I have borne with such composure as I could command the imprisonment which deprived me of my liberty. Were I a criminal; were I guilty of crimes meriting a prison cell; had I ever lifted my hand against the life or the liberty of my fellowmen; had I ever sought to filch their good name, I would not be here. I would have fled from the haunts of civilization and taken up my residence in some cave where the voice of my kindred is never heard. But I am standing here without a self-accusation of crime or criminal intent festering in my conscience, in the sunlight once more, among my fellowmen, contributing as best I can to make this “Liberation Day” from Woodstock prison a memorial day, realizing that, as Lowell sang: “He’s true to God who’s true to man; wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, ’neath the all-beholding sun. That wrong is also done to us, and they are slaves most base, Whose love of right is for themselves and not for all their race.” Prison Labor _Its Effect on Industry and Trade_ _Address before Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico’s, New York City, March 21st, 1899._ In my early years I stood before the open door of a blazing furnace and piled in the fuel to create steam to speed a locomotive along the iron track of progress and civilization. In the costume of the craft, through the grime of mingled sweat and smoke and dust I was initiated into the great brotherhood of labor. The locomotive was my alma mater. I mastered the curriculum and graduated with the degree of D. D., not, as the lexicons interpret the letters, “Doctor of Divinity,” but that better signification, “Do and Dare”—a higher degree than Aristotle conferred in his Lyceum or Plato thundered from his academy. I am not in the habit of telling how little I know about Latin to those who have slaked their thirst for learning at the Pierian springs, but there is a proverb that has come down to us from the dim past which reads “Omnia vincit labor” and which has been adopted as the shibboleth of the American labor movement because, when reduced to English, it reads “Labor overcomes all things.” In a certain sense this is true. Labor has built this great metropolis of the new world, built it as coral insects build the foundations of islands—build and die; build from the fathomless depth of the ocean until the mountain billows are dashed into spray as they beat against the fortifications beneath which the builders are forever entombed and forgotten.