AN INVADED RIGHT AND WHAT IT MEANS.
By S.
The laws of God and man make it the duty, as well as the privilege, of the man who marries, to support, under all normal conditions, the wife he marries and the children born to him; and no self-respecting man seeks to shirk the responsibility. More than that, he is glad of the opportunity. That responsibility is his chiefest pleasure; and such men will work and have worked themselves into the grave in seeking to insure their families against the possibility of want. But there has arisen a despotism more merciless than poverty, which steps between that man and that right, and assumes to dictate how and when that right may be exercised, or when he may not lift spade or hammer, type or chisel, to earn the bread for hungry mouths or clothes to cover the nakedness of his children, or the rent money that keeps a roof above their heads. That is not the despotism of capital, for capital, with all the faults it has, has not undertaken to prohibit the laborer from laboring when labor is in demand. It has remained for labor itself to permit to grow up in its very midst a tyrant more cruel to individual men than kings or capitalists have ever sought to be. It is taking from the individual the opportunity to perform the duty which common decency, to say nothing of the requirements of heaven and humanity, have put upon him. Recently men have been shot to death or clubbed to death when, with starvation looking straight into the faces of those they had sworn to “love, cherish, and protect,” they have gone back to jobs which they had only left under threat of death. Such men are heroes, as truly heroes as any who ever went to death at the call of their country; but there is no name for such as those who have done these men to death. As a matter of justice between man and man, there is no man nor set of men that has a right to say to another man, “You shall not work until we give command.” Man in general has not yet bartered away that right inherent in the race to labor at his own direction when and where he will. Some have done so, and in so doing have made themselves voluntarily bond-servants to a pitiless tyranny. The writer of these lines is not a capitalist and never will be, and has no sympathy with any unjust exactions of the money power, or with any of the heartless methods of which they may from time to time be guilty in the mad scramble for wealth. Neither has he any sympathy with the cruelties practised in the name of labor upon men whose only offense is a desire to work for the support of their families, and who, as men, have refused to surrender their liberties into the hands of any organization whatsoever. Nevertheless, it is becoming more and more apparent that a time is fast approaching when men who labor as independent men, free men, prizing their liberty as men should, will labor under constant threats, constantly in danger of their lives. Labor is not behind capital in the matter of organization, and the day is coming, and coming soon, when all classes of labor will be under the control of the organization, when that organization will be able to dictate in every branch of human industry, and he who refuses to yield to the domination of the organization will do so at the peril of his life. The stronger these organizations become, the more of that spirit do we see manifest in their treatment of both their own members and those who still seek to maintain the liberty of their own person. The man who does not belong to some union is not looked upon as having any rights that the union is bound to respect. These conditions are the forerunners of trying and perilous times, an indication of that culmination of events to which the prophecies of God’s Word so long have pointed. Fearful times are hurrying toward us; the very air is heavy with the omens of the coming storm; but to those who know the Lord they are harbingers of the coming day. S.