law, but "after the law came the Gospel”—“He came not to destroy the law; but to fulfill." The nations will be born into "newness of life." Of course, the life that was was the gestative life. It was preparatory to the higher life. Soon will we have a new birth of freedom. Soon will we have the true equality of men and women. Soon will we have a new civilization. Now are we barbarians. Soon will we be a free and enlightened world. Then there will be no more wars. Then will one flag float over all the starry flag of the United States of the World. That flag will be unfurled, not by the speculative class the class that lives off the toil of others—but by the toilers themselves. None but toilers ought to vote; for no other men and women should be but toilers. I would have every ablebodied man live by the labor of his own hands. That is what the emancipation of labor means. It means that the burden of toil shall be shared equally, and that no one shall by any artificial device escape having to bear his equal portion of the common burden. It is not that I, or any one else, shall live without labor; but that all shall do a like part of the common task.

There can be nothing worse than what we now see the ablebodied shirking their share of labor, or receiving for compensation of their little toil a greater share of the common product than falls to the lot of those who do the greater part of the work. No man can have an equitable right to anything that is not the product of his own toil. To say that it was produced by his ancestors is false; for the products of labor that are of any value are perishable and must be renewed year by year.

The idea that wealth can be handed down is false. Nothing can be handed down from one generation to another that is of any real utility-nothing that can keep life and warmth in the human body. Outside of unjust law, equality exists.

We declare war against the existing social system. We mean to destroy it, root and branch. God said to Adam: "By the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread." We declare that each and all of his sons must share alike this duty and obey alike this command. The one purpose of the labor movement is to lift all men to an equality. How? By doing away with the idlers.

There is no use for the laborers to try to maintain their natural rights under existing conditions. If they appeal to the courts, they find no relief. Why? Because the binding decisions of the courts have come down from the past, when all labor was enslaved, and they are altogether against the toilers. They contemplate labor as enslaved. So labor has no legal rights.

The state ruled by speculators and lawyers protects them not. They can have no protection until they protect themselves. How may they do this? By means of a combined political movement. They must elect to office only men of their own class-sworn to be true to them. A great political movement of labor by labor and for labor is near at hand. God speed the moment when the toilers shall be one! God speed the moment when they shall stand together in politics with the same persistence as they now stand together in a great strike for higher wages!

The power to transform the world is in their hands, if they will only use it. And the workers are coming to know their power. Soon they will use it. Already a change has come over all social relations. Nothing is as it once was. Great aggregations of capital leave nothing to individual enterprise. All business is becoming controlled by the executives of trusts and combines. So the new that will make labor master contemplates only the mastery of all trusts by the people. The combined people will advance to the control of all interests. They will of necessity have to do so-not led to it by any theorizing, but driven to it by circumstances beyond their control.

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I only anticipate what must inevitably be. Can the old condition of things be restored? No; the world has outgrown the old order. Men must and will co-operate, either in private trusts or, gathering and consolidating their interests until finally one interest will control i. e. the public interest-one gigantic public trust comprehending all businesses. Will not the people maintain their right to rule? or will plutocratic rule be accepted as final? and by the "Galveston plan" the few rich take and hold control everlastingly of cities, states and nation? We are advancing. Soon a universal trust, with all men and all women equal shareholders in it, will have grown up. This is nationalism.

But it is only fulfilling the prophecy of the Acts of the Apostles. It is only making world-wide the Pentecostal society. The church of Jerusalem was the epitome of the church of the twentieth century. All things revolve and circle in orbits. So the old church organized in Jerusalem on the day of the Pentecost comes again in sight. it is now about to comprehend all men within its fold.

But

YE 132ND LESSON.

Society's Barnacles.

It is a law of biology that, if in the life struggle one organism fixes its abode on another, there is hardly a limit to the degradation that awaits it. Thus the barnacle crab begins life swimming through the ocean, having a segmented body, three pairs of legs and one eye. He leaves off his roving ways, attaching himself to the soft, hinder parts of a distant relative, the hermit crab. Here he does nothing but absorb the juices of his host. Soon he loses his eye, then his limbs, then the segmentation of his body, his head, his intestines, his everything. He grows too lazy, and sinks too low even to eat. Around his mouth he develops a bundle of roots which spread through the soft body of the hermit as roots of a plant through the ground. He absorbs nutriment like a plant, and hence all the animal structures even the intestines abort, and the purple saculina-that is its namehas sunk to the level of mere unconscious existence. Host and parasite started alike.

