Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most effectively in what they said. Strong, sturdy men, with every mark upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation, which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great classes of society,” the employing and the employed. They declared the wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman. The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm. But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work, his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager to take the vacant place on the same terms. And it is little relief to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom. It was interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle-- “Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.” Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and should steal, _he_ would be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his personal liberty and be forced to work. But in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal, _society_ would be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.”