r cold selfish hearts to
order out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but only
to inflict one--to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite
for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or
punish the crime of prosperity.

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always
is. The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was
sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly,
and logically died for it. Nero's time was a time of turbulence, yet
Seneca's mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare
their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the
names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos--guides and
gods of the "fierce democracies" which rise with a sickening periodicity
to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of blood and
fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the good of
mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and endowed
with its aims--that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the Temple
of Shame.

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without
the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usually
murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer them
can endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocritical
condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the
strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe
them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders to
assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, while
openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested in
spite of them--these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for it
includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of the
property of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed.
Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they are
morally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, they
are morally liable for _all the_ consequences--all the inconveniences
and losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed by
interruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whom
a selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of the
closed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so