Go to Grosscup's for Oysters and Confectionery.
THE WEEKLY UNIVERSITY COURIER.
THE LARGEST COLLEGE JOURNAL CIRCULATION IN THE UNITED STATES.
Published Every Friday Morning by the
COURIER COMPANY,
For Kansas University Students.
DENTON DUNN, President. | R. J. CURDY, Secretary
EDITORIAL STAFF:
CYRUS CRANE, Editor-in-Chief.
F. G. CROWEL, JEAN ANDERSON,
F. G. ENFIELD, JEAN ANDERSON,
F. G. KENY, W. A. WHITE,
A. G. CUNKLE, BILLA ROFES.
AGNES WRIGHT.
BUSINESS MANAGERS:
DENTON HOGER00M | EARLE L SWOPE.
Entered at the post-office at Lawrence, Kansas as second-class matter.
University Directory.
University Directory.
PHI MAE DELTA—Meets Saturday nights, No. 715 Mass, St., 3d floor.
PHI KAPPA PSI—Meets Saturday nights, 3d floor opera house block.
PHI DELTA THEA—Meets Saturday nights, A. O. U.W.Hall.
SIGMA HAI—Meets Saturday nights, 2d floor Opera House block.
BETA THETA PI—Meets Saturday nights, 4th floor Opera House block.
SIGMA NU—Meets Saturday nights, I. O. O.F block.
KAPPA ALPHA THEA—Meets Saturday afternoons, No. 715 Mass, St., 3d floor.
I.C.—Meets Saturday afternoons at homes of members.
KAPPA KAPPA GAMMA—Meets Saturday afternoons at homes of members.
OREAD LITERARY SOCIETY—Meets Friday afternoon in its hall, University building, south wing, 3d floor. Pres., Denton Dunn; sec'y Ella Ropes.
OROPHILIAN LITERARY SOCIETY—Meets Friday afternoon in its hall, University building, north wing, 3d floor. Pres., A. L. Wilmoth; sec'y Laun a Arnett.
SCIENCE CLUB—Meets Friday afternoons, in chemistry lecture room. Pres. R. L. McAlpine; sec'y V. L. Kellogg.
PHARMACETRIC SOCIETY—Meets Thursdays at 3 p.m in Prof. Sayre's lecture room. W, H. McBrice; president. A. M. Rice; sec'y
KENT CLUB, of Law Students—Meets Friday nights in Court House. Pres., J. W. Roberts; sec'y A. Overton.
PHILOLOGY—Meets second Friday of the month in Greek lecture room, University building. Pres., Prof. Robinson; sec'y Prof. Wilcox.
MOOT SENATE—Meets in Orophilian hall every Saturday afternoon. President, John Mushrush; clerk, L. A. Baldwin.
ORATORICAL ASSOCIATION—Pres., E. G. Blair; sec'y A. L. Wilmoth; Board of Directors, Frank Crowell, Denton V., G. Kellogg.
COLLEGE BRANCH Y. M. C.A.-Pres., F. J. Gardner; sec'y L. T. Smith; meets every Friday night in city association.
COLLEGE BRANCH Y. W. C.A., meets Sunday afternoons at homes of members.
COURIEI Company—Pres., L. A. Gilbert; sec'y Miss Emma Hynes.
KEVIEW Company—Pres., S. W. Shattuck.
JASEBALL Association—Sec'y F. E.Nal.
LAST year P. L. Soper, of the class of '81, suggested that on Wednesday evening of Commencement week a grand ball be given to which all students and alumni be invited. Mr. Soper thought that the plan would meet with favor among the alumni and would induce many of them to make their alma mater a visit. The students yearly ball at Madison draws more alumni than even the Commencement exercises. We think that it would work well here if rightly managed. Let us have your opinion.
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LABOR AND LOVE
Contest oration, by Henry B. Hamilton, delivered at Ottawa, Kansas, January 11th.
LABOR AND LOVE.
By the doctrinaires of social science, personal liberty is decreed free scope. Superior strength turned loose in the industrial community, where force, accident and individual freedom are left to regulate themselves, rears a new despotism crowned with the specious name of private enterprise. This enterprise proceeds from the same spirit that led Napoleon to gather the liberties of France within himself, and create an imperial force "that covered Europe with blood and tears." Democracy in civil affairs, Oligarchy in industrial affairs, is the anomaly of our present national life.
The question arises, has genius vainly wrought, and are mechanical inventions the "iron devils" which crush labor's hopes and rob labor's chances? John Jtuart Mill sadly asks, why no day's toil for any human being has been lightened. With progress, human wants have multiplied, human needs have multiplied, inventions have multiplied, labor has divided and sub-divided and is distributed to wheels, cranks and levers innumerable. Yet labor has remained a constant factor, and, in the work of production to-day, laborers in their dull, continuous, automatic toil are "as impersonal units." Impersonal as the loom. Impersonal as the cog and band. Less personal, indeed, than the complex mechanism working out of the thought of some immortal mind.
Dead level of equality, when personal beings fill the place of impersonal units.
Plato expected commerce to increase as toil divided, but little did he dream of this century's struggle; of the combative spirit in man, leading his faculties in battle array, over "our daily bread." The struggle for gain is intense, conscienceless and loveless. It breeds frenzy on Wall street, pandemonium at the Chicago Exchange. War passions and gambling passions flash and flame along the lines of daily trade. The business drift has been steadily toward the ethics of the Board of Trade. Value is not determined by utility, but by the fluctuations of trade. To a remorseless market of mysterious supply and demand, labor must come to exchange for the privilege of meagre animal life. Labor is a commodity; a commodity in excess of demand; cheaper than the slave; a perishable commodity, in which, on the average, are wrapped the destinies of five lives and a home. Thus, the laborer himself is virtually a commodity, a sentient being filling the insen sate place of a commercial thing.
It is the ethics of trade, that teaches us to regard every question with prudential and calculating eyes, and even those who would reform the world, exhibit the waste of vice and crime in appalling figures of dollars and cents. Our social philosophy is Mammonistic. Wealth instead of man is the centre and circumference of our economic science. I believe with Lincoln that "man should be
Dead level of equality, when sentient beings fill the place of insensate things.
first—the dollars second." True, appalling is the waste, but more appalling still is the waste of soul which correlates the economic waste. The most appalling fact is this, that souls are born into the world but "half made up" and doomed to social environments that give them yet more evil shapes. It is the wontonness of wealth and the grind of poverty that make men vulgar, extravagant and criminal. In the very centers of civilization, where the extremes of wealth and poverty meet, creeps the lowest vice.
Starting revelations or guided crime in circles of irresponsible wealth, were made by the Pall Mall Gazette. About the steps of London bridge crouches the worst deprivation, the deepest misery of the globe. Within three miles of Bartholdi's statute, crawl in green slime. human vermin, whom Liberty has never enlightened, who were born to a slavery, with fetters forged by generations of pauperism and pauperism's vice. This "Black Empire of necessity and night," holy influences do not reach and can never pervade. As Carlyle says: "The heart lying dead the eye cannot see." But, in this dark realm, the Huns and Vandals gather-wielding the fearful weapons of despair. In our great cities, wealth, culture and religion are massed, but there, too, the volcanic forces of ignorance, misery and crime, are massed. What can avert the earthquake shock?
But what shall we say to the complain of the honest laborer. Working for wages which bar-keeper scorn, he perceives millions wasted not only in criminal indulgence and drunken vice, but also in great enterprises wrecked by ruinous competition. On the other hand he perceives wealth and power accumulate in the hands of few. A railroad magnate receives citizens from two western cities and gives his royal promise to build their cities up. Single men accumulate fortunes which exceed the stretch of imagination. They are like those vast astronomical distances which we can express by figures but cannot comprehend. Whence came those figures symbolizing such fabulous wealth? Mystery of mysteries, but to this mystery add this question from the laborer's anxious mind: "Why should labor fill the word with wealth and be in want?"
Not Waste, but Over-production is the indictment against "hard times." Business relations must be strained, every branch of trade squeezed hard, and multitudes of business men hurled into the starless abyss, because society is too rich. Ragged, hungry, houseless seeker after work, suspend your efforts! Perish by the wayside! Society is too well clothed, too well fed, too well housed.
Pennsylvania miners, come forth from eternal night, and let the sunlight mock the famine that shadows the threshold of the "Pluck-mestore." Kansas farmers burn your corn! Society is too well warmed, too well fed. Are these, then, no part of society?
Such is the indictment. By the resultant force of aggressive strength
and cringing weakness, by legislation suborned, by communities deluded, avenues of special privilege, of corporate immunities, of fictitious value, of usury and rent, have been shaped, along which the profits from every form of industry and the fruits of toil are drawn and piled in heaps by pitiless greed. Five-eighths of our produce is hoarded by one-tenth of our population, three-eighths is distributed to nine-tenths. Now political economy is called the science of exchanges but can any disciple of laissez faire explain to us how five-eighths hoarded by one-tenth can freely exchange with three-eighths distributed to nine-tenths. It is not strange that a glut is becoming perennial, that there is a dead level of industrial depression to the masses everywhere.
The social problem is a problem in proportions. The tendencies are toward theiatric heights of wealth and a wide-spread levels of poverty.
To level the Alps would raise western Europe but twenty-one and one-half feet, but the hills of western Europe should not be leveled and dumped upon the Alps, robbing the rest of nature to increase their solitary grandeur.
To make men equal is impossible; to make conditions equal no thinking man desires, but more equitable proportions must be established. The problem must be solved. The ratio between effort and reward is not just. There is no participation by millions who work, in the results of their labor.
These impersonal units, these commolities, are men—men robbed of the real life of man
Many of them are souls quivering with unworked potentialities. Even in the gloom of the lowest ranks of labor, toils the motion of a spirit yearning to mix with life.
Let the privileged classes beware. The hearts of the people are better than their systems—more humane than their laws. The latent thoughts of business men are nobler than their business lives. Already the common people demand a solution of the social problem.
Only well proportioned minds—only large souls with faculties of reason, conscience and affection co-ordinated in symmetrical proportions, can solve the problem. Souls that can learn from the sublime feeling of honest John Brown; yet, with a well-poised discretion of a Wm. H. Seward; with a Chas. Sumner's integrity. Large souls whose generous though includes the welfare of the race, and whose noble qualities cooperate in sympathetic zeal for humanity's good, turn to co-operation as the true principle for capital and labor; not as manifested by communism of provincial schemes, but as a broad system of mutual interest and distributed profit.
Production and distribution are carried on by associated effort. A system of mutualism and common interest would bring the social classes into harmonized relations and create plenty and peace. As Plutarch says: "There is a principle of kindness in the human soul, and men are born to
love as well as to think and perceive."
Under our system of competition, which is our Christian extension of the philosophy of the savage, the embodied doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" by a people who profess the Golden Rule, "Heaven's rich instincts" are repressed, earth-born passions are let loose, and universal antagonism, distrust and bitterness prevail. The strong are made arrogan and despotic; the weak are made desperate and rebellious. The law of competition is not sufficient. Society must accept the law of co-operation, the law of fraternity, the law of love, which every lover of mankind hails with joy.
Self-interest commends co-operation. Pools, syndicates, associations, have adopted it. Solidarity of interests demands it.
Not masters, but leaders do we want; not Napoleons, nor even Bismarks, but men like Abraham Lincoln—a man who was the people's chief because he was the people's servant. The intellect of capital may have free scope, but its avarice must be restrained.
Capital may lead,may guide,may mould,but dictator the American spirit cannot endure.
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Love and labor fill the world with all by which the world is blessed. Love, then, alone has a right to prescribe for labor, the divinity in man to govern man the animal.
True justice proceeds from love, for they have no regards for the rights of man who have no regard for man himself.
Co-operation is just. Justice alone can arbitrate the rights of man.
God is love. As man advances he gains new perceptions. But his progress must follow the evolution of the Infinite Mind.
Out of chaos and disorder, the Almighty Thought unfolded a universe, and the morning stars sang together. For ages this diapason flowed on, flowed on, until the reverent hush around Bethlehem's Star, when angles took up the refrain for earth and men. That song humanity has heard. Its tender notes vibrate along the heart strings of our race, and now, above the roar and strife of trade and war, mingle with the celestial anthem and blend with the silent symphonies of the stars. Not Mammon, but the Nazarