It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration. “These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized by those of their employers. All employers and directors of labor in all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their condition of subordination.” “That,” said the Citizeness, “is a significant sign of the times. I have rarely seen words which indicate more clearly the growing frame of mind of the capitalists. They are beginning to wake up to the fact of danger. Oh, yes, when it begins to be a question of self-preservation they show signs of some knowledge of the actual situation! But just see how foxy they are. Mr. ---- does not tell his fellow-employers to treat their men well because they ought to, and he doesn’t talk any foolishness about the interests of labor and capital being identical. He knows better than that. He knows perfectly well that the men in the employ of his corporation are wage-slaves. He knows it a good deal better than most of the men themselves know it. And what he is telling his fellow-capitalists, who are beginning to feel alarm over the situation, is this, that in all their treatment of their men they must make a point of disguising from them their real condition of servitude. Keep them in servitude, of course, but by all possible means keep them in ignorance of it, for the greatest danger to the existing order of things lies in an awakening of workingmen, and already there are signs of such an awakening, and ‘the times’ are, therefore, ‘anxious.’” Tumultuous applause followed this sally. It expressed the prevalent thought as no word of the afternoon had done. “Capital conspiring to maintain the existing bondage of labor--growing anxious at symptoms of dawning intelligence among its slaves, and disclosing, in a moment of unguarded anxiety, its real spirit through a feigned one!” “What clearer proof of the truth could be asked?” men seemed to say, as they looked eagerly into one another’s faces, and kept on applauding. Before the noise subsided the Peddler again had gained the floor. He harked back to his original theme of “education,” and was showing its applicability to the situation from the new point of view.