"It is the duty of government to foster, uphold, and defend labor in its unequal struggle against the greed of capital to the end that capital may not utterly crush it beneath its scornful and merciless heel. I tell you in all seriousness that on this subject you are approaching the verge of a volcano whose wrathful pent-up fires can not be much longer controlled, nor is it desirable that they should be unless a speedy change in the treatment of labor by capital, involving justice and right, is brought about. It is a delusion and in opposition to all human experience to expect capital, uncompelled by law, to become quickened in conscience and pervaded by a sense of equity and right. The government must stretch forth its strong arm and compel the exercise by authoritative and coercive power of a spirit of justice and fair dealing that belongs to a common humanity. Revivify and re-adopt that virtuous and beneficent doctrine of the earlier patriotic statesmanship of the republic, namely: 'The greatest good to the greatest number.' The men and women who toil and sweat in poverty constitute the greatest number, and he must indeed be blind to truth and deaf to justice who fails to discover or concede that the toiling millions have wrongs done them by the greedy rapacity of capital, and which appeal with vehement persistency for redress--aye, we fear in a little while, for retaliative and retributive vengeance. They have the right to claim protection from the steady and stealthy encroachments of capital whereby the rich grow richer and the poor poorer. Capital and labor are mutually interested in each others' welfare and prosperity, and are alike equally entitled to protection when dealing justly with each other, but under the present order of things labor is at the mercy of capital, and receives not justice at its hands. And this great government fought into existence by the common people, defended in every succeeding struggle by the common people, and which claims to be a government of the people and by the people and for the people, stands idly by with folded arms and with an apparent serene complacency permits the great masses of the people to become hopelessly impoverished, while the exclusive and favored few become enormously enriched. Verily has the government by its inaction and failure to interpose, become truly and in the sight of heaven a _particeps criminis_ in producing this wretched and deplorable condition of affairs." August 21, 1882: