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[172] movement in any newspaper or magazine, unless, indeed, there was a strike, or something of that sort. Now you cannot take up any of the leading newspapers or magazines without finding them full of it; editors eat, drink, and sleep on it. The question is so broad, it has so many different channels, that it puzzles them. Even John Stuart Mill has not attempted to cover its whole breadth. It takes in everything.

Let me tell you why I am interested in the Labor Question. Not simply because of the long hours of labor; not simply because of a specific oppression of a class. I sympathize with the sufferers there; I am ready to fight on their side. But I look out upon Christendom, with its three hundred millions of people, and I see, that, out of this number of people, one hundred millions never had enough to eat. Physiologists tell us that this body of ours, unless it is properly fed, properly developed, fed with rich blood and carefully nourished, does no justice to the brain. You cannot make a bright or a good man in a starved body; and so this one third of the inhabitants of Christendom, who have never had food enough, can never be what they should be.

Now, I say that the social civilization.which condemns every third man in it to be below the average in the nourishment God prepared for him, did not come from above; it came from below; and the sooner it goes down, the better. Come on this side of the ocean. You will find forty millions of people, and I suppose they are in the highest state of civilization; and yet it is not too much to say, that, out of that forty millions, ten millions, at least, who get up in the morning and go to bed at night, spend all the day in the mere effort to get bread enough to live. They have not elasticity enough, mind or body, left to do anything in the way of intellectual or moral progress.

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