Ionescu and Gellner - Populism, Its Meanings and National Characteristics [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

© 1969 by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

PART ONE I

NORTH AMERICA

9

Richard Hofstadter 2

LATIN AMERICA

Alistair Hennessy 3

RUSSIA

Andrzej Walicki 4

EASTERN EUROPE

97

Ghi!a Ionescu

5

AFR I CA

122

John Saul

PART TWO

6

POPULISM AS AN IDEOLOGY

r-v

Donald MacRae

7

A SYNDROME, NOT A DOCTRINE

1 53

166

Peter Wiles

8

THE SOCIAL ROOTS

180

Angus Stewart 9 SBN

297 17614 5

\ Printed and made in Great Britain by The Garden City Press Limited Letchworth, He11fordshire

POPUL ISM AS A POLITI CAL MOVEMENT

Kenneth MinogW! 10

THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM

Peter Worsley INDEX

1 97 212

CONTRIBUTORS

Professor Richard Hofstadter, Columbia University Alistair Hennessy, University of Warwick Dr Andrzje Walicki, Warsaw Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Ghita Ionescu, University of Manchester Dr John Saul, University College, Dar Es Salaam Professor Donald MacRae, London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Peter Wiles, London School of Economics and Political Science Angus Stewart, London School of Economics and Political Science Kenneth Minogue, London School of Economics and Political Science Professor Peter Worsley, University of Manchester

INTRODUCTION

A spectre is haunting the world - populism. A decade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question that was asked was - how many will go Communist? Today, this question, so plausible then, so·u~ds ·a little out of date. I11 as far as the rulers of new states embrace an ideology, it tends more often to have a populist character. And populism is not an outlook restricted to the new nations. In the Communist world, strong currents seem to 'move in· a populist direction. And in the anxious or agonizing re-examination which has gripped several developed liberal societies of late, populist them~s are prominent. There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear just what it is. As a doctrine or as a movement, it is elufilye and protean. It bobs up everywhere, but in many and contradictory shapes. Does it have any underlying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies? The present relevance of populism has also brought about a , revival of interest in some half-forgotten nineteenth-century currents which bore, or were given, the same name. Does the anger of American Middle Western farmers against urban lawyers, the droolings of Tolstoy over muzhiks, the rationalizations of East European resentments against alien traders, and the slogans in terms of which rulers of new nations legitimate themselves and subvert liberal institutions - do all these have a common intellectual source, and are they parts of one phenomenon? Is there one phenomenon corresponding to this one name? The present book is a determined attempt to answer this question, to give a clear outline to this elusive yet insistent spectre. It is the work of a set of scholars whose joint competence covers the highly diverse areas which have been haunted by populism. But I

POPULISM - ITS NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

INTRODUCTION

the book is not a mere addition of disjoined researches. The various contributors cover both the diverse geographical regions, and the various analyti~ally distinguishable aspects of populism. Above all, their contributions dovetail with each other (without necessarily agreeing - there has been no attempt to impose unity of vision), in as far as each author wrote with full knowledge of the contributions of the others. Each saw the early drafts of the other essays. Thus, though of course each author is responsible for his own views only, the final versions are co-operative in the sense that they were written or re-written in the light of the others. Besides, their common original purpose was to 'define' populism. A discussion was held at the London School of Economics on 19-21 May 1967.* The fact that it brought together so many of the expertst in 'populism' with the object of attempting 'to define'

