The man who wants others to work to such an extent that their lives are burdens, is utterly heartless. The toil of the world should continually decrease. Of what use are your inventions if no burdens are lifted from industry—if no additional comforts find their way to the home of labor; why should labor fill the world with wealth and live in want?
Every labor-saving machine should help the whole world. Every one should tend to shorten the hours of labor.
Reasonable labor is a source of joy. To work for wife and child, to toil for those you love, is happiness; provided you can make them happy. But to work like a slave, to see your wife and children in rags, to sit at a table where food is coarse and scarce, to rise at four in the morning, to work all day and throw your tired bones upon a miserable bed at night, to live without leisure, without rest, without making those you love comfortable and happy—this is not living—it is dying—a slow, lingering crucifixion.
The hours of labor should be shortened. With the vast and wonderful improvements of the nineteenth century there should be not only the necessaries of life for those who toil, but comforts and luxuries as well.
What is a reasonable price for labor? I answer: Such a price as will enable the man to live; to have the comforts of life; to lay by a little something for his declining years, so that he can have his own home, his own fireside; so that he can preserve the feelings of a man.
Every man ought to be willing to pay for what he gets. He ought to desire to give full value received. The man who wants two dollars' worth of work for one is not an honest man.
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.