Household Papers and StoriesStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Household Papers and Stories
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Didactic fiction; Home economics -- Fiction; Short stories
"This great democratic movement is coming down into modern society
with a march as irresistible as the glacier moves down from the
mountains. Its front is in America,--and behind are England, France,
Italy, Prussia, and the Mohammedan countries. In all, the rights of
the laboring masses are a living force, bearing slowly and inevitably
all before it. Our war has been a marshaling of its armies, commanded
by a hard-handed, inspired man of the working-class. An intelligent
American, recently resident in Egypt, says it was affecting to notice
the interest with which the working classes there were looking upon
our late struggle in America, and the earnestness of their wishes for
the triumph of the Union. 'It is our cause, it is for us,' they said,
as said the cotton spinners of England and the silk weavers of Lyons.
The forces of this mighty movement are still directed by a man from
the lower orders, the sworn foe of exclusive privileges and landed
aristocracies. If Andy Johnson is consistent with himself, with the
principles which raised him from a tailor's bench to the head of a
mighty nation, he will see to it that the work that Lincoln began is
so thoroughly done, that every man and every woman in America, of
whatever race or complexion, shall have exactly equal rights before
the law, and be free to rise or fall according to their individual
intelligence, industry, and moral worth. So long as everything is not
strictly in accordance with our principles of democracy, so long as
there is in any part of the country an aristocratic upper class who
despise labor, and a laboring lower class that is denied equal
political rights, so long this grinding and discord between the two
will never cease in America. It will make trouble not only in the
South, but in the North,--trouble between all employers and
employed,--trouble in every branch and department of labor,--trouble
in every parlor and every kitchen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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