And it is the same with parasitism in the social world. But what is parasitism? It is the living off the juices of another or others. Whoever gathers the proceeds of others' labor without giving the equivalent in the proceeds of his own labor is a parasite. Every millionaire rich-man, no matter how he came by his riches, is a parasite. He has sucked the life-blood of labor until he has become swollen to fatness. Every one that has gathered an undue proportion of the fruits of others' toil has come by it through parasitism. The speculative class are parasites on the bodies of the toilers. They are the barnacle crabs attached to the soft, hinder parts of a distant relative the working class and doing nothing, but absorb the juices of his host. This is literally true.

It is an awful thing to contemplate. Barnacles rule this "free government." All laws are made by them and the court decisions they dictate. The host, the working class, whose juices the speculators suck, are shamefully legislated against. A standing army is built up to coerce and shoot them down, if they wince under the bloodsucking. The barnacles are gods and lords. The victims sucked till their skins are empty and dry are a "dangerous class."

Would to God they were dangerous to the barnacle speculators! I would they might destroy and get free from the barnacle, bloodsucking, speculative class. How the barnacles are themselves enerVated; and, worse yet, they are destroying society itself. Why have

we saloons? Why have we houses of ill fame? They exist because of the barnacle speculators.

Says William D. Gunning, in his instructive book, "The Life History of Our Planet," from which I quoted in the beginning of this essay: "Man is poor. Let him toil and moil every day of his life and every toiling hour of the day still he is poor. If some higher intelligence could look in on the toiling millions of Massachusetts, grinding and spinning and weaving in the mills, boring and blasting and pounding in the quarries, in the sweat of their brows torturing the unwilling earth for its grain, in sweat and in grime torturing metals in the furnace, a cloud of sadness might pass over his brow as he thought that for all this toiling and moiling, after clothing their nakedness and feeding their hunger, there was left just three cents a day to each toiler. This is the average surplus earning in Massachusetts."

And yet Massachusetts is the most wealthy of all the American states. So the wealth of a nation is not the wealth of the toiling inany of that nation, but of the few barnacles-blood-sucked into their aborted bodies. Three cents a day the average gain of the toiler— nine dollars a year! How many years will it take him to become worth a million? Divide a million by nine, and we have one hundred and eleven thousand one hundred and eleven years, one month and ten days! Is it right that the few grasp all and the many nothing? Who are our great heroes, our noble men? The sons of toil. How seldom does the son of a millionaire distinguish himself by manly qualities? A Roosevelt in a thousand years!

Degeneration! Every speculator is a degenerate. A degenerate from what? Why, from the true standard of manhood.

Are we a Christian people? Is every rich man, every millionaire an Ananias? He is if he withhold the giving into the common treasury what Christ commanded him to give and what has been stolen from the public from the toilers who produce all the wealth. But how may this be returned to the people? How given back to the producers?

By a proper system of taxation, by the abrogation of special privileges and monopolies, by the destruction of all incorporate bodies except one, the state itself. Make all the benefits of machinery common. Let the individual own and possess exclusively only what by nature is his.

YE 133RD LESSON.

Capital Versus Labor.

A world-wide trust has been formed. It has in view the enrichment of the few and the enslavement of the many. It is the gold trust. "Profits of capital rise with the fall of wages, and fall with the rise of wages." That is the law. This trust we denomiate the "money power." Its head is the international banking trust, which comprehends all other trusts. It is the governing power the world over today-not less in America than elsewhere-England for instance. The welfare of the many is not had in view by any government. Only moneyed interests-only investments of capital is the end of all legislation. The Boers were conquered to give the British control of the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. For whose benefit? Not the common people's. Who whipped the Boers? Tommy Atkins. He suffered much.

Tommy, now the war is over, would be glad of employmentnot in handling the gun, but in handling the pick. He would come in numbers beyond the two hundred thousand that came to lay

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down their lives fighting the Boers, bringing with him his sweetheart as wife. He would light the home lamp and dig out of the ground the gold. But he could not be corralled in a compound. He could not be worked as a Cooley for a Cooley's wage. He would have a fair share of the output of the mines. So eighty thousand Chinamen have been contracted for in China and shipped into South Africa, when Tommy, having laid down his gun, would gladly do this work. Tommy must stay at home and walk the streets of London all the night long, having no place whereon to lay his head, and have free breakfast at the Salvation Army barracks, and, as for dinner and supper, he may go hungry. This will be the situation always, while big dividends from mining stocks are paid to Lombard street usurers; but these would not accrue under conditions of home building and fair wages to British workingmen. So Chinamen are shipped in and so England is preparing by means of greed-the greed of those who least need the gold-is preparing revolution.

