Another thing which seems to us quite in our way to say is that the political contest has an uncommonly large humanitarian element in the center of the field. We probably have readers who believe that the interests of the American workmen are not specially concerned in the result. It is not that question of fact which we now raise, but the fact of the _solicitude_ for the workmen which is conspicuous. We are witnessing, at this point, not so much a discussion about the tariff—for so far there has not been much of that—as a discussion over the permanent welfare of a large and growing section of our population. This discussion is not carried on by them so much as on behalf of them. Granted that a great party sees in their welfare an opportunity; what is it that makes the opportunity? It is surely not any incidents of the last Congress, or any opinions of candidates. These would be insufficient to create the discussion in its serious form. Is it not true that the philanthropy which freed the slave is thinking and feeling for the men in mills, and their wives and little ones? It would be easy to show that the politicians would have passed this matter by if they could. But we have become a manufacturing country. The laborer has become a great fact. He is a citizen, a social element, a man with a soul, and the head of a family. The social instinct in us took alarm some years ago. Outside of parties it has worked out into humanitarian feeling, and is ripening into purpose. The workman is likely for some decades to fashion for us the spirit of our politics and the ends sought by our statesmanship. No matter how much or little it may influence the results of this struggle for the control of the government, the question of the workman’s well-being has come among us to stay. It touches our life at all points. It challenges our institutions. It says to us: “Solve me or I will dissolve you.” Are we to have a distinctly depressed class doing our work? Is the “white slave” to live, suffer and die under our feet? There are persons who say, “it is inevitable. Older societies have sifted down to the bottom these forlorn and hopeless elements by force of a natural necessity, by a law of human society.” No good and strenuous American believes such a doctrine. The country we live in exists in our thought, to make life fairer, sweeter, more equally gracious for all the members of the national household. Our ideal is challenged by the specter of a degraded mass of laborers. We can not see this ghost of the old world without a shiver of apprehension. It may be that tariff questions do not touch the main question; that is for others to consider. What we note is that the whole of this labor question, with its complicated relations to all other questions, looms large on the horizon.