Excerpt from The Relations Between Capital and Labor in the United States
Our government is made up of the people, by the people, and for the people. Whatever irritates and distracts any considerable number of its citizens comes close and quick in its sensitive pulsation to the heart and strength of our national life. With us government and people are synony mous terms. Like the brain and the body, they are bound together by innumerable and delicate nerves. Does the one suffer, then the pain is speedily communicated to every part of the body politic. We have no Strong, conservative and centralized force that stands apart by itself, governed by a special sovereignty, and controlled by a limited authority, in the maintenance of public peace and order. Do the people strike at the government and the civil rule, then they fall.
We have no soldiers enlisted in their defence but them; no coercive power for municipal order and national unity but what they voluntarily contribute. Do the people make the assault upon our institutions, then Caesar has fallen by the hand of his bosom-friend Brutus.
It would seem, then, that under such circumstances we must make some satisfactory solution of this difficult problem of capital and labor; that we must find some remedy for the disease, discover some palliative to sooth and allay its inflammation for, should it continue to increase in its maddened intensity and purpose, who will set the bounds to what it may destroy, who limit the extent of the upheaval and change it may produce, in the present social order and political system of the government of the United States?
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