and dissipation mainly, at, for his family, the early age of forty-four, but he left a son who became George III. We refer to these facts with deliberate purpose. Men say, with Scripture, "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" Was it to be expected, with such a lineage, that the Queen of England should be what she has been or is? Was not a monarch rather to be looked for like one of the many who have been curses rather than blessings to their people? Surely all the hereditary theories, whether of Galton or others, are mocked and set at naught by this experience. In other words, the Herald means that Victoria has been better than her immediate predecessors, which is true enough, but is saying very little in her favor.

The Time to Build a Home.

THE time to build a home is now. When a man is young and active-when his hands are strong and his heart hopeful - then is the time to prepare for a shelter for old age and a haven of rest and love for his children. We venture to say that what the average laboring man squanders in useless and injurious indulgences during the age of twentyfive and forty-five years would build and furnish him a beautiful home. Good suggestions; but will they have any influence on the average young man of the day? We fear not; there are too many expensive social affairs nowadays, with which the average young man must be identified if he "wants to be anybody." He must keep a horse and buggy; must belong to some high-toned military company, extravagant base ball, rowing, toboggan, or other expensive club; must spend time and money to keep up with the other boys and girls of the period, spend all he earns and sometimes more- drawing on the surplus funds in his care belonging to his employer,- to meet the demands of costly fun and the demands of high-toned society. And if ever he does stop to consider the importance of getting a home, or to look into the future far enough to realize the necessity of providing for the solid realities of life, an empty pocket-book stares him in the face, a salary drawn in advance. rises up before him, and he turns to contemplate with envious eye the man of forty-five or fifty years of age, who, by honest endeavor and steady toil, has secured a home and a moderate competency, and to curse the fate which has made him the impecunious cuss he is, with no better prospects for the future. And as he grows older he bemoans his fate and attributes it to the grinding monopoly of money power,capital starving labor,-lives from "hand to mouth," and when he dies his wife must take boarders, do washing or sewing, and his children be dependent upon the charity of an uncharitable world.

A man who has a good physical constitution, is blessed with average good business tact, has met with no crushing calamities and has no home at fifty is not an object of pity, and no "anti-poverty society" will better his condition.

II.

LET us, then, enlarge our idea of capital, and take into that conception all that I have enumerated the muscular and mental, and manual and mechanical power which has been created by labor. Therefore, as I said before, I claim for the man that can only bring to the field of labor his strength without skill, as well as the man that brings his strength with a half skill, or with a complete skill, or with a scientific industry-I claim for them all the name of honest laborers; and I believe that if they be honest, that is, mentally and morally exerting their power for their own good and the good of their neighbor, they are entitled to all respect for the dignity of their state and of their work. And I cannot better express what I mean than in these words, which I find also quoted by Mr. Brassey, and his selection of them shows how he sympathized in what I am saying. Quoting some words of Mr. Ruskin, who has written lately with great sympathy for working men and for all who are engaged in labor, Mr. Brassey says that "there is one thing necessary for us all, and that is reverence."'

I know nothing that is more undignified than for a man to think there is nobody of higher stature, morally or intellectually, than himself.

The smallest man on earth is the man who thinks there is nobody greater than himself. A man who is able to lift up his eyes to excellence, wherever he finds it, and who has an honest and earnest admiration for it, without a spark of jealousy and without a particle of envy, I think that man is worthy of the name of a true laborer. "Now," Mr. Ruskin says, "this is the thing which I. know, and which you laboring people usually know also, that reverence is the chief power and joy of life; reverence for what is pure and bright in your own youth; for what is true and tried in the age of others; for all that is gracious among the living, and great among the dead, and marvellous in the powers that cannot die." (Wages in 1873, p. 53. By Thos. Brassey, M.P. Longmans. 1873)

