Excerpt from The Politics of Labor
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
Emerson.
"The Labor question," as it is called for want of a better name, is simply the question as to whether America shall in the future be a free democratic land, with equal rights and opportunities, as far as may be, for every citizen - or a country where the many are ruled, as in Europe, by the privileged few. It is no new question, but a new phase of a very old one? The rights of Labor are the rights of Man. Within the last generation a danger to American liberty has manifested itself in the power of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and the disposition to use that power oppressively and arbitrarily for the further aggrandizement of its possessors and the virtual enslavement of the mass. Apart from this conscious voluntary action on the part of the great money and railroad kings, the natural result of the increase of population under our existing social system is to intensify the pressure of competition, to make opportunities less equal, and to widen the chasm between rich and poor.
America is no longer the land of promise for the downtrodden of the Old World.
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