Alexander Irvine, author and lecturer, speaking before the Brooklyn
Society for Ethical Culture, said in part:
Speaking for the mass of the laborers, the men and women of the
underworld, men and women not knowing or appreciating beauty
in any form, men who know only the whip and spur, I speak
feelingly, for I was one of them. I began work caring for the
horses of a rich man and I wondered then why a horse was of
more value than a man. I had then the ambition to have as good
a life as the horse. I quit and went to a coalpit and worked
for a shilling a day in merry England, and I saw there the same
disparity. I was a miner’s mucker, and the mules were better and
far more considered than the men. There was at the time a labor
leader trying to organize the men to work for better wages and
better hours. I tried to teach them the way to heaven. He was
doing the better work, as those workmen in the mines could not
have appreciated heaven.
In a lumber-camp I saw peonage at its worst. I was a peon
myself, under the whip and lash and the butt-end of the whip was
held in Wall Street, and the lash cut the backs of Anglo-Saxon
men. Could I find a magazine to print my story of what I saw? I
could not. The stocks of the magazine company were owned by the
capitalists.--Brooklyn _Standard Union_.
(1981)