Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the presidential chair and every laundress in exile.

I have not a “solution” to the “labor problem.”  I have only a story.  Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none in all the world was so good and wise as he.  He was one of those few whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their foolish fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divine law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time.  Amongst the utterances of this man was one command—­not a new nor perfect one—­which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world.  One of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity that will surely come to it.  When a people would avert want and strife, or, having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only means—­all other plans for safety or relief are as vain as dreams, as empty as the crooning of hags.  And behold, here is it:  “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that “business is business”; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you starve—­rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many “solutions to the labor problem” as there are among you those who can not coherently define it—­do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus of Nazareth?  Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing with evils besetting nations and souls?  Have you the effrontery to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act?  Bah! you fatigue the spirit.  Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes, your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speeching, marching and maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own blood and your pick-pocket civilization quenched as a star that falls into the sea.