I sympathize with every honest effort made by the children of labor to improve their condition. That is a poorly governed country in which those who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when men are obliged to beg for leave to toil. We are not yet a civilized people; when we are, pauperism and crime will vanish from our land.
There is one thing, however, of which I am glad and proud, and that is, that society is not, in our country, petrified; that the poor are not always poor.
The children of the poor of this generation may, and probably will, be the rich of the next. The sons of the rich of this generation may be the poor of the next; so that after all, the rich fear and the poor hope.
I sympathize with the wanderers, with the vagrants out of employment; with the sad and weary men who are seeking for work. When I see one of these men, poor and friendless—no matter how bad he is—I think that somebody loved him once; that he was once held in the arms of a mother; that he slept beneath her loving eyes, and wakened in the light of her smile. I see him in the cradle, listening to lullabies sung soft and low, and his little face is dimpled as though touched by the rosy fingers of Joy.
And then I think of the strange and winding paths, the weary roads he has traveled from that mother's arms to vagrancy and want.
There should be labor and food for all. We invent; we take advantage of the forces of nature; we enslave the winds and waves; we put shackles upon the unseen powers and chain the energy that wheels the world. These slaves should release from bondage all the children of men.
By invention, by labor—that is to say, by working and thinking—we shall compel prosperity to dwell with us.
Do not imagine that wealth can be created by law; do not for a moment believe that paper can be changed to gold by the fiat of Congress.
Do not preach the heresy that you can keep a promise by making another in its place that is never to be kept. Do not teach the poor that the rich have conspired to trample them into the dust.
Tell the workingmen that they are in the majority; that they can make and execute the laws.