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—The—Crime of Poverty

Introductory.

The orator was introduced to the audience by Brother James Love, one of the committee, in the following words:

Ladies and Gentlemen:—I appear in this introductory place to-night as a workingman, the representative and spokesman of a large body of workingmen, very greatly dissatisfied with their social condition.

In looking broadly over our own land and Europe we observe a still greater dissatisfaction. We see that in spite of steam and the mighty powers born of this century, that labor is prostrate. That labor saving machines do not lessen our cares. That the difficulties of life seem ever to increase. That failure is the rule and success the exception. That great combinations of capital and great workshops are reducing the independent worker to an unhappy servitude. That factories are filled with children. That woman struggle for the barest subsistence. That strikes and outbreaks are of daily occurrence. That tramps become more numerous, and that insanity increases.

We have overthrown despotisms, but the man with the ballot is no better off than before.

"Man is born free," exclaims Rosseau, "but he is everywhere in chains."

Believing these results to come from excessive population has beclouded the philosophers. The endeavor to reconcile them to the tenderness of Jesus has degraded Christianity.

But there is dawning upon us a notion that these social wrongs are based upon the denial of a great truth: the truth that the earth belongs to the whole human race and not to a part of it. That the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, in which all of his children, every living soul, has an equality of right.

The thought of more than a hundred years has been moving towards this, till it culminates, in our own day and in our own land, in a man with the reasoning genius of Newton, Shakespearian command of language, and the broad human sympathy of St. Francis, who bears the completed message of peace to an anxions and overwrought world.

This man who has transformed a "political economy that is dark and despairing, to a new science radiant with hope," I now have the great honor to present to you—our loved fellow-countryman Henry George.