PUCK, May 18th, 1887. “Don’t be a laboring man—that is, labor, but as an employer rather than as an employee. You have got to serve your apprenticeship to poverty—so has everybody else, except the comparatively few who inherit large fortunes. But be diligent in your apprenticeship, and it will be mastership in the end. Work with this one idea in view—that some day you will have earned and saved enough to go into business for yourself. Then you can employ some other poor man, who would else go hungry; and you can treat him well and give him a chance to make money in his turn. That is the way of the world. It is not a bad way, if you take it bravely and cheerfully. If you refuse to take it in the right spirit, if you sulk and whine and call upon labor organizations to protect you, and cry for special legislation to right wrongs which you can’t even define—why, you will find it a pretty hard way. It is hard on shirks, idlers, skulkers, and men who do half-hearted work. But it is a way that is as old as the rising of the sun; a way that will be the same when the last sun sets on this world, and all the McGlynns and Georges and Anti-Poverty Clubs in creation will not change it. It is the good old way of duty, and it existed before Labor Leagues were thought of.” |