less than the difference in the price per day. Ignorant labor is narrow, mechanical, and generally poor, and for this reason, if for no other, it must be lowpriced; but superadded to this, it is necessarily servile and dependent, and will always be overrode, wronged and oppressed by the superior intelligence and concentration of selfish capital.

Among an uneducated people, wealth naturally accumulates in the hands of the few most sagacious and best informed, and the whole history of the world proves that social and political power will go with it and be wielded in the interests of the class who possess them. There can be no legislative guards and bulwarks which will securely protect the rights of labor, so long as the great working majority of a people are unschooled. No other class of society is so profoundly and immediately interested in the maintenance of national intelligence; no other should guard with such ceaseless vigilance against the lapse of popular intelligence by the influx of foreign and the growth of native ignorance. The places of learning are the sources of productiveness, of inventive genius, of mercantile enterprise, popular equality and civil power. It is in the schoolhouse that peoples have passed from childhood to manhood, from subordination to independence, from pupilage to mastership. At these fountains we drink the inspiration to great deeds and lofty character, and engender thoughts that ripen into divine philosophies and imperishable literatures. From these science goes forth to marshal her countless

utilities, and art to fill her canvas with enduring beauty, and build her temples that teach through the ages. Our own Franklin has said, "If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him." Not even a bold man would dare impeach the practical wisdom of the philosopher on a question so obvious, but his axiom is only half the truth. The investment of capital in knowledge is not simply the safest, but it is the most profitable disposition we can make of our fortunes. He who so invests may, after a time, empty his head into his purse, if it possessed any raw material originally. A stupid clod-hopper sows his grain and reaps fifteen bushels to the acre; his neighbor puts his brains into his work and reaps fifty bushels to the acre. A similar disproportion of income runs into every branch of human industry.

Intelligent labor is not limited to single lines of pursuit, and the quality of its work is as superior as its quantity, and hence the demand for it, and the price which it is paid is greater than for the simpler and ruder efforts of the uninformed.

The ignorant sometimes attribute to partial legislation, or to a defective political or social organization, the infelicities and misfortunes due to their own defective education, and demand laws which shall equalize things in themselves unequal, as though that would not be the greatest inequality, and a precedent dangerous alike to liberty and labor. The function of law with us is to secure equal opportuni

ties to all and to protect capacity in a fair struggle for success.

Mind enters into every effort of the hands, and determines its result. Labor is the instrument by which it gives palpable existence to its conceptions, and the character of the product depends upon the nature of its culture. The product cannot rise above the thought-level of the brain in which it originates. Great things are born in the long agony of thought. The paintings of Raphael were thenatural offspring of that intellect in which he drew diviner pictures than he could transfer to canvas; and so the spinning-jenny of Arkwright was the invention of a mind fully up with an advanced practical civilization.

The law holds with nations, for they are aggregates of individuals. Barrenness and poverty reign among the ignorant descendants of the old Greek whose culture culminated in temples, and statues, philosophy and poetry; while the prosperity and power of England have advanced with the intelligence of her population. The founders of our government understood this, for a committee of the convention of 1787 proposed to introduce a clause into the constitution "to establish public institutions, rewards and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, commerce and manufactures." The proposition failed, but the people, in each of the original states, established schools which have been the source of our unparalleled prosperity.

If the annual increase of our wealth is to advance

with an undiminished ratio; if the unexhausted fertility of our soil is to supply breadstuffs and cotton for the expanding markets of the world, and the mineral ores beneath our soil are to rise into a thousand forms of utility and beauty; if the sound of machinery is to be heard on all our streams, and a lucrative commerce to fill our rivers and line our sea-board; if our most interior settlements are to be taken to the sea, and intercourse and unity to be given to our imperial domain by railroads; if the hundreds of millions of people hereafter to throng our prolific territory are to be virtuous, industrious, homogeneous and patriotic, universal intelligence must be maintained by a system of instruction reaching to every family, and as broad as the boundaries of the republic. Thus only can we bring to bear upon all, those motives which, in other lands, awaken the aspirations and kindle the ambition of the few, and so avail ourselves of the immeasurable industrial capacity and intellectual force possessed by the whole population.

Here too, I apprehend, is to be found our ultimate security against the incorporated moneyed aristocracies, the imperium in imperio, which are already concentrating wealth, controlling business and baffling individual enterprise; which have their representatives in state and national legislatures, demanding grants and subsidies, and threatening to control the politics of the country. This corporate absolutism is antagonistic to the genius of our institutions and, if allowed to grow, may in time de

stroy the freedom of both labor and politics. Undoubtedly it hastens the development of resources and the accumulation of wealth; but we cannot afford a development which impoverishes the masses and destroys personal liberty. The abuse of power, however, by the shrewd and reckless managers of corporate influence, fortunately carries its own antidote in an educated community, for there men as able, and as well informed, will rise up and on the authority of the people who are the source of rights, demand the surrender of franchises and prerogatives which threaten the equality of rights that underlies our institutions. Universal intelligence will, in the end, abolish class monopolies and privileges in the industrial and political organization of society. When each person is able to realize his natural equality with, and independence of, every other, no association or institution, governmental or other, will be allowed to exist, which militates against the public welfare. Then, and not till then, there, and only there, shall we have a fair division of the profits of production between capital and labor. Capital is selfish, labor is unreasonable, and both are oppressive when they have the power; and only when a whole community has the intelligence to comprehend the natural relations and common interests of capital and labor, will the spirit of this senseless and bitter controversy which now cripples the thrift and enterprise of business, be laid.

It is not strange that working men, as they become conscious of their rights and power in the advance