Various

“ They all imply the capacity for organization as they all have shown its power. Let us believe that, like the old guilds, these labor organizations are helpful parts of the machinery of human progress. They force upon us the fact that there have been and are injustices which must be righted. We are beginning to learn that we can not depend upon one side alone for our political economy or our facts; that we need an organization strong enough to compel respect in order to protect those who without it would be, as they have been, helpless. ”

“ It is like the old guilds in being subject to the same dangers as they were, and when it proves false to its true objects it will pass away as did the old guilds. It will last only so long as there is a necessity for its existence, as long as it does the work it is born to do. And when it has come to deny freedom, to refuse another's rights, and to repress industry, the seeds of dissolution are already sown.
Trades unions or labor unions arose from the necessity of organization among the laborers or wage-earners if they were to hold their own against the aggregation of capital. ”

“ But as he grew in the power to comprehend his place in the system of things—to understand the way in which the objects and forces of the world were related to each other, together with the way in which he, as knowing organism, was related to the universe—he gradually ceased from his vain striving to subject the cosmos to himself, and at last learned not only to subordinate himself to the cosmos, but to trace to it unreservedly the whole method and meaning of his origin as a living, thinking organism. Man in the beginning could be no more than the measure of the universe. ”

“ And society must continue to suffer from the violence and waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself a higher and better way.
May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will each have a share in the business they together carry on? ”

“ And no one, no class of men, deserve their freedom unless, when all other means fail, they have the courage and energy to pay the price.
Therefore, we will not be alarmed at struggles which in the end will bring about a better condition of life for all. Rather let us try to end those struggles by pushing bravely on toward the end mankind is striving for. We, with such a past as ours, must not be false to the ideal which is our birthright; we should not be incapable of finding the true way. ”

“ The same spirit of independence, the same desire for equal justice which animated the old guilds of England, and which have made the Englishman and those who have sprung from him the freest as well as most law-abiding people on the earth, are found within the organizations of labor. We in this country hardly can find only danger in the spirit which impels the workingman to resist every encroachment upon his rights, to strive for that better future to which he believes he is entitled. ”

“ By this time the laborer had grown entirely away from serfage, had been freed from the terrible grasp of a hopeless future, and the possibility of a degree of comfort and independence had come into existence. We need not linger longer over his early days. The laborer still had his peculiar trials and hardships, but he had a future. From a subject class, the terror as well as necessity of its employers, he has grown to be their equal before the law, and this by his own efforts, aided, of course, by the advance of society and the broader humanity of mankind. ”

“ As a rule, we are very well content to let things alone if we ourselves are fairly comfortable, and especially are we blind to another's ills if the remedy for them is found in a renunciation of part of that which we have always considered our own. There is nothing particularly new in this. We easily can imagine some worthy burgher in the olden time expostulating at the demand of the craft guild even to be allowed to exist, and I do not imagine his language varied much in spirit from the indignant disgust shown by some large employer of labor to-day when he talks of labor unions. ”

“ Not only have they at command all the generalizations of social science, but all the facts upon which those generalizations are based, to prove that neither climate nor race is a limitation upon freedom.
If climate determined the character of the political institutions of a people, many questions would be suggested at once that would be beyond solution. Why, for instance, should a certain freedom have existed in Athens, and the most intolerable despotism in Sparta? Again, why should there be despotism in Russia and Germany as well as in Morocco and Egypt? ”

“ They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." That is the same cry against the inequality of property and social condition which we hear to-day. And we may thank him, and men like him and with his inspiration, that the conditions of five hundred years ago have changed, and that the dawn of a better and higher humanity has broken upon us. Filled with socialism and communism as the words are, they still have a truth which appeals to every sympathetic and thoughtful man. ”

“ We had made the forty miles of the dreaded White Pass trail without serious hindrance or delay, up over the summit of 2,860 feet elevation, and down over a course which was depicted in colors of hardship that would have done more truthful service in describing a pass in the Himalayas. There was no mud, not a trace of snow or ice except on the mountain declivities, and had it not been for a horse that was both stiff and lame, and required my attention as pedestrian to an extent that had not been bargained for, the journey would have been an exceptionally delightful one. ”

