Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean.

Mr. Lloyd's reputation as a writer on economic questions is sustained in the manner of handling the usually dry statistical matter which tells the story of strikes and lock-outs. He makes the story interesting and often graphic, while he gives the facts and figures relating to the intricacy of contracts in a way to be easily understood by the ordinary reader. The book is a valuable compilation of the facts gathered relating to this shameless abuse of corporative power in Spring Valley.

The New Ideal.

Mr. Lloyd has been until recently on the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune, and is now devoting his time to first-hand investigations into labor troubles. This book gives an account of a lock-out in one of the mining districts of Illinois, and is the more forcible and eloquent an arraignment of the "millionaires," as the statements are throughout verifiable. As Mr. Lloyd in effect says, professors of political economy do not come near enough to realities to discover such details as he portrays, and the working-men do not know how to bring them before public opinion. Hence the necessity of a mediator, who shall thoroughly investigate the facts and at the same time give them to the public, not in statistical reports, but in a form that compels its attention. Mr. Lloyd is a practised writer; no one can read this narrative without being profoundly moved, and for the directors and stockholders of the Spring Valley Coal Company (and, besides, of the Chicago and North-Western Railway, an aider and abettor of the nefarious business) the effect must be to set their blood on fire—so far as they are blessed (or unblessed) with any moral sensitiveness. Every thoughtful citizen—whether man or woman—should read this book, and have fully brought home to him or her the problems it suggests. It belongs to the literature both of fact and of power.

The Religio-Philosophical Journal.

Mr. Lloyd admits that Spring Valley and its miseries and wrongs were, at the beginning, but the conception and achievement of one or two of the leading owners of railroad and other companies who did the planning, secured the approval of the Board of Directors, and the active influence of the railroads through whom, by special freights, the business of competitors was stolen, coal land was bought, and the scheme was invented by which fortunes were to be made from working-men's necessities and the misuse of the powers of the common carrier. But none of the directors, none of the stockholders, who received the profits of the scheme, protested against it; on the contrary, all accepted unprotestingly their "share of the guilt and gilt." Mr. Lloyd gives a mass of facts and figures which prove, on the part of corporations employing men at Spring Valley, an amount of greed and heartlessness which seems incredible in an enlightened country.

Mr. Lloyd is a literary artist as well as a man of deep feeling, and he combines felicity of diction with fervor and eloquence of expression, and writes with effectiveness and power. The book should be read by all who are interested in the labor question—the practical issue of the hour.

Chicago Times.

It is a pitiful story, a heart-breaking story, and Mr. Lloyd tells it with a great deal of force and earnestness.

The Dawn.

Can it be possible in these happier days among men who share the Christian civilization of the very eve of the twentieth century, that there can exist any analogy to this relentless war of savagery, this cruel and cowardly subjugation of a competitor, not in honest, open combat, but by taking advantage of a position to deny him food, shelter, and the very necessaries of life? For an answer, such as would bring indignant emotion to every heart not indurated by avarice of gold, and shame to every cheek not rendered incapable of blushing by hardened selfishness, we refer to the terrible facts, so calmly told with the severity of simple truth by Mr. Lloyd.

Starved Rock and Spring Valley are not isolated instances. The malady is constitutional, not local. "The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint," may be said of our modern system of business.