to little else than how to make us work to the best advantage, while you shall pocket the proceeds. You are fond of extolling the importance of head-work; but, as we have learned, that you may contrive to get your living without working at all. For you do not think as much, nor do you turn out to be such profound thinkers, as you pretend. Most of the discoveries of which you boast, and inventions and improvements in the arts of production, from which you derive so much profit, are the result of our thinking; and nearly all the individuals, who have saved your body from putrefaction, have been supplied from our ranks. We comprehend you; and hereafter will endeavor to do our own thinking; and if we think not so much to your interest us you have done, we may think perhaps more to our own, which will be still better.

C. In most of your remarks you labor under a mistake. You seem to believe that there is a class in this country hostile to the workingmen, seeking to circumvent them, and to keep them from rising. All this is mere fancy. I can speak for myself, and I think for all of those whom you brand as aristocrats, that nothing would give them or me more sincere pleasure than to see the workingmen all in comfortable. circumstances. We have no pleasure in poverty, no delight in seeing, and certainly none in causing human suffering. You do us great injustice, and you do a serious injury to the workingmen themselves. You stir up their jealousies, excite their hostility against those you call the accumulators, and throw the whole community into a state of intestine war. Now this is no way to bring about a reform. The rich are necessary to the poor, and the poor are necessary to the rich, and as the friend of either class, you should seek to make both live together as brothers.

R. The lamb is necessary to the wolf; for without the lamb the wolf might want a dinner; and the wolf is necessary to the lamb, for without the wolf the lamb might fail to be eaten. "Therefore," says the benevolent wolf to the lamb, "do not be hostile to

us, nor excite your brother lambs against us; for you see we wolves and you lambs are mutually necessary to each other. We are as dependent on you for something to eat, as you are on us to be eaten." "But I don't want to be eaten," exclaims the lamb in great trepidation. "Not want to be eaten!" replies the wolf. "Now that's odd. You and I are very far from thinking alike, and I must needs consider you very unreasonable, and radical in your mode of thinking.” C. Do you mean to call the rich wolves? R. Apply my comparison as you please. All I mean is that the reasoning of the wolf appears to me as conclusive and every whit as just as yours.

C. I anticipated nothing of this from you, who evidently have had the means of knowing better. Some ignorant workingman might have been pardoned for talking so, but you, whoever or whatever you are, have seen too much of the rich to believe any such thing as you assert. You must have some base and sinister purpose in supporting the workingmen. You have some personal pique to gratify, and I no longer believe you honest but mistaken, as I did at first.

R. As you please. I profess to have no control over your opinions. You are not the first man whom the truth has offended, and will not be the last. But be cool. Now I know the rich; I know the accumulators of wealth in this country and in most others, and it is because I know them that I speak as I do.

C. If you continue to talk thus, I must break off the conversation, and relieve myself of your company.

R. As it suits your pleasure. I neither court nor avoid any man. But listen a moment. Now I have not the most distant suspicion that there is a class among us that wishes to keep down the workingmen, or that wills their poverty. The rich have no disposition to injure the poor. They are not hostile to the poor. The wolf does not by any means dislike the lamb, or wish to injure it. He only wants a dinner, and lamb is his most agreeable food. He loves lamb most affectionately..

C. No more of that, Sir.

R. Well, well, Sir, I see you do not like the comparison; you probably are afraid of the consequences. The wolf

C. I tell you I will hear no more of that.

R. Very well, Sir. I only wanted to say that, the wolf might be afraid, if the lambs should once know that they were necessary to the wolf only for the purpose of furnishing him dinners, and that he was necessary to them only for the purpose of eating them, that they might, as they probably have no great desire to be eaten, combine against him, and thus leave him to feed on something else; but as it is disagreeable to you, I won't say it. And besides the wolf must be very foolish to apprehend any danger from a combination among the lambs. What could they do against the wolf? By combining they would only give him an opportunity to make his dinner on the fattest instead of the leanest. But seriously, Sir, your talk about the necessity of the rich to the poor is all a humbug, and fully justifies my comparison. The poor are necessary to the rich, I admit; but that the rich are necessary to the poor, I deny; and you know they are not, as you testify by your dread of my saying so. It is out of no love to the poor, no tender regard for their welfare, that you wish to have it understood that the rich are necessary to them.

