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As a matter of fact, its starting point was the practical effort of British trade union leaders to organize the workingmen of the Continent and to prevent the importation of Continental strike-breakers. That Karl Marx wrote its Inaugural Address was merely incidental.
But in that year of grace, 1897, there had been so many demands made upon everybody, from the Saint William's Hospital for Trolley Victims, from the Mistletoe Inn, a club for workingmen which was in its initial stages and most worthily appealed to the public purse, and for the University Extension Society, whose ten-cent lectures were attended by the swellest people in Dumfries Corners and their daughters and so on that the collections of Saint George's had necessarily fallen off to such an extent that plumbers' bills were almost as much of a burden to the rector as the needs of missionaries in Borneo for dress-suits and golf-clubs.
The associations of workingmen were willing to put their money into buildings, machinery, and stock, and the men were ready to work hard themselves, but they were not willing to pay for skill in management, and so their failure was inevitable.
Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against professional Liberals like Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone in England, began to loosen the shackles that bound them to infamous conditions, and after the abrogation of laws that made any association of workingmen a penal offense, the labour unions began to ameliorate certain of the servile conditions under which for two generations the workman had suffered.
What the national work-shops were to the socialist workingmen, what the "Gardes mobiles" were to the bourgeois republicans, that was to Bonaparte the "Society of December 10," a force for partisan warfare peculiar to himself.
The third, the Pendleton Civil Service Act , was designed to secure appointment to public office on the ground of fitness, and not for political service. Corporations.% These measures were all good enough in their way; but they left untouched grievances which the workingmen and a great part of the people felt were unbearable.
I was literally fined $400 for attending that meeting. As my term of service drew to a close, the workingmen who had joined the church during my incumbency got together. They were in a majority. A church meeting was called, and a motion passed to call a council of the other churches.
You speak about all as of your friends; you grieve for all, and you rejoice for all!" "For all, mother dear, for all! The world is ours! The world is for the workers! For us there is no nation, no race. For us there are only comrades and foes. All the workingmen are our comrades; all the rich, all the authorities are our foes.
"Five men in this country control the chief interests of five hundred thousand workingmen, and can at any moment take the means of livelihood from two and a half millions of souls. These men compose the executive board of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor of America.
And then she added very sadly, gazing intently at me, "Your poor teacher is very ill." Sunday, 25th. As we had agreed, we all went together to the Theatre Vittorio Emanuele, to view the distribution of prizes to the workingmen.
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