it is in itself significant. The expression is used in English, Spanish (populismo) and, to a lesser degree in French (populisme), and with the implication that the word means the same as the Russian Narodnichestvo. (But Peter Worsley rightly remarks in his contribution to this book that: 'the translation of the Russian Narodnichestvo has been rendered as populist, but this very act of translation is itself an imputation, not a "neutral" simple;equivalence, which translation can never be, since it has to use categories available in language.') But its use both as a noun and as an adjective has spread, and is spreading, increasingly. It n9w-1inks such st~~ge bed-feUows as ~ng_lib_erals who call themselves 'populists' and so!Ile die-hard socialist:lu¥ho claim to have 'populist tt:aditiol}§'. Some political scientists think that Maoism is a form of populism and Nazism another form. And some historians of ideas see it run like a distinct red thread from Chernishevsky to Frantz Fanon and Marcuse. Indeed, one of the reasons why it is very important to find out more about the expression and the concept is that so many people are inclined to think that movements 'left-of-Soviet-communism' such as Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism, Castroism and the current ideology of the students' movements are the strident reincarnations of populism in the second half of the twentieth century and that indeed for the first time in history a 'populist international' could be conjured up. There are perhaps six principal questions on which to base an assessment of whether populism is a unitary concept, regardless of the variety of its incarnations, or whether it is simply a word wrongly used in completely heterogeneous contexts. One question is whether populism was primarily an ideology (or ideologies) \ or a movement (or movements) or both. Perhaps, and this is the second issue, populism was a sort of recurring_m.entalit~ appearing ~ diff~ pistoncal and geog~phic coi:texts as the result of a special social situation faced by societies in which,_as...~ French sociologist, Alain Touraine,°described it, the middle social factors were either missing or too weak. Thirdly, populism can be defined rin terms of political psychology. The element of political persecu\ tion mania was more acute in its political psychology. It was imbued with the feeling that identifiable or unidentifiable conspiracies were at work, deliberately and tenaciously, against the people. The basic attitude was one of apprehension towards

• It had been organized by Government and Opposition, a quarterly of comparative politics, at the time published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, with the help also of the Humanitarian Trust, London. The verbatim report of the conference can be consulted at the Library, London School of Economics and Political Science. A 2recis of the discussion was published in Gover1Jrnent and OpjJosiflion, -Spring 19tJ8. t The full list of participantswas as follows: J. Allcock (Bradford), Prof. S. L. Andreski (Reading), Sir Isaiah Berlin (Oxford, chairman of session), Dr Conrad Brandt (Oxford), Dr Peter Calvert (Southampton), Nigel Clive (Foreign Office), Maurice Cranston (LSE), F.W.Deakin (Oxford, chairman of session), Prof.RP.Dore (LS E), Geoffrey Engholm (Sussex), E. Gallo (Oxford), Prof. Ernest Ge liner (LSE, chairman of session), Prof. Julius Gould (Nottingham), George Hall (Foreign Office), C.A.M.Hennessy (Warwick), Prof. Richard Hofstadter (Columbia), Ghita Ionescu (LS E, rapporteur), J amesJoll (Oxford), Ellen de Kadt (LSE),,Emmanuel de Kadt (LSE), Dr Werner Klatt, Dr John Keep (School of Slavonic and East European Studies), Francis Lambert (Institute of Latin American Studies), Dr E. Lampert (Keele), Shirley Letwin, Dr L.J.Macfarlane (Oxford), Prof. Donald MacRae (LSE, chairman of session), Dr I. de Mada.riaga (Sussex), Prof.G.F. Mancini (Bologna), Kenneth Minogue (LSE), Prof.W.H.Morris-Jones (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), Dr John Saul (Dar-es-Salaam), Prof. Leonard Schapiro (LSE, chairman of session), Prof. Hugh SetonWatson (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, chairman of session), T. Shanin (Sheffield), Geoffrey Shillinglaw (School of Oriental and African Studies), Dr Zoltan Szabo, Prof. Alain Touraine (Paris), Prof. F. Venturi (Turin), Dr Andrzej Walicki (Warsaw), Derek WaHer (School of Oriental and African Studies), Prof. Peter Wiles (LSE), Prof. Peter Worsley (Manchester, chairman of session). 2

..