I will turn now to the other part of my thesis; that is, to the rights of labor. I am not going to be communistic, and I have no will to be revolutionary. Adam Smith says, "The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property." Therefore, first of all, I claim for labor the rights of property. There is no personal property so strictly our own. It is altogether and entirely personal. The strength and skill that are in a man are as much his own as his life-blood; and that skill and strength which he has as his personal property no man may control. He has this property in him. Lawyers say a man's will is ambulatory, that is, it travels with him all over the world. So the working man carries this property with him as ready money. He can buy with it, and he can sell it. He can exchange it. He may set a price on it. And this

And

ready money which he carries with him he may carry to every market all over the world; and what is more he will not be impeded by any foreign currency. No coins, no difficult calculations, decimal or otherwise, obstruct his exchange with other nations of the world. further, in one sense it is inexhaustible, except that we all have limits and dimensions, and our strength and skill are bounded by what we are. But there it is, perennial, going on always through his life till old age diminishes it; then what remains in him is to be honored with a reverence of which I spoke just now.

Shakespeare gives an account of what a true laborer is in this way. He says in "As You Like It," and puts it into the mouth of the laborer, "I am a true laborer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm.' Well, then, I claim for labor (and the skill which is always acquired by labor) the rights of capital. It is capital in the truest sense. Now our Saxon ancestors used to call what we call cattle "live money"; and we are told that what we call chattels and cattle and the Latin word capita are one and the same thing; that is, "heads" of cattle, or workers, or serfs. This was "live money." And so is the labor, the strength, and the skill in the honest workman "live money." It is capital laid up in him; and that capital is the condition of production. For capital which is in money, which I will call dead capital, or dead money, receives its life from the living power and skill of the laborer. These two must be united. The capital of money and the capital of strength and of skill must be united together, or we can have no production and no progress. And, therefore, "labor and capital must," as the book I quoted from before puts it, "ride on the same horse;' and that book says, in a sort of mother-wit way, that "when two men ride on a horse one must ride behind." It says that capital rides before. Well, now, if they cannot ride side by side, they ought to walk hand in hand. Whatever rights, then, capital possesses, labor possesses.

Once more labor has a right of liberty. We read in Columella, who wrote a book on Roman agriculture in the first century of our era, that the soil all around Rome became so sterile, barren, and unproductive, and year after year so perceptibly lost its fertility that the philosophers of Rome accounted for it by saying that the earth was growing old. We do not find that England has grown old, as comparing King John's time with our own. But the secret of this diminution in productiveness was very easily discovered. It was cultivated by slaves, and slave labor is labor without a heart; it is labor without a will. It is not the strength of the arm, but it is the vigor of the will that makes the axe ring upon the root of a tree. Every laborer has a right to work or not to work. If he refuses to work, for an idler there is an old law which says: "If a man will not work, neither let him eat." (2 Thess. iii. 10.) That law has never been repealed. And the same law says that "the laborer is worthy of his hire" (St. Luke x. 7), and I am happy to say that law still stands in the sacred statute-book. Well, a laborer has a right to determine for whom he will work, and where he will work. I do not mean in any capricious and extortionate way, but he must be first and last the judge and the controller of his

own life, and he must pay the penalty if he abuses that freedom. This carries with it also the right to say whether he can subsist upon certain wages. This is undeniable. He may set too high a price upon his labor, but then he will pay the penalty. No man can appraise it for him. Another man may offer him his wages, and if he is not content he may refuse it. He cannot say, "you shall work." Well, now in England serfdom lasted until the fourteenth century, and I have no doubt that serfdom was one of the reasons why the fertility of England was not what it is now one, I say, for I do not forget capital, skill, and science. Serfdom died out under the benign action of Christianity. Then for many centuries there existed a state of labor in this country which, though it was free in one sense, was not altogether free in another. It was under certain social circumscriptions which limited the freedom of the laborer - the old law of settlement and the like, into which I will not enter. At the present time the labor of Englishmen is, I may say, as free as the air. They may go where they will, they may labor where they will, they may labor for what they can obtain; they may even refuse to labor. This again is undeniable. I do not see how anybody can deny this without denying a right which belongs both to property and to capital.

