The possession of a wife implies, quite implies, occasional bits of income, but also of responsibility, in the shape of children. “He who has wife and children has given hostages to fortune.” The rich man knows this to his cost, though he may get enough delight out of the experience to pay him a thousand times over. But to the poor man dependent upon daily wages, and with no property or savings to fall back upon, a family is often fetters, with ball and chain to boot. Thank God, such bonds often feel as light as feathers and soft as silk, but these sensations do not decrease the weight or dragging power one particle. If a man determines to marry while he has nothing to marry on, let him at least be honest with himself, tell himself that he is going to be the slave of whoever employs him, and blame himself instead of employers, or capital, or public opinion for the consequences. There is a large class of workingmen who do not seem to think they are fit for anything but what they are doing. Such men may be honest, cheerful, obedient, industrious, painstaking and obliging. Well, slaves have been all this and more. Such men are bound to be slaves. Nothing that trade unions, Knights of Labor, law, religion or public sentiment can do, can save them from practical slavery. The men who organized any State, county or town in this Union had no bigger or healthier brains than the workingmen of to-day; but if each of them had imagined he could do but one kind of work, the map of our country would not look as it does now. Any of these men considered himself equal to taking a hand at building houses, clearing land, shoeing horses, digging post-holes, following the plough, planting corn, tending stock, loading steamboats, acting as deck-hand of a flatboat, carrying mails, or doing whatever else had to be done. They blundered terribly at times, but who did not and who does not? Each new kind of work they laid their hands to sharpened their wits and widened their view of what might be done in the way of getting ahead in the world. That is the reason why trade unions do not flourish in new countries. Men there have been taught by experience to take care of themselves. The common laborer in a new country thinks himself the equal of the judge, the doctor, the lawyer and the railway president. And so he is, so far as a fair impulse and a fair show can make one man equal to another in the race for life.