“ The laborer has become free—free to follow along the path of his predecessors, to gain full justice, but not to oppress others. Before the law at least he is the equal of his employer. I have implied at least that he has but followed the spirit which led his older brother of the middle class up from practical subjection to power. The craft guilds of the one, the labor unions of the other, are in the same line as the old town guilds. They all are manifestations of that democratic independence which seems necessary for political freedom. ”

“ If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the very nature of things violence must come to rend away the obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old. They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. ”

“ The positive contribution which we would seek to make is that the whole matter of European origins is by no means so simple as it has too often been made to appear. It is not imperative that conclusions from all the contributory sciences of physical anthropology, philology, and cultural history should be susceptible of interweaving into a simple scheme of common origins for all. The order of races, for example, need mean nothing as respects priority of culture. Nor do the two sciences, philology and archæology, involve one another's conclusions so far as civilization is concerned. ”

“ Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole superstructure, of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. ”

“ If we add that the degeneration provoked by the abuses of civilization has begotten a multitude of forms akin to madness which afford a field for combinations now tragic, now strangely comic—like the phobia by which one is afraid to cross a room, or avoids a certain group of words, or refuses to know how many doors and windows there are on the street, or can not be at ease without saying sexual pacifying formulas; a class who with their perverted tastes form a real new world apart ”

“ During the warmer days of summer the heat feels almost tropical; the winter cold is, on the other hand, of almost the extreme Siberian rigor. Yet a beautiful vegetation smiles not only over the valleys, but on the hilltops, the birds gambol in the thickets, and the tiny mosquito, either here or near by, pipes out its daily sustenance to the wrath of man. The hungry forest stretches out its gnarled and ragged arms for still another hundred or even three hundred miles farther to the north. ”

“ Doubtless these unions to-day seem to him to have the same dangerous tendencies which the craft guilds were talked of as having eight hundred years ago.
If there were no wrongs to right, if selfishness did not exist, if there were a real belief in the brotherhood of man, and life were in accordance with that belief, such organizations might not be necessary, or if they existed have other aims; but until all men have an equal chance for self-development, and a chance for something more than a mere existence, labor unions or something to take their place must exist. ”

“ When both the public as well as the profession lay aside entirely the common notions of a transcendental origin of insanity, and set to work to study the perfectly natural steps through which degeneration and breakdown eventually come to be, all will see the desirability of such health records being accurately and fully kept, not only as a help toward determining the nature and prospects of any given case, but also toward preventing the development of those constitutional tendencies which lead to trouble, as well as in helping on those that provide against it. ”

“ May it not be perhaps because we have an inherent doubt about the justice of the survival of the strongest, or perhaps because even the strongest of us feels compelled modestly to confess his inability to pick out the fittest, that modern civilization encourages, not the destruction but the preservation of what has obvious weakness, on the chance that it may have unseen strength? ”

“ The intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic characters—the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. ”

“ Sensible people do not think that everything children crave should be given to them, or that more than a limited number of excitements should be thrown in their way. It is one of the drawbacks to wealth that the possessors of it can hardly refrain from half burying their children beneath a profusion of toys, and crowding upon them such a multitude of distractions, in the way of travel, shows of all kinds, and society, that all chance of development from within is well-nigh destroyed. ”

“ The impulse thus given to despotism spreads to every part of the social fabric. When people are devoted to the pursuits of peace, the forces that make for freedom transform their ideas, feelings, morals, and institutions, political, industrial, and social.
Whether despotism exists, as Mr. Kidd and his followers assume, among all the indigenous populations of the tropics, only a careful investigation of the subject would permit one to say. But that it must, as they contend, always exist there, none of the laws of social evolution gives the slightest warrant. ”

“ And now, we all of us, at least in the capitals and the great centers, find ourselves consumed by a feverish activity which makes the mind labor much more than Nature intended it should, under which is produced all this mass of neurasthenics, hystericals, besides the multitudes of moral insane, profoundly egotistical persons, without affection and wholly directed by a powerful passion for gold, for which they sacrifice everything, even salvation! ”