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3

POP ULISM - ITS NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

I N TRODU C TION

unknown outside forces : colonial oppression, people living in towns with international roots or ~amifications, bankers, international capitalists, etc. As such populism could be characterized by a peculiar negativism - it was anti: anti-capitalistic, anti-urban, as well as xenophobic and anti-semitic. In contrast, and this was the fifth point, populism worshipped the people. But the people the populists worshipped were the meek and the miserable, and the populists worshipped them because they were miserable and because they were persecuted by the conspirators. The fact is that the people were more often than not identified in the peasants who were and are, in underdeveloped societies especially, the most miserable of the lot - and the more miserable they were the more worshipped should they be. Finally, until now this recurring mentality usually disappeared in history by absorption into stronger ideologies or movements. There were three ways in which this happened. One led to socialism. One led to nationalism. And, as for instance in Eastern Europe before and after the First World War, one led to peasantism. The present book attempts to throw open to the public the discussion until now held only in intellectual conclaves; and with due modesty, it hopes to encourage an inquiry into this elusive concept and its many meanings which deserves to be continued in many other individual or collective volumes. The material assembled in its pages is in the majority based on the papers initially presented at the 1967 conference. The studies by C. A. M. Hennessy, G . Ionescu and Peter Wiles were added in order to complete, as much as possible, the examination of the subject. Even so though the field has by no means been fully covered and the editors would like to express their regret that, in spite of their efforts to reorganize and complete the original material, the book does not contain studies on Asian or Canadian populisms. The examination of 'the meanings of populism' was divided into two major headings. The first part groups the different historicogeographical examples: Russian populism of the nineteenth century, American populism of the nineteenth century,, Eastern European populism and peasantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Latin American populism and African populism of the tweQtieth century. The second part examines the conceptual meanings of populism: populism as an ideology, populism as a political movement, the social roots of populism, the

economic aspects of populism and an overall view of the concept of populism. The present book thus is the first organized attempt to clarify the main aspects of a concept which during the nineteenth century and even more in the twentieth century has been more fundamental to the shaping of the political mind than is generally acknowledged.

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G.I. E.G.

I.

PART ONE

1 b

CHAPTER ONE

NORT H AMERICA Richard Hofstadter

.I .

The character of American populism derives in great part from the American tradition of entrepreneurial radicalism. Elsewhere, populism rested upon the role of the peasantry, but unless one identifies a peasantry simply with rural poverty, the United States has not had a peasant class; neither, despite the limited stratum of large landowners and slave owners in the South, has it had a class of rural grandees, an aristocracy with clerical and military connections and conservative traditions. ~ What the United States has had, in place of a peasantry, is a 'J class of cash-conscious commercial farmers, producing staples both for the domestic and the world market and linked to the bustling, competitive petty-capitalist life of the expanding small towns of the American interior. Alongside the farmers, because of the open character of the society, there has been the constant thrust of 'new men' - ambitious entrepreneurs, often recruited from the farms, trying to break into established lines of enterprise and into the upper echelons of the political or social world. In the absence also of a powerful tradition of labour radicalism and of strong socialist parties, American radicalism has drawn a large part of its strength from heretical businessmen, village entrepreneurs, and the petty capitalists of the small towns. This tradition was entrepreneurial in the sense that it accepted the basic principles underlying private capitalism, and tended to argue that its specific programmatic proposals would in fact strengthen the capitalist order by broadening opportunities and giving the common man access to positions of profit and power. But it was also unless we set too stringent demands upon the term - radical in its 9 2- P

NORTH AMERICA

POPULISM - ITS NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

continuing assertion of the claims of democracy and egalitarianism, in its broad humanitarian sympathies, in its sharp criticisms, sometimes merely rhetorical but at other times observant and telling, of the practices of vested interests and 'monopolies', and in giving voic~ to persistent American suspicions of concentrated power. American radicalism was inevitably shaped by the conditions of rural life. At the time of the Constitution, the nation was about ninety per cent agricultural, and its predominant intellectual forms were established in rustic conditions. Not until nearly the end of the nineteenth century did the portion of the population employed in industry match that of the farmers, and it was not until the twentieth that the urban population exceeded the rural. America presented an economy rich in land and natural resources, but short of labour and capital. Under these conditions, there was a great premium on capital-intensive agriculture - that is, agricultural practices designed, through the use of machinery, to compensate for the scarcity of labour by taking advantage of extensive and relatively cheap land. The pressure for capital, both to acquire ~ machinery for cultivation and to engross as much land as \ possible for speculative purposes, was always high. From its early beginnings, the American economy was always afflicted by an insatiable demand for money and credit, and it became the classic land of homespun and original monetary theorists. It is important to be aware, as American historians have not always been, that this demand did not exist solely among the rural classes or among poverty-stricken debtors. Even in the colonial period, for example, the influential spokesmen for paper money were not rural scribblers or demagogues but public officials, leading ministers and other , professionals, and prominent businessmen. In fact, several of the American colonies, and the new states in the years just after 1776, had made ingenious and successful experiments with paper-money issues, in which the expansion of the currency was carefully geared to landed security. 1 Oddly enough, alongside this avant-garde finance, there grew up in some agrarian circles a contradictory fear, an almost primitive fear, of banks, of paper money - of everything that Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian contemporaries called 'the paper system'. ~ T rue wealth, the primitive agrarians believed, came from land I and labour. An overbuilt apparatus of commerce and banking, an excessive rate of public spending, a large public debt with the 10

