NAVAL DISPLAY ON "LABOR DAY."
By G.
NO GREATER anomaly could be devised than a gorgeous military or naval display on Labor Day. Labor, in a true, moral sense signifies peaceful occupation, the production of things necessary to the sustenance and happiness of human beings. How labor can be properly or consistently represented by that which stands for the extreme opposite of peace and its products is a mystery. It would seem that not merely "judgment is turned away backward" (Isa. 59:14) in these last days, but that even the ordinary sense of propriety is lost sight of in the increasing mania for sensational display. What the laboring classes could have seen in the largest display of war-vessels ever seen in the western hemisphere, had they been awake to a sense of the spirit of our time, would have been a hole into which a large sum of the people's money is thrown every year. And they would have noted that the spirit of war is being encouraged to a far greater extent than the spirit of peace and useful labor. All this notwithstanding the pretentious clamor for peace. These "piping times" are times of much peace talk, but the preparation of war implements and war materials bode anything but peace. A great army passing through a country is a scourge, a destroyer, and consumer of the products of labor; and what do the people of a seaport dread more than a blockade by a naval force? The two extremes of principle were represented in the great naval review on Long Island Sound on Labor Day. The occasion was the celebration of labor, the peaceful producer of necessary commodities, but there was the strange spectacle of the votaries of labor making a god of the great organized destroyer—one of the great world-leeches on the products of labor. Possibly the growing political machine named "organized labor" expects to utilize the military and naval forces some day in the furtherance of "the cause." G.