A FOREWORD TO OUR READERS.
By Editor
TWO mighty giants are engaged in battle, a typical struggle of a thousand. The world is the arena. Thousands on the one side, and millions on the other are enlisted in the combat in person, in means, in sympathy. With the thousands are the munitions of war in this world. With the millions there is bare sufficiency for present needs. A small force numerically with great resources listed against a mighty force with limited resources. The product of the factors in each case render them so nearly equal in the tremendous possibilities of the conflict, that the outcome arouses all the latent instincts of gamble and risk in the human. Heads are throbbing hot. Eyes are blazing eager. Muscles are knotted. Nerves are tense. Some are jubilant in hope of victory. Others are fearful of defeat. Yet all are intensely earnest as they gaze upon the combat, urge on the fighters, or take part in the fray. Men fall and rise again in the struggle. Men fall and fail in the struggle. Women and children suffer and pine and die, crushed under ruthless feet, stabbed in the houses of professed friends. Yet these combatants are necessary to the ordinary life of this world. Both might be used for the lasting benefit of humanity. But in the fearful struggle, now on as never before, there is little blessing, much wasted effort and energy, and great loss in the fearful harvest of crushed fortunes, ruined reputations and characters, hating hearts, venom-filled memories, and loss of life here and hereafter. We are interested in this tremendous conflict between Capital and Labor. We are a part of humanity. What touches humanity touches us. What affects humanity affects us. For with others we can not stifle, nor would we, “THE SYMPATHIES, THE HOPES, THE WORDS, THAT MAKE MAN TRULY MAN.”
We stand amazed at the mighty increase of riches through gigantic and even world-wide combination. We see that wealth is used subjectively, if not objectively, as a means of oppression. We feel with the millions of earth that there is injustice, objective, subjective, and incidental; sometimes of purpose, but with suffering always the result. We see the rising up against this on the part of laboring men, often like the blind giant Samson groping for the pillars which may be lifted for the overthrow of the whole system. In this desire to get even with the oppressor they are willing to die with him if they may but be revenged. And notwithstanding their blind impotency and misdirected revenge our hearts sympathize with them. But we would teach them the better way. It is not our way, for we of ourselves could present nothing better than what has been presented before. We would lay before our readers in this number of our paper the way of faith, of justice, of truth, of love,—the eternally established way. We ask you to read and weigh, not in the light of the brute, temporary present, but of the eternal, permanent future; not in the light which men’s flaring, flickering, dying tapers cast upon the question, but in the steady, ever-increasing intensity of the radium power of the transcendent light of God’s “more sure Word of Prophecy.”