The curse born of poverty is not confined to the poor alone; it runs through all classes, even to the very rich. They, too, suffer; they must suffer; for there cannot be suffering in a community from which any class can totally escape.

On the one side, the masses of the community are compelled to expend their mental powers in merely maintaining existence. On the other side, mental power is expended in keeping up and intensifying the system of inequality, in ostentation, luxury and warfare.

The higher the stage of social development, the more society resembles those higher organisms in which functions and powers are specialized, and each member is vitally dependent on the others.

Whatever degrades the laborer and robs him of the fruits of his toil stifles the spirit of invention and forbids the utilization of inventions and discoveries even when made.

We honor Liberty in name and in form. We set up her statues and sound her praises, But we have not fully trusted her. And with our growth so grow her demand. She will have no half service!

Political economy is the simplest of the sciences. It is but the intellectual recognition, as related to social life, of laws in which their moral aspect men instinctively recognize, and which are embodied in the simple teachings of Him whom the common people heard gladly.

The appointed condition of human progress is evidently that men shall come into closer relations and become more and more dependent upon each other.

The diffusion of intelligence tends to make men discontented with a life of poverty in the midst of wealth, and the diminution of intemperance better fits them to revolt against such a lot. Public schools and temperance societies are thus prerevolutionary agencies.

To make that a crime by statue which is no crime in morals, is inevitably to destroy respect for law; to resort to oaths to prevent men from doing what they feel injures no one, is to weaken the sanctity of oaths.

The ability of any industry to establish and sustain itself in a free field is the measure of its public utility, and that ''struggle for existence'' which drives out unprofitable industries is the best means of determining what industries are needed under existing conditions.

Nothing could better show the futility of attempting to make industries self-supporting by tariff than the confessed inability of the industries that we have so long encouraged to stand alone.

If on goods costing a dollar a manufacturer or merchant has paid fifty cents in taxation, he will now expect profit on a dollar and fifty cents instead of upon a dollar.

We have no right to assume that men would be as grasping and dishonest in a social state where the poorest could get an abundant living as they are in the present social state, where the fear of poverty begets insane greed.

There is no one who in exchanging his own productions for the productions of another would think that the more he gave and the less he got the better off he would be.

He who by any exertion of mind or body adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum of' human knowledge or gives to human life higher elevation or greater fullness- he is, in the large meaning of the words, a ''producer,'' a ''working-man,'' a ''laborer,''.

The only answer his philosophy can give- the only answer he can obtain from the political economy taught by the ''free-trade'' text-books- is that the bitter struggle for existence which crushes men into pauperism and starvation is the nature of things.

The burning of a city is indeed a lessening of the aggregate of wealth. But is the waste involved in the burning down of a city any more real than the waste involved in the standing idle of men who would gladly be at work in the building up of a city?

As even the man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with workmen who organize for a strike.

Whatever improves the condition of the lowest and broadest social stratum must promote the true interests of all. Where the wages of common labor are high and remunerative employment is easy to obtain, prosperity will be general.

It is often said by protectionists that free trade is right in theory but wrong in practice. Whatever may be meant by such phrases they involve a contradiction in terms, since a theory that will not agree with facts must be false.