There is a dead halt for a minute or two, and then one of the workmen steps out from the ranks of his fellows, and says:  “Boss, you have been very good to us, and when you prospered we prospered, and now you are in a tight place and I am sorry, and we have got to sympathize with you.  I don’t know how the others feel, but I propose that we take off twenty per cent. from our wages, and that when the times get good you will remember us and raise them again.”  The workman looks around to his comrades, and says:  “Boys, what do you say to this? all in favor of my proposition will say ay.”  “Ay! ay! ay!” shout two hundred voices.

But the mill-owner, getting in some new machinery, exposes himself very much, and takes cold, and it settles into pneumonia, and he dies.  In the procession to the tomb are all the workmen, tears rolling down their cheeks, and off upon the ground; but an hour before the procession gets to the cemetery the wives and the children of those workmen are at the grave waiting for the arrival of the funeral pageant.  The minister of religion may have delivered an eloquent eulogium before they started from the house, but the most impressive things are said that day by the working-classes standing around the tomb.

That night in all the cabins of the working-people where they have family prayers the widowhood and the orphanage in the mansion are remembered.  No glaring populations look over the iron fence of the cemetery; but, hovering over the scene, the benediction of God and man is coming for the fulfillment of the Christlike injunction, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

“Oh,” says some man here, “that is all Utopian, that is apocryphal, that is impossible.”  No.  Yesterday, I cut out of a paper this:  “One of the pleasantest incidents recorded in a long time is reported from Sheffield, England.  The wages of the men in the iron works at Sheffield are regulated by a board of arbitration, by whose decision both masters and men are bound.  For some time past the iron and steel trade has been extremely unprofitable, and the employers can not, without much loss, pay the wages fixed by the board, which neither employers nor employed have the power to change.  To avoid this difficulty, the workmen in one of the largest steel works in Sheffield hit upon a device as rare as it was generous.  They offered to work for their employers one week without any pay whatever.  How much better that plan is than a strike would be.”

But you go with me and I will show you—­not so far off as Sheffield, England—­factories, banking-houses, storehouses, and costly enterprises where this Christ-like injunction of my text is fully kept, and you could no more get the employer to practice an injustice upon his men, or the men to conspire against the employer, than you could get your right hand and your left hand, your right eye and your left eye, your right ear and your left ear, into physiological