It is Greed that has destroyed the ancient monetary system of Christendom and placed gold on the throne for the same end that Chinamen were brought to the Rand, viz: big dividends in Wall and Lombard streets. No patriotism, no humanity, no philanthropy, no Christianity-only greed. It will end in revolution. The gold trust

has made the other trusts inevitable. Greed has done its work. Rockefeller is the first and will prove to be the last American billionaire. Greed has ripened and borne its fruit. It is not good fruit. The tree will be hewn down and cast into the fire. The Chinaman will be shipped back to his native home in the Celestial kingdom to stay there. Tommy Atkins will return to South Africa-not to hunt with his gun for Boers, but to make farms and crush quartz rock. No dividends will accrue thereafter to Lombard street idlers. South Africa will have the benefit of the farms and of the minesnot the De Beers alone-not the few so-called "capitalists," but the many toilers. And the people of America will own the wealth of America. The wealth will be equitably "divided up." Yes, we will "divide up." Mr. Rockefeller and the millionaires will "take their medicine" and disgorge. Not just "the majority of the wealth will belong to the majority of the people;" but all of the wealth will belong to all of the people and never another millionaire cumber the ground, but all men and all women and all children will be well to do. This is the condition that immediately confronts the United States of America and the United States of the World. Tradition will be ruthlessly trampled under foot. "Behold I make all things new," God has said. The time is at hand for the inauguration of the "new heaven and the new earth." The "old heaven and the old earth have passed away" and there is "no more sea." God bless forever the good old Bible that inspires us with so much of hope and that has made our country what it is and preserved to us of antique thought the grandest of altruistic and moral ideals born of the aestheticism that produced works of unsurpassed beauty and perfection in art and literature-models for all time.

YE 134TH LESSON.

Patriotism Versus Speculation.

What is the duty of the individual regarding wealth? Each thinks that he has a perfect right to go along the path of custom. If he live in a land of slavery he may, like Washington, own slaves and get rich off their enforced toil. If he live in a land of speculative "business" he, as a Christian man, may take advantage of favorable conditions to become a millionaire. It matters not how many suffer want, he has a moral right to take advantage of the necessities of

others to employ them at starvation wages and pile up his profits off their labor.

It seems to me that the true man will "go mad," as did John Brown, and strive, by all means, to break down the existing order of things, as he tried to break down the wicked order of his day. We must not sit still and see injustice grind humanity to powder between the upper and the nether millstone of selfishness and greed. No matter if it is the custom, we must change custom and inaugurate fair play.

But we spent hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives to help the poor and oppressed of Cuba.

Well, why may we not do something for the millions of the poor of our own country? Why not Uncle Sam establish schools in the South to do away with the ignorance there of the blacks and the whites alike, as in Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines? Why not give employment, in peaceful pursuits, to all who want work and wages? We can pay men to shoot other men. Why not set them to work in the shops and on the farms as well? It has not been customary for governments to employ labor except in building forts or in shooting men. But may it not be proper to make it customary? May not governments employ men in pursuits of peace as well as of war?

The trouble is, there is a speculative class. That class is the devil of our civilization. It ought to be put down, wiped out, abolished, forever put an end to. That class is enriched by wars. The calamities of war ought to bring suffering and loss alike to all. It is this class that rules the state, and not the people rule who toil and fight. The many bleed and pay the taxes, while a few speculators get rich. So wars exist because they make speculators rich.

Who furnish the money to carry on war? The speculators say they do. How do they furnish it? Do they give it gratuitously? Miss Gould, a kind-hearted, patriotic American girl, gives $100,000. How much do the speculators of Wall street give? They do not give; they take. It is per cent that they are after. They buy bonds with currency-untaxable bonds that return interest. Then they expect to bank on the bonds-expect to get back in bank bills from government that prints and endorses them and accepts them in exchange for other bonds and for taxes as much as they give in currency for the bonds.

That is what the speculators do to "help carry on wars." They, in the end, get back ten dollars for one.

Perhaps the people will do a little honest thinking, when they see their sons slain in war, taxes increased, and millionaires become billionaires-bond owners growing fat and the people lean-they will ask whether the government may not be made to assure the "greatest good to the greatest number," as the fathers meant it should.

Shall the banks issue their notes for money, buy bonds with "currency;" that is to say, their own bank notes, and on the bonds issue other notes, buy with them other bonds and issue notes on them as before, and so on, increasing the interest-bearing debt as the banks increase their notes and profits? That is the way that wars are carried on by the help of Wall street.

What benefit to the country is the currency issued by the banks? None whatever. They only put it out on loans. Let the government ignore the banks and put out its own paper money, legal tender. Borrow not one cent of the banks. Greenbacks accepted by the producers are a loan without interest.

Why should our sons

Let property be no more sacred than life. die for their country, and the speculators grow rich "for the country?" Let property be squandered, as well as life. Can my boy's life. lost on the battlefield, be given back to him with interest at the end of the war?