I shall first show you this morning how this quarrel between monopoly and hard work can not be stopped, and then I will show you how this controversy will be settled.

Futile remedies.  In the first place, there will come no pacification to this trouble through an outcry against rich men merely because they are rich.  There is no member of a trades-union on earth that would not be rich if he could be.  Sometimes through a fortunate invention, or through some accident of prosperity, a man who had nothing comes to large estate, and we see him arrogant and supercilious, and taking people by the throat just as other people took him by the throat.  There is something very mean about human nature when it comes to the top.  But it is no more a sin to be rich than it is a sin to be poor.  There are those who have gathered a great estate through fraud, and then there are millionaires who have gathered their fortune through foresight in regard to changes in the markets, and through brilliant business faculty, and every dollar of their estate is as honest as the dollar which the plumber gets for mending a pipe, or the mason gets for building a wall.  There are those who keep in poverty because of their own fault.  They might have been well-off, but they smoked or chewed up their earnings, or they lived beyond their means, while others on the same wages and on the same salaries went on to competency.  I know a man who is all the time complaining of his poverty and crying out against rich men, while he himself keeps two dogs, and chews and smokes, and is filled to the chin with whisky and beer!

Micawber said to David Copperfield:  “Copperfield, my boy, one pound income, twenty shillings and sixpence expenses:  result misery.  But, Copperfield, my boy, one pound income, expenses nineteen shillings and sixpence; result, happiness.”  And there are vast multitudes of people who are kept poor because they are the victims of their own improvidence.  It is no sin to be rich, and it is no sin to be poor.  I protest against this outcry which I hear against those who, through economy and self-denial and assiduity, have come to large fortune.  This bombardment of commercial success will never stop this quarrel between capital and labor.

Neither will the contest be settled by cynical and unsympathetic treatment of the laboring classes.  There are those who speak of them as though they were only cattle or draught horses.  Their nerves are nothing, their domestic comfort is nothing, their happiness is nothing.  They have no more sympathy for them than a hound has for a hare, or a hawk for a hen, or a tiger for a calf.  When Jean Valjean, the greatest hero of Victor Hugo’s writings, after a life of suffering and brave endurance, goes into incarceration and death, they clap the book shut and say, “Good for him!” They stamp their feet with indignation and say just the opposite of “Save the working-classes.”  They have all their sympathies with Shylock, and not with Antonio and Portia.  They are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal.  They are filled with irritation and irascibility on this subject.  To stop this awful imbroglio between capital and labor they will lift not so much as the tip end of the little finger.