146 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
A IVOR KING MAN— A BRIEF SKETCH OF JOHN FARMER.
BY PARKER PILLSBURY.
What constitutes the genuine Working Man? is yet to many an unsolved problem. Perhaps none have more positively settled it in their own minds, than the vast multitude of those whose only labor is with their hands. And they doubtless are a large ma- jority of the working community — may bear about the same numerical proportion to the whole, as the brain Ijcars to the avoirdupois of the whole body of a man. But small as the brain of a man may be, the muscles and bones cannot say to it, we have no need of thee. It takes very little brain to show any man that without that little, his bones and muscles would be of little use. And did all bone and sinew workers, in whatever department, knov/ and consider what time and strength, what health and life, have often been consumed in inventing or perfecting the tools or instruments v.'ith which they work, t.hey would be glad and proud to elect all such as honorary members of their Guild, or League, or Protective Un- ion, though, with hands, they made nothing.
I have just been reading an Essay, by an excellent friend of mine, now no more, but friend of everybody while he lived, on "Labour Parties and Labor Reform." After a true state- ment of the aims and purposes, the principles and platforms of some of these organizations, both in Europe and America, he questions and criti- cises them after this sort :
"Will ihey consent to narrow their Laboring Class so that the term shall not include the Professions whose toil ministers,' however imperfectly, to con- stant demands of soul, body, and estate ; so that educators of the young, and counsellors and consolers of the old, shall be set off as drones in the industrial hive? Are we to throw out of the list of " Working Men " the philosopher who explores moral and spiritual prob- lems, and states the laws of intelligence, the economies which cannot be foregone nor overlooked? Or the poet who cheers the day with insight that brings health and sweetness to all thought and work ?
- * * Does labor exclude the schol-
ar's function, to present man under dif- ferent phases of religion and culture, and enforce universality by tracing the movement of ideas and laws through the ages of his development ? Are we to reckon out the cares of maternity, the mutual offices of domestic life, the friend, the lover, even the " fanatic " whose lonely dream prospects the track and points the way for coming genera- tions ? Are we to count as outside of labor-contribvition all work that reforms the vicious, relieves the helpless, or sets the poor in the way to help themselves ?
Thus distinctly stated, the Essayist says, the questions may seem to an- swer themselves. But knowing how easy it is for parties, or men embar- rassed, to break away from principles that perhaps few, individually, would attempt to deny, he asks this also : " If labor is definable as that kind of service for which wages are paid, in distinction from that kind of service which consists in providing the fund out of which they are paid? from that kind of service which plans and directs the operation and bears the risk and responsibility? Or, in other words : is labor, as labor, so clearly distinguishable from capital in this sense, that the toils of mind as well as body involved in the application of the latter do not deserve to enter into our estimate of the ' rights of labor?'" And then he adds, and who will not say justly adds : " We must be very far from the track of science and freedom, if our defini- tions threaten to fall into such arbi- trariness as this."
Two facts as respects Mr. Farmer, are beyond all question ; he exhausted all his vital energies and working powers, and died before he was fifty
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