"No one supposes," said Phillips later, "that law can make men temperate.... But law can shut up those bars and dram-shops which facilitate and feed intemperance, which double our taxes, make our streets unsafe for men of feeble resolution, treble the peril to property and life, and make the masses tools in the hands of designing men to undermine and cripple law." Phillips also worked untiringly for labor reform. He wrote to Mr. George J. Holyoake, in England, "There'll never be, I believe and trust, a class-party here, labor against capital, the lines are so indefinite, like dove's-neck colors. Three-fourths of our population are to some extent capitalists; and, again, all see that there is really, and ought always to be, alliance, not struggle, between them." Again he said, "Capital and labor are only the two arms of a pair of scissors,--useless when separate, and only safe when fastened together, cutting everything before them." He urged fewer hours for labor, better wages, and united effort among workingmen. He said to them, "Why have you not carried your ends before? Because in ignorance and division you have let the other side have their own way. We are ruled by brains.... You want books and journals.... When men have wrongs to complain of they should go to the ballot-box and right them.... Men always lose half of what is gained by violence. What is gained by argument is gained forever." In an address in 1872 he said to labor, "If you want power in this country, if you want to make yourselves felt, ... write on your banner, so that every political trimmer can read it, so that every politician, no matter how short-sighted he may be, can read it: 'We never forget! If you launch the arrow of sarcasm at labor, we never forget; if there is a division in Congress, and you throw your vote in the wrong scale, we never forget.'" Mr. Phillips carried out his ideas of labor under his own roof. So kind and considerate was he to his servants, that his cook, who was his nurse in childhood, used to leave the door open into the kitchen, that she might hear him pass and repass. She said, "Bless him, there is more music in his footfall than in a cathedral organ!" When she was too old for work, he placed her in a home of her own, and went to see her every Saturday, when possible, with many gifts for her comfort, till she died. He paid the best wages to servants of anybody in the neighborhood. "Good pay, good service," he used to say. He was always generous. One day on the cars he met a woman thinly clad, a lecturer from the South, a niece of Jefferson Davis, as he afterwards learned. She had received five dollars for her work. Mr. Phillips said, "I don't want to give offence, but you know I preach that a woman is entitled to the same as a man if she does the same work. Now, my price is fifty or a hundred dollars; and, if you will let me divide it with you, I shall not have had any more than you, and the thing will be even."