ambition, and his ability to rid himself of certain crudities not only of expression, but of thought. All the stories deal with a kind of Western life that is altogether new to literature; not the Pike County civilization of John Hay's ballads, nor the picturesque barbarism of Bret Harte's mining country, but the hard, prosaic, and angular life of villages on Western lakes and rivers; life that has grown up within moral and social lines as rigid and ungraceful as "fever an' ager" ever made the gaunt contours of those who live it. The types of character that Mr. Habberton chooses to treat cannot be overlaid with sentimentalism; and the one fact would show his art to be beyond the common, that he has kept them from being only repellent and useless studies of pure harshness, for which their mere fidelity to nature could hardly be a sufficient raison d'être. In spite of all their utter want of picturesqueness, and in spite, too, of the rather stiff didactic purpose which is almost naïvely stated as the motive for his giving us their story, he has made his people very human, and his local coloring so nearly perfect as to show a power he ought not to neglect. We have not space to go into the detail of the stories. By far the best of them, " The Jericho Road," is concerned with the problem of what may happen to the weak member of a rude society when, as Mr. Habberton puts it in his preface, the Good Samaritan does not come along. "The Barton Experiment" is the history of a "Temperance Reform " in Barton Village, wherein the reformers' eyes were opened to certain practical aspects of the matter of intemperance and the community's business with the drunkard, which had hitherto escaped them, as they have escaped the eyes of other and more cultured classes. "The Scripture Club of Valley Rest" pleases us least of all the three, not because in its history of the shades of opinion, the difficulties and the types of character appearing in the Bible-class of a village church, it approaches more closely to a purely didactic book than even either of the others; but because its figures are so much more crudely drawn, and show so much less invention and spirit than the two earlier stories lead us to expect. - Mr. Habberton is entering upon his work as heavily handicapped as a new author can be, weighted with a meaningless success, and with the constant temptation to do hurried work because he knows a similar success awaits whatever he may publish. But in the "Jericho Road" and the "Barton Experiment" there is distinct evidence of a talent which should in time give better results than these two trifles. The books whose titles end our somewhat random list may be described without injustice in the compass of a paragraph. "Nimport" is clearly the production of a writer who has his hardest lesson yet to learn in the subordination of his own somewhat obtrusive cleverness, before the few uneven merits of his work can bear a large proportion to its great defects. To write a volume with so obvious an effort to say telling things, and not to say any, would be beyond the power of any person moderately equipped with wit and general reading; so that "Nimport" is not altogether without its epigrams and touches of good characterization. Yet, as a whole, it cannot but be rated wearisome; and the bad habit of a leading person of the story, in communicating her adventures in letters of that odious kind written to be read aloud amid the hearers' praises of their "cleverness," can only be a warning to many wise novel-readers that the book is to be shunned. Gail Hamilton's "First Love is Best" is simpler in its style and altogether better than what might perhaps be looked for by habitual readers of its author's works; and yet it fully justifies her long apology for entering upon the novelist's domain. What is good in this story would have been still better said in the essay form in which she has already written somewhat overwritten, possibly. And what is otherwise than good might thus have passed unnoticed, being of that peculiar sort of commonplace which never strikes one as particularly stupid till put into the mouths of characters in fiction. ART. VII. "FAIR WAGES." THE newspapers have fallen into line to defend the railway companies, who thus have brought all the great guns of public opinion to bear on one side of the fight, so the strikers have got the worst of it before the community. We have been so handled that if a workingman stands out to speak his mind, the public have theirs so full of pictures of him and his doings in the illustrated papers, that he is listened to as if he was a convicted rough pleading in mitigation of penalty, instead of an honest and sincere man asking for a fair show. I would not have any one mistake what my principles are and have been. I don't envy any man his wealth, whether it is ill-gotten or not. I am a workingman, therefore an honest one, and would refuse a dollar I did not earn, for I am neither a beggar to accept charity nor a thief to take what belongs to another, however he came by it. If it be his according to law, I, for one, am ready to protect him in his legal rights, and in return I want to be protected in what I believe to be mine. Forty years ago my father came over to this country from Sweden. He had a small business and a large family. In Europe business does not grow as fast as children come, and poverty over there is an inheritance. He heard that North America was peopled and governed by workingmen, and the care of the States was mainly engaged in the welfare and prosperity of labor. That moved him, and so I came to be born here. He, and millions like him, made this country their home, and their homes have mainly made this country what it is. Until lately the States kept their faith and promise to the people, and we, the people, showed ours when trouble came; an assessment of blood was made on our shares of liberty, and we paid it. That is our record. We did not fight for this party or that party, but for the country and against all that were against the United States. I am no politician, caring little whether one party or another holds the fort at Washington. My father, who, like me, was a workingman, used to say a country fared best where a strong and sound opposition party kept justice awake and made power behave. So it was before the war, but since then, it seems to me, the power has got fixed so long in one set of hands that things are settling down into a condition like what my father left behind him in Europe forty years ago, and what stands there still. I mean the slavery of labor. The landed aristocracy over there made the feudal system, just as the moneyed men of this continent are now making a ruling class. As the aristocracy used to make war on each other, so in our time the millionnaires live on each other's ruin. As the feudal lords hired mercenary soldiers to garrison their strongholds and to prey on the common people, so the railway lords and stock-exchange barons hire a mercenary press to defend their power, the object of both being the same: the spoils of labor. It looks very like as though this country was settling down into the form and system we fled from in Europe. The rights and value of labor were acknowledged here forty years ago because the country wanted hands. Now we have made it rich, it turns our own earnings against us, and its prosperity becomes our disaster. We are told to look at Europe and perceive that this condition of affairs is the inevitable result of growth, of population, of wealth; but we look over there, and find that discontent, rebellion, and war are also the inevitable results, and it was to avoid such results these States declared themselves free, that Americans should have a government that was not a conspiracy. That government has been regarded by the laboring classes of Europe and by our people as the stronghold of the workingman, and in this our present difficulty we are referred to its Constitution which should afford us a remedy for our grievances, the ballot-box is the panacea for all and every complaint. It is not so; and those who point to the remedy know it to be a sham, they know they can buy idlers and vagabonds enough to swell the ranks of wealth and run up a majority whenever a show of hands is required. They recruit the very men that wrecked Pittsburgh, and would pillage New York if they dared to face us, the workingmen, that fill the ranks of the militia. We are sick of this game, we are soul-weary of looking around for some sympathy or spirit of justice, and, finding none, we turn to each other and form brotherhoods and unions, depots of the army of labor, officered by the skilled mechanic. This organized force is now in process of formation, and prepared to meet the great questions of the age: Has labor any rights? If so, what are they? Our claim is simple. We demand fair wages. We say that the man able and willing to work, and for whom there is work to do, is entitled to wages sufficient to provide him with enough food, shelter, and clothing to sustain and preserve his health and strength. We contend that the employer has no right to speculate on starvation when he reduces wages below a living figure, saying, if we refuse that remuneration, there are plenty of starving men out of work that will gladly accept half a loaf instead of no bread. we do We contend that to regard the laboring class in this manner is to consider them as the captain of a slave-ship regards his cargo, who throws overboard those unable to stand their sufferings. Let those who knew the South before the war go now amongst the mining districts of Pennsylvania, and compare the home of the white laborer with the quarters of the slave; let them compare the fruits of freedom with the produce of slavery! But we know the question is a difficult one to settle, not want to force it on with threats. The late strike was not intended to break out as it did; things broke loose and took a direction we regretted. We find ourselves answerable for results we had no share in or control over. Nevertheless we accept the event as a symptom of the disorder that is consuming our body and pray the country to look to it, it is not a passing complaint. Let me put this matter in a plain way, as we understand it, and use round numbers instead of fractions, as we have to deal with hundreds of millions, - dividing the subject into sections. 1. In the United States the amount of capital invested in railway property last year was $4,470,000,000, made up of $2,250,000,000 capital stock and $2,220,000,000 bonded debt. The gross earnings were $500,000,000, or about eight and a half per cent on the capital. The running expenses (of which the bulk was for labor) were $310,000,000, leaving $185,000,000 as interest to the capitalist, or barely four per cent on his investment. Labor is admitted into this enterprise as a preferential creditor, to be paid out of gross earnings before the most preferred mortgagee or bond holder receives a dollar. For as capital could not build |