I decline to answer that," said Thoburn.

"You will not decline to answer before the throne of God. For you and
Tom will meet yonder. Good God, man, did you ever think of that? Did it
ever occur to you that you and Tom will take your last ride in the same
conveyance, and have the same upholstery in the tomb? And somebody
else's filly will be making its mile in less time than yours when the
clods are falling on your coffin."

I have often marvelled at this strange power of rhetoric in an untutored
man; but it only confirmed what I a