Consider the rents paid by this class of our brothers. It is they who pay the highest rate for their dwellings. The worth of the house is often little more than nothing, the ground it covers making the only value. I am told that twelve or fifteen per cent a year on a large valuation is quite commonly paid, and over thirty per cent on the actual value, is not a strange thing. I wish this might not prove true. But the misery of the poor does not end with their wretched houses and exorbitant rent. Having neither capital nor store-room, they must purchase articles of daily need in the smallest quantities. They buy, therefore, at the greatest disadvantage, and yet at the dearest rates. I am told it is not a rare thing for them to buy inferior qualities of flour at six cents a pound, or $11.88 a barrel, while another man buys a month's supply at a time for $4 or $5 a barrel. This may be an extreme case, but I know that in some places in this city, an inferior article is now retailed to them at $7.92 the barrel. So it is with all kinds of food; they are bought in the smallest quantities, and at a rate which a rich man would think ruinous. Is not the poor man, too, most often cheated in the weight and the measure? So it is whispered. "He has no friends," says the sharper; "others have broken him to fragments, I will grind him to powder!" And the grinding comes. Such being the case, the poor man finds it difficult to get a cent beforehand. I know rich men tell us that capital is at the mercy of labor. That may be prophecy; it is not history; not fact. Uneducated labor, brute force without skill, is wholly at the mercy of capital. The capitalist can control the market for labor, which is all the poor man has to part with. The poor cannot combine as the rich. True, a mistake is sometimes made, and the demand for labor is greater than the supply, and the poor man's wages are increased. This result was doubtless God's design, but was it man's intention? The condition of the poor has hitherto been bettered, not so much by the design of the strong, as by God making their wrath and cupidity serve the weak.