New Tabernacle SermonsTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
New Tabernacle Sermons
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Presbyterian Church -- Sermons; Sermons, American
Neither will the contest be settled by cynical and unsympathetic
treatment of the laboring classes. There are those who speak of them
as though they were only cattle or draught horses. Their nerves are
nothing, their domestic comfort is nothing, their happiness is
nothing. They have no more sympathy for them than a hound has for a
hare, or a hawk for a hen, or a tiger for a calf. When Jean Valjean,
the greatest hero of Victor Hugo's writings, after a life of suffering
and brave endurance, goes into incarceration and death, they clap the
book shut and say, "Good for him!" They stamp their feet with
indignation and say just the opposite of "Save the working-classes."
They have all their sympathies with Shylock, and not with Antonio and
Portia. They are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal. They are
filled with irritation and irascibility on this subject. To stop this
awful imbroglio between capital and labor they will lift not so much
as the tip end of the little finger.
Neither will there be any pacification of this angry controversy
through violence. God never blessed murder.
The poorest use you can put a man to is to kill him. Blow up to-morrow
all the country-seats on the banks of the Hudson, and all the fine
houses on Madison Square, and Brooklyn Heights, and Bunker Hill, and
Rittenhouse Square, and Beacon Street, and all the bricks and timber
and stone will just fall back on the bare head of American labor. The
worst enemies of the working-classes in the United States and Ireland
are their demented coadjutors. Assassination--the assassination of
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin,
Ireland, in the attempt to avenge the wrongs of Ireland, only turned
away from that afflicted people millions of sympathizers. The recent
attempt to blow up the House of Commons, in London, had only this
effect: to throw out of employment tens of thousands of innocent Irish
people in England.
In this country the torch put to the factories that have discharged
hands for good or bad reason; obstructions on the rail-track in front
of midnight express trains because the offenders do not like the
president of the company; strikes on shipboard the hour they were
going to sail, or in printing-offices the hour the paper was to go to
press, or in mines the day the coal was to be delivered, or on house
scaffoldings so the builder fails in keeping his contract--all these
are only a hard blow on the head of American labor, and cripple its
arms, and lame its feet, and pierce its heart. Take the last great
strike in America--the telegraph operators' strike--and you have to
find that the operators lost four hundred thousand dollars' worth of
wages, and have had poorer wages ever since. Traps sprung suddenly
upon employers, and violence, never took one knot out of the knuckle
of toil, or put one farthing of wages into a callous palm. Barbarism
will never cure the wrongs of civilization. Mark that!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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