C. You seem to think that we are a set of selfish wretches, who detest the poor and do all we can to make them miserable.

R. No, I do not. I acquit you of all hostility to the poor. I am even willing to admit that you have a certain affection for them, and would do your best to preserve and multiply them.

C. Come, cease your pleasantry, and speak seriously. R. I am serious, and speak with all the truthfulness I can command. The wolf certainly has no disposition to destroy the race of lambs. Nor do I blame the wolf for making his dinner of lamb. It is his nature to do it. Nor do I blame the accumulator for transfer

ring the profits of the workingman's labor into his own. pockets. It is his nature to do it. He could not be an accumulator if he did not. What I complain of is that there are wolves, or accumulators of wealth, separate from the producers of wealth. In sober earnest, you can assign but two reasons why the rich are necessary to the poor; one reason is that they may be the instructors of the poor, and the other that they may give them employment. Have you any other reasons to allege?

C. Those are enough.

R. But we have disposed of these already, by contending that the poor should do their own thinking, and also work for themselves. There is no good reason in the world to be assigned, why one class of the community should be dependent on another for its instructors. The whole community may and should be equally educated, and every man may and should work for himself. So long as the wealth of the community is in the hands of only a certain number of individuals; or, in other words, so long as the community is divided into two classes, one of which owns the funds, and the other of which must perform the labor of production, the poor are undoubtedly dependent on the rich for employment; and since without employment, the poor must beg, steal, or starve, the rich may be said to be necessary to them. But this is the precise evil I complain of in the present social arrangement of wealth and labor. Let each man become an independent proprietor, and then the rich would not be necessary to the poor, in order to give them employment, for each man could employ himself on his own capital, and instead of working for another he could work for himself.

C. Every man does work for himself now. I do not know what you mean by this senseless clatter about every man's working for himself on his own capital. Every man does so work now. One man's capital is his farm, his workshop, or his store and goods, another's his ability to labor, the strength and activity of his limbs. In the great copartnership of society

each man invests his capital, whatever it be, and receives his share of the gains. Some invest more than others, and therefore receive and ought to receive a proportionally larger share. You and I too form a copartnership when I employ you as a common laborer to plough, plant, hoe, or reap for me. You are not in

deed an equal partner. Your investment is less than mine. You invest merely your bodily strength and activity, while I invest house, barn, out-houses, land, oxen, horses, sheep, and hogs, together with my own. labor, bodily or mental. Now as my investment is more than yours, I ought to receive a larger portion of the gains. Your share is called your wages, and when you consider that in copartnerships of this kind, I have all the vexation and labor of superintending the joint concern, that I have to pay all the incidental expenses, run all the risk, and be responsible for all the debts, and to you also for your share, I think that you must admit that your wages amount to your full proportion. Certain it is, that many an employer would do well to exchange places with those he employs. They in fact often run away with all the gains, and seldom suffer when the concern is a losing one.

This matter of wages, about which workingmen have so much to say, is, after all, a thing beyond human control. A stern and unyielding necessity governs it. There is a natural ratio established between wages and the price of articles demanded for consumption, which no power on earth can alter. If wages rise, articles of consumption rise in the same proportion; if wages fall, then articles of consumption fall. Let the workingmen double their wages, and what they gain on the one hand they will find they lose on the other. They will have to pay double for everything they consume. When masons, and carpenters, and house-joiners rise in their wages, house-rent will rise; when house-rent rises real estate will rise in value, land will bear a higher price, and of course the productions of the soil. Flour must rise; the baker then will ask more for his loaf or make it lighter; and