“From among the many letters which have come to us anent capital and labor, called out by our special issue, we present the following candid expression of opinion, breathing peace and good will. The solution of the great question, the climax of the great struggle, is set forth in ‘the more sure word of prophecy.’”—ED. S. OF T.”
EDITOR SIGNS OF THE TIMES—Sir: No cartoon that ever I saw, even during the days of Nast and Boss Tweed, struck me so forcibly, as being the whole truth in a picture, as did the title-page cartoon in the recent “Capital and Labor” issue of the SIGNS.
The writer is not a regular reader of the SIGNS, but not infrequently he gets a copy, prompted by something in the “Table of Contents,” that promises “a feast of reason.”
During the past ten years the writer has by pen and voice, in a feeble but earnest way, warned his countrymen of the culmination that would surely come, from the “irrepressible conflict” between the “toiling masses” and the “privileged class,” if the spirit, the precept of the gentle Jesus, the meek and lowly Nazarene, the “carpenter’s son,” did not enter the hearts of men as the dominating influence, acting as a solvent of the world’s greatest, most vexed, and vexing problem.
What is that spirit by that precept?—“Love one another.”
This is the sum and substance of Christianity; the highest human ideal; the acme of civilization; the ne plus ultra of social organism.
Let the cruel, barbarous, unenlightened selfishness of the human heart be incinerated to dead ashes in the white heat of the glowing fire of brotherhood, and there will be averted the awful climax foreshadowed by that terror-inspiring cartoon.
Then, instead of the two great forces and factors of civilization, of industrial and commercial life, labor and capital, being two mighty giants panoplied for war, grappling with each other in a battle to the death to determine the question of supremacy, the right to rule, while the great majority, the consumers not identified with either camp, are crushed by the whirlwind of the mighty combat, they would meet as two great, strong brothers, robed in the habiliments of peace and industry, clasping hands in harmony and love neath the cloudless skies of progress, from which the life-giving sun of posterity radiates its beams of cheer upon the happy millions gathered around, making the vault of heaven to reverberate with their diapason of joy and thanksgiving for the blessed exemplification of the truth, that civilization is civilized; that humanity is humanized, made so by the all-conquering power of love, the outward expression of the Christ spirit; the practical exemplification of His divinely-inspired maxim as the highest rule of human conduct, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”
But O, the momentous question is, Will the Christ spirit dominate? or will the spirit of the devil, the spirit of selfishness, or greed, rule?
If the latter shall be, then woes untold and untellable are to be upon us, and civilization must needs have a new birth in the blood of revolution and be christened with the waters of tribulation, heated hot by the fires of anarchy.
But, if the former shall prevail, then civilization will peacefully emerge out of the wilderness of contention and advance to the heights of human excellence, whence can be looked upon a world that was like unto a hell transformed into the similitude of heaven.9
Let us continue doing all we can to aid in bringing about such a blessed consummation.