consequent heavy taxation, could only be means by which an insatiable 'paper aristocracy' would exploit the honest farmer or planter. This ·duality in economic philosophy, which is apparent in the era of the Revolution and the Constitution, continued thr~ugh the J acksonian period. J acksonian thought was divided between those who continued in the old hard-money, anti-bank ways, and those who were more interested. in getting access to government funds and putting them to use in exploiting the great American bonanza. This cleavage in thought was paralleled by a cleavage in expressed values and in economic policy. As to·values, Jacksonian democracy is marked by two conspicuous themes that seem quite at odds with each other: the first is the persistent clamour of new enterprisers for greater opportunities, the cry against monopoly and aristocracy; the demand to give the commoners better and ·more even access to the big prizes in business, politics, and the professions. In it one can see the old American urge to get ahead, the passion for advancement, The second theme is what Marvin J Meyers has called restorationism. 2 It hearkens back to the simplicity, the civic dedication, the nobility, the limited material aspirations.and high moral tone that were deemed to be characteristic of the old republic. In it the Cincinnatus-ideal, so integral in the public reputation of George Washington, is invoked once again. And restorationists were deeply concerned that the aggressive materialism of the country, its insatiable quest for opportunities and profits, for offices and emoluments, would lead not only to wealth and luxury but to decadence. Even in the 1830s, then, the young republic showed a distinct strain of nostalgia and a distinct sense of uneasiness with itself. These differences in expressed values were reflected in Jacksonian policy. On one hand, the general passion against monopoly and aristocracy was mobilized against the Bank of the United States. Jackson's veto of the bill to recharter the Bank ensured its downfall. His removal of the government's deposits from its control at first intensified the inflationary effect of the assault upon central banking. By putting the government funds at the disposal of state banks whose directors often incautiously geared them to the hectic land speculation of the time, the J acksonians set off a brief speculative spree. When it seemed to be gaining too much momentum, they shrank from what they had done, clamped down

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POPULISM - ITS NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

on the use of credit in land 'sales, and thus intensified the economic reaction that was bound to come. Their inconsistency in policy was, no doubt, attributable to several things - not.least to their attempt to represent social interests that were to some degree incompatible and to their views of money and banking - but it reflected in good part their deep uncertainty as to what they stood for. Was it hard money and the old simplicities? Or was it open opportunities, brisk competition, speculation, slick dealings, and the main chance? The debt of later populism to the Jacksonian heritage is considerable. Leaders of the Populist Party of the nineties were very often men of strikingly advanced age for reformers, born in the J acksonian era and thoroughly familiar with its slogans. The old ' J acksonian cry: 'Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None', served them as it had served their predecessors. The same concern with opportunity as against monopoly, the same fear of the regulation of financial affairs from a single, presumably sinister centre, underlay both movements. Senator Benton's 'Monster' - the Bank - was replaced by Wall Street, Lombard Street, and the House of Rothschild. The political principles of Jefferson and Jackson, , argued General James B. Weaver, the Populist presidential candidate of 1892, were still in vital respects applicable.

NORTH AMERICA

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The rugged utterances of these statesmen ring out today like a startling impeachment of our time.... There is enough in them to completely transform and re-invigorate our present suppliant and helpless state of public opinion. Those declarntions were uttered in the purer days of the republic and before the various departments of Government had seriously felt the baleful and seductive influence of corporate wealth and power.3 'The old hero,' he said of Jackson, 'understood that a Democratic government had no use for an aristocratic or monarchical system of finance.' 4 The development of American agriculture in the decades after the Civil War superimposed upon this Jacksonian heritage staggering problems and grievances. The American commercial farmer, his production organized in a multitude of small units operating with fixed costs, selling in an increasingly competitive world market, and victimized by tariff and taxation policies, was fighting a losing battle. It was his exports that largely paid for the imported 12

