justification for such demonstrations, or excusing such acts of destruction or violence. But I want to call attention to this source of danger and menace to the good order and peace of society, and the security of property. An unemployed and more than half-starved element in any community is a slumbering volcano which at any moment is liable to a violent and destructive excitement. In the rapine and desolation that follow such an eruption, we see the result of ignoring the obligations to which I have referred—obligations, indeed, that are not recognized by our laws, and such as can not be enforced in any of our courts, but which are of a character that transcend all human law, and reside in that relationship which the Creator has established between men.
Take away the conditions of suffering and want which are coincident with an unemployed laboring class, and both the pretext and incentive to such demonstrations will be wanting.
But hungry men are neither philosophers nor political economists. Both themselves and those who depend upon them are in the direst need. Food and wealth are plentiful, but in the midst of both they are dying from want. Is it strange that under the promptings of their necessities they come to regard wealth as their enemy, and its possessors as in league against them, or that they determine to obtain relief without reference to the legal rights of those who may for the time being be the owners of that which they so much need?
We deprecate these outbursts. They ought to receive the severest condemnation. Their effect can only be to aggravate the very difficulties by which they are inspired. But let us remember that they have their origin, to a very considerable extent, in the indifference of society to its obligations to the laboring classes, and that society can only be made secure by recognizing and discharging these obligations.
The recent labor-strikes, culminating in the dynamite murders at Haymarket Square, in Chicago, should not, in my judgment, be classed with the London demonstration.
The labor difficulties occurring throughout the United States, in the first half of A.D.1886, have a different purpose and origin. They are the first manifestations of a plan to establish an oligarchy of workmen. A secret organization was established, on the theory of unquestioning obedience to the mandates of its leaders. Its members were made to believe that the organization was potent and beneficent. Under the pretense of protecting labor, these leaders assumed to dictate and control the actions of laborers, after a fashion more odious and tyrannical than was ever before known among civilized men. Large numbers of working-men were deceived by the professions-of these demagogical leaders. Others were intimidated and dragooned by the power of the organization, and thus these pestilent fellows of the basest sort were enabled for the time to set at defiance all law, to
