No investment exacts such cruel usury as indifference to injustice. A wrong, uncared for in a North End tenement house will avenge itself, sooner or later, on Beacon Hill or Commonwealth Avenue. I thank God for every indication of discontent, on the part of laboring men and women, at conditions which cramp or fetter the free utterance of their manhood or womanly glory. In that divine discontent is the hope of the race. Our own Lowell sings:-- "The hope of truth grows stronger day by day. I hear the soul of man around me waking, Like a great sea its frozen fetters breaking, And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray, Tossing huge continents in scornful play, And crushing them with din of grinding thunder That makes old emptinesses stare in wonder. The memory of a glory passed away Lingers in every heart, as in the shell Resounds the by-gone freedom of the sea. And every hour new signs of promise tell That the great soul shall once again be free; For high and yet more high the murmurs swell Of inward strife for truth and liberty." V. THE RELATION OF WAGES TO MORALS. "When the toiler's heart you clutch, Conscience is not valued much; He recks not a bloody smutch On his gold; Everything to you he defers, You are potent reasoners; At your whisper Treason stirs, Hunger and Cold!" --JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. When Henry W. Grady, the brilliant Southern orator, was in Boston on his last visit, only a few weeks before his sad and untimely death, he charmed us all by his entrancing word-picture of a happy country home. The fields, the lowing kine, the well-appointed farmhouse, the noble farmer, the contented matron, the dutiful children, the hospitable welcome of their guest, the cheerful and reverent evening worship--all these and more stand out on the glowing canvas under his words, as I have myself seen them in real life a thousand times. About such a home, and the toilers that support it, there is a halo of glory. There is, however, a great deal said about the dignity of labor which is nothing more than oratorical commonplace--the meaningless froth of the rhetorician. There is no dignity about labor in itself. What is there about piling bricks on top of each other, or mixing mortar, or sewing blue denim into overalls, or trading earthen jars for nickel coin, that has about it any inherent dignity? It is only as there is mixed with the mortar, or builded with the bricks, the holy cement of a moral purpose; only as there is stitched into the cloth the diviner thread of hopeful love; only as the deed gathers the aroma of an aspiring human life, is it a dignified transaction. But when you make of the laborer a slave, degrade his work to a mere fight for bread, harass him by continual debt, put him in a vile tenement house that smothers all holy ambition, labor has no longer dignity, it smells rather of the dungeon and the pit. [Illustration: THE FIND.]