Everybody who reads the newspapers or talks with his neighbors knows that the conflict between labor and capital is drifting us into another civil war. We can already reach ahead in imagination and fix our eyes upon the dreadful moment when the forces of class revolution will raise their standards and move to the attack. Among thousands it is being openly advocated. Among great numbers of quieter citizens of all classes it is accepted as a sort of grim necessity. Men seem always to be ready enough to fight. However, a sound national life can not be maintained by crushing down the masses, any more than freedom and progress can be secured for anybody through a Bolshevistic revolution. And how much more deadly is disunity between classes than between sections! How difficult it is to make men so desirous of peace that they will consecrate their lives to secure its conditions! Are there none among us so devoted to our Union, so ardent in the cause of peace, that they are willing to rally around the principles which will make both peace and unity possible? I steadfastly maintain that, if properly led, a majority of Americans are willing to think and act in order to forestall anarchy and civil war. A vast majority of our farming people and middle classes are ready to demand, as Andrew Jackson demanded in 1830, that the nation do lawful justice to all. We who still constitute the solid body of the nation wish to urge upon the wage-working people with all our hearts that America and Americanism can solve their great problem without rebellion and bloodshed. And we are just as ready to assure those who own and direct capital, even those who are so often hated because of their great riches, that no penny shall ever be taken away from them without due process of law. Surely a majority of us have not yet lost faith in the very foundations of our democratic union. The recent stupendous events in revolutionary Europe should cause every thoughtful American mind to re-examine most carefully the principles of our government and of our democracy. We stoutly maintain that these principles and the constitution based upon them furnish a peaceful means, even a brotherly means, for the solution of the labor problem. But if, under the dangerous conditions which impend, our Federal Union is to be preserved, our love for it must draw us ever closer together in its service. Every principle of the bill of rights must be steadfastly defended. Embittered hatreds and suspicions must be allayed. The nation as a whole must be persuaded to take counsel in a quiet way. To those who shriek out upon us that "Might makes right," and that "Government is founded upon power and wealth alone," we must be able to reply that our Constitution and laws are still vitalized by the love of our American hearts, and by our willingness to sacrifice self for the sacred things of the Union. May we not still reply, also, that freedom is only curtailment of power--power to rule