capital needed to finance American industry and his labour that produced, at lower and lower prices, the food that nourished the industrial labour supply, but as time we~t on he saw that he was not profiting in proportion to the nation's growth. An important element here is the sheer magnitude of the growth of the agricultural sector of the economy, especially i~ the West. Between 1860 and 1900 the number of farms increased from 2·0 million to 5 ·7 million, the land in farms from 407 million to 838 million acres. The use of machinery made farming more difficult to finance, and increased its productivity. By 1900 the farmer was eighty-six per cent more efficient than he had been in 1870. At the same time the international revolution in communications, marked especially by more rapid steam transportation, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the proliferation of the railroads in the American West, drew the farmer into an increasingly glutted and competitive international market, where he had to compete, behind the handicap of the tariff, with the food of Argentina, Canada, and Australia, where new areas of land were rapidly being settled, and with the cotton of India and Egypt. Prices moved quite steadily downward, and then fell drastically in the depression of 1893. Farmers in basic staples, who were in no position to meet their situation either by cutting back their production or by more efficient marketing, found themselves with larger and larger crops on their hands, sold at lower and lower prices. From 1870 to 1895 corn production grew from: 1·1 mi-llion bushels to 2·5 million, wheat from 2·5 million bushels to 5·4 million, cotton from 4 ·3 million bales to 7 ·1 million. But in the same years the price of corn fell from 52 cents a bushel to 25 cents, wheat from $1 ·04 per bushel to 50 cents, cotton from 12·1 cents to 7·6 cents a pound. The years from 1873 also marked the d~astic fall in the price of silver, as successive demonetizations of the metal by various nations of the western world coincided with a great increase in its production. Western silver mine owners could look with sympathy upon the plight of the farmers, but they could also see in them the mass basis of an infl.ationist bloc, ready to convert the old fiat money infl.ationism into silver inflationism and to go forth in a common battle for monetary inflation as a·remedy for the depression. The strength of the silver forces was increased in 1889-90 when six new states of the V·lest with strong mining interests were admitted to the union. Infl.ationists could now look forward to a

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POPUL I SM - ITS NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

NORTH AMERICA

strong silver bloc in Congress. Moreover, the silver miners brought to the populist movement something it needed very badly - a source of funds. Radical farmers were generous with their enthusiasm, but they had little money to give, and the movement had to work with pathetically insufficient funds. But in return for their contributions the silver interests exacted their own price. They were not much interested in the more radical proposals of populism like the public ownership of means of communication - and they were concerned to use what leverage their dollars gave them to get the movement to concentrate more single-mindedly on the silver issue. To this end they did what they could to make silver inflationism the dominant aim of the populist following, and in this they had the assistance of a number of homespun pamphleteers, bred in the old traditions of monetary panaceas. Among these, the most important was W. H .('Coin') Harvey, whose Coin's Financial School became the great document of the populist movement. 5

accompanied by the cash-hungry farmer eager to win his place in the markets of the nation and the world, and it is also true that after 1815, with tl1e rapid development of the vast American hinterland and the rapid improvement of transportation facilities, the yeoman farmer receded into the by-ways of rural America and the commercial farmer was subject to all the vicissitudes of the climate and the economy, and he was frequently the victim of men with more power and fewer scruples - land grabbers, railroad tycoons, credit merchants, bankers, middlemen. The farmer himself also become deeply involved in the commercial ethos of the American system, to which he belonged. He was a businessman as well as a cultivator of the soil. He succumbed repeatedly to the temptation not merely to raise and sell crops but to profit from the one aspect of his situation that promised big and quick gains - from land speculation. The dynamics of the economy pushed him into relatively large-scale enterprise for a family unit. It entrapped him with machinery and debts. And often he saw speculative gain as the one way to recoup on his hard labours and his big risks. In good times, with skilful management and a bit of luck, he might do well. But the periodic flip-flops of the economy frequently caught him out. In the long run, he was playing a losing game: he had little to sustain him through even a short-run disaster - a crop failure, a drought, the weevil, the locust, a damaging storm. Against a major social disaster even the most provident farmer had no security. And two such major disasters afflicted him after 1860. The first was the Civil War, which, it is true, provided a tremendous stimulus to the Northern farmer but which broke the social system of the South and left its farmers in bondage to the one-crop system, voracious short-term credit and the caprices of the international market. The second disaster was the great international price depression of the last third of the nineteenth century. By the end of the Civil War, the old agrarian hard-money view had disappeared, though it had left an inheritance in the form of a rather categorical suspicion of banks and bankers. Civil War conditions had taught the farmers and many of the businessmen of the Middle West to associate prosperity with high prices. The long deflationary freeze of the 1870s, .'8os and '90s confirmed this view. The history of the populistic mind as it expressed itself during these years is increasingly the history of a concern with the monetary system, though there are also other