It

Let me here enter a protest, though I have no doubt you do not need it. I have said it before, in Manchester, some years ago, and I cannot help saying it again in Leeds. There are some people who are trying to force into the mouths of Englishmen a very long word - the proletariat. I have no doubt you have all heard it and all read it. When I see it in a book I suspect the book at once. When a man says it to me I doubt whether he is an Englishman. Our old mothertongue has a great many more monosyllables than polysyllables in it, and I love it all the more for that, for I think our old Saxon monosyllables have the strength of a strong race in them. Now I had ten thousand times rather be called a working man than a prolétaire. I will tell you my reasons against the name of prolétaire. It is pedantry; it is paganism; it is false; and it is an indignity to the working man. is pedantry, because it was dug up out of the old Roman law by certain French writers, chiefly in or about the time of the first French Revolution; and that accounts, perhaps, for its paganism in its revived state, because that was a period very rank with paganism. It is strictly pagan in its origin; it belongs to the Roman civilization, such as it was, before the Christian era. But, further, it is utterly inapplicable to our present state, and I will tell you why. The population of Rome was distinguished into classes. There were those who were called in legal phrase capite censi, or men told by the head. They were mere numbers; they possessed nothing; they were nothing; they could do nothing; they had two eyes and two hands and two feet; and they were entered in the poll tax by the tale. These were the lowest of the Roman population. Next to them were the proletarii, or men who had homes and families, if you call a home a roof or a shelter where a man could lie down, but they were destitute of property. They had nothing but their children. They could only serve the state by themselves and by their children in military service, or something of that sort. Moreover, they

were slaves, or to a great extent they were slaves. They were the greatest of idlers, and the most profligate and the most dependent of the Roman populace. They lived on alms; or what is worse, they were the followers and flatterers of those who had anything to give them. Well, now, I ask whether it is not an indignity to English working men to call them prolétaires?

Labor has a right, not only to its own freedom, but it has a right to protect itself. And now, gentlemen, I know I am treading very near to dangerous ground; nevertheless I will speak as an historian or as a political economist, but certainly not as a demagogue. If you go back to the earliest period of our Saxon history you will find that there always were associations distinct from the life of the family on the one side and from the state on the other. The family has laws of its own laws of domestic authority, laws of domestic order, and, I will say, after King Solomon, laws of very salutary domestic punishment. On the other hand the state has its public laws, its legislature, and its executive. But between the public and the domestic life there is a wide field of the free action of men and of their mutual contracts, their mutual relations, which are not to be controlled either by domestic authority, and cannot be meddled with by the public authority of the state-I mean the whole order of commerce. Commerce existed as soon as there was the interchange of one thing for another, and these free contracts between man and man, between employer and employed, are as old as civilization. Clearly, therefore, there is a certain field which must be regulated by a law of its own, by tribunals of its own; and as soon as we begin to trace anything in our Saxon history, we begin to trace the rise of guilds. They were of a religious character at first. Some have thought they were religious only, but that is a mistake; they were also what we should call benefit societies; they were also for protection; they were again for the vindication of liberty from the oppressive jurisdiction of those who held local authority. There were guilds, or gilds, of many kinds - some were called "frith-guilds," and others were called "craft-guilds," and these craft-guilds were composed of masters and of men - of employers and of employed.

In all the history of civilization, if you go back to the Greeks or to the Romans, you find that trades and professions always had their societies and fellowships by which they were united together. It seems to me that this is a sound and legitimate social law. I can conceive nothing more entirely in accordance with natural right and with the higher jurisprudence, than that those who have one common interest should unite together for the promotion of that interest. I hope to show before I have done that this has always been a principle of the most solid civil and political order, and it is that with which I am now concerned. To tell the truth, the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, as described to me by its excellent President before I came here, appears to me to be a "craft-guild;" for, as I understand, there are in it both employers and employed — there are both capitalists who hold what I have called the dead money, and there are capitalists who hold the live money — and therefore you are united in a common interest. You seem to me, if "craft-guilds" are dangerous bodies, to be a very dangerous body. Well,