THE CHILDREN OF THE LABORER

have sailed across the ocean and settled in a land where the fields yield steady harvests and where the genius of the inventor has exceeded with its results the wonders of the Arabian Nights.  In this land of freedom and plenty the day laborer gets $1.50 a day.  He pays 90 cents to $1.30 for a bushel of wheat, and if he desire such food, he can pay $80 for a monster ox weighing 1600 pounds.  He thus pays less than a day’s labor of ten hours for his bushel of wheat, and about fifty-three days’ (530 hours’) labor for his ox.  He does not need this high grade of meat, however, as few English laborers ever buy from even the round of such beef, and no ordinary American householder in city or country gets as good once a year.

PROGRESS IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred years, from 112 hours’ labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or seven hours’ work, and from 1372 hours’ labor for 400 pounds of beef to 267 hours’ labor for the same weight of better food!

But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time did not work, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a vagabond.  But all this had “been seen to.”  Such things are never unforeseen.

FOR INSTANCE: 

“Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the life of your child.  Will you have it?  No!! you will not pay one single dollar to save the life of your little child!  Here is a man, who, for one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents, will let his child be lowered into the grave—­will listen to the clods falling on its little coffin!  But ah!  I am provided against such men!  They cannot escape me!  Here is a smaller package which will save your child’s life for fifty cents.  It is yours.  Death has missed his mark!” Now, with the inevitable forethought of

THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND

whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve’s surrender to “that first grand thief who clomb into God’s fold.”  Under a statute of Richard II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor.  This law stood for centuries, and was reiterated in the seventeenth George II. and the thirty-second George III., along with fixed wages for services rendered.  Personal liberty was held to be the privilege of the proprietary class.  By a statute of Henry VIII. (1536), children of five years and up, were compelled to labor.  A man able to work who refused a proffer