2

Many of the qualities of populi'st thought stem from the dual character of the American farmer. In the old ideal, shaped by the pastoral poets and infused with a warm glow by Jeffersonian writers, the farmer was the independent yeoman: a hardy pioneer, a good citizen, close to the soil, energetic, hardworking, devoted to the family that worked with him, simple, reliable, and honest. He cared little for money, but was interested in farming primarily as a way of life. His farm was his home, and if he lost one, he lost the other. In common with other men who did manual labour, he was a victim of exploitation by special interests : he carried an undue share of the tax burden; he paid too much for freight and for credit; he had a hard time claiming his share of the land, as against the big land speculators and the railroads. T o the agrarian theorists there was bound to be something wrong with any social system in which agriculture did not get its full share: Whenever, in a populous Nation, agricultural pursuits become of secondary importance as a means of acquiring wealth, it may be set down as ce1tain that the callings which have risen above it are operating under some artificial stimulus which is abnormal and unjust.6

I

On every count this image of the farmer had solid reality behind it. It is true, however, that the self-sufficient yeoman was always 14

NORT H AMERICA

POPULISM - ITS NATIONAL c'HARACTER TST I CS

concerns' of considerable importance centering on the control of the railroads and the disposition of the public lands. The Greenback movement o{ the late 1860s and early 1870s, inspired in part by the recollection of the prosperity that had come with high wartime prices, concentrated on currency issues. The Granger movement of the 1870s and 1880s was more centrally concerned with the regulation of the railroads by state legislatures. The platform of the People's (Populist) Party of 1892 embodied a broad programme of propqsals for currency, credit (an endorsement of the sub-treasury scheme), income tax, government ownership of railroads, and the reclamation of excess lands owned by railroads and other private corporations and of all lands owned by aliens. These measures were supplemented by political reforms, among them the demand for the initiative and referendum and the popular election of senators - demands that were to be echoed in the Progressive movement. Dut in 1892 the Populists learned that the currency issue - notably the demand for free silver - had deeper resonances in the public mind than any other; and by 1896, when the depression had struck and the currency issue had grown still more salient, the demand for free coinage of silver, to the despair of left-wing Populists like H enry Demarest Lloyd, overshadowed everything else and paved the way for the nomination of William Jennings Bryan by the People's Party. The most popular book produced by the Populist movement was not a work of general social theory, nor even a programmatic tract analysing the full range of proposals that had been advanced to remedy the ills of the people, but 'Coin' Harvey's popular treatise on the money question, Coin's Financial School. In this single-minded work all the social evils that affiicted the United States were traced to the international conspiracy that was held to have resulted in the demonetization of silver in 1873, and it was implied that the free coinage of silver by the United States at the old ratio of sixteen to one would by itself be sufficient to remedy the situation. In response to the oppressions and hardships brought about by the great international deflation of the late nineteenth century, populist thinkers evolved their own conception of the world. Quite understandably, they thought that the state of America had deteriorated lamentably since the days before the war. i

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Thirty years ago, [wrote th'e Kansas Populist Mrs Sarah E. V.Emery in 1892] the American laborer was a prospective lord. He saw within

his reach a home of plenty for his family, and an old age of comfort for himself. The bright picture before him inspired industry, e!=Onomy and sobriety, and the laborer was a peaceful, sober, respected citizen.... Dut today what is the outlook for the wage-worker of this country? He sees before him only toil, unremitting, half-requited toil; hope dies out in his bosom, despondency takes pos~ssipn,of: his heart; and unless sustained by a strong faith and a gia!)lt'will he brtak'~ ,neath the weight of oppression, seeks relief in a sui~'cl