the Mechanics' Ticket, has received a large proportion of the votes given yesterday. Some have declared that it is far ahead of every other. Be this as it may, it becomes the friends of good order in this community, of whatever party, to go to the polls and by their votes prevent so shameful a result. Shameful it would be if even a moderate support were given to tickets prepared by persons who scoff at morality and demand a system of public robbery." "We understand," said another, "with astonishment and alarm that the Infidel Ticket,' miscalled the Workingmen's Ticket,' is far ahead of every other assembly ticket in the city. What a state of things have we reached! A ticket got up openly and avowedly in opposition to all banks, in opposition to social order, in opposition to the rights of property, running ahead of every other! Is not this sufficient to startle men who have regard for the fundamental laws of society?" On the second and third days the friends of religion and order thus appealed to did rally, and but one candidate on the Mechanics' Ticket, Ebenezer Ford, was elected.

The great vote cast for Ford — 6, 166 — alarmed the community. All the horrors of anarchy seemed at hand. The "Fanny Wright Ticket," the Infidel Ticket" was denounced and the legislature called on to unseat Mr. Ford. The leaders of this miscalled mechanics' party, the people were told, held that everything was wrong

in the present state of society, and that the whole system must be changed. Their object was represented to be to turn the state into an Owenite community, confiscate all land and hold it for the general use of the people, strike down religion, and abolish marriage.

So horrid a picture of socialism disturbed the mechanics, who now made haste to publicly disavow all connection with Owen, with Fanny Wright and the Free Enquirers, and at a ward meeting passed resolutions denying all sympathy with the "Infidel party," repelling with scorn the charge that they were hostile to the civil, moral and religious institutions of the country, and declaring agrarian laws to be debasing, wicked and dishonest. The New York Typographical Society went further yet and appointed a committee to report as to who Owen was and in what his scheme consisted. The committee assured the typesetters that Robert Dale Owen was a Scotchman, that he probably had never been naturalized, and that he had been assisted in his labors "by one Fanny Wright, also an exotic of some notoriety.'

"It does seem unaccountably strange," said the report, "that a native of that part of the world where thousands are every day groaning under oppression, should leave these unfortunates, come over to the New World, and, in the midst of a people enjoying the fullest liberty proclaim himself the apostle of equal rights and tender

them the hand of friendship against their oppressors. Such insolence might well be treated with contempt were it not for the fact that a band of choice spirits of foreign origin, have united and, taking advantage of our mild laws, are sowing the seeds of discontent and rebellion. It is true that there is some distress among laboring people. It is true that labor is not as well paid as in times past, that a man working with his hands is now unable to earn as much as he once could. But in our country, at least, the distress is caused not by anything Owen could reform, but by the introduction of labor-saving machinery during the last thirty years. Has Owen any remedy to propose? Far from it. He calls on the workingmen to associate for defence of their rights when no rights are endangered." The report ended with a repudiation of his plan and a denial of all sympathy with his purposes. The Painters' Society, on the other hand, took a different view, admitted that much Mr. Owen said was true, and was disposed to favor his plan for free education. At Philadelphia, where the workingmen supported a ticket at the October election for city and county officers, they too denied the charge of sympathy with Miss Wright as warmly as their fellowlaborers in New York. "We view," so ran a resolution adopted at a public meeting after the election, "the report charging us with being disciples of Miss Wright, and connecting religious points with our contention, as a base fabrication

propagated by our enemies. We disclaim all adherence to Miss Wright's principles and hold them foreign to our views, and appeal to the fact of the existence of the Workingmen's party on the principles it now professes for nearly a year before she appeared among us.

But it mattered little whether the workingmen avowed or disavowed sympathy with the Free Enquirers; the fact remained that a serious reform movement was well under way and was spreading and gaining in importance daily. All over the country journals were appearing to advocate it, and societies were forming to labor in its behalf. In New York City the Telescope was busy exposing the designs of the clergy and holding up to view the dangers of ecclesiastical encroachment. At Rochester the Spirit of the Age was denouncing imprisonment for debt and capital punishment, and calling loudly for a mechanics' lien law. At Canton, in Ohio, the Farmers' and Mechanics' Society of Stark County had been founded to spread the new doctrines and agitate for coöperation and reform. Louis there was a Society of Free Enquirers. Alabama" The Ladies' Bill," to give women the right to hold after marriage property which belonged to them before, was warmly debated in the legislature, and in Tuscaloosa another Spirit of the Age upheld the cause of the people as vigorously as its Rochester contemporary. The Southern Free Press of Charleston, South Carolina,

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announced its principles to be "No sect, no creed; open to all," and declared that it would collect such information as was useful to mechanics and workingmen and would look to them for support. "Our great object," said the editor in his prospectus, "will be to urge you to break down the barrier which separates your children from those of lordly aristocrats by the establishment of national schools." At New Castle, in Delaware, an Association of Working People was formed with a membership open to any person twentyone years of age who was engaged in any branch of productive labor. "How is it," said the preamble to their constitution, that all classes save the laboring are heard in the legislature? The commercial, the agricultural, the manufacturing, ask for protection and it is granted. But what is accorded the workingman—nothing. Yet who needs protection more? The price of labor is hourly going down because of the numbers thrown out of employment by labor-saving machinery. The cost of every article of consumption, meantime, is increased by taxation. 'Does not the present system, under such circumstances, tend to increase the poverty of the poor and add to the riches of the rich? Let us then be represented in the legislature. Let us unite at the polls and give our votes to no candidate who is not pledged to support a rational system of education to be paid for out of the public funds, and to further a rightful protection for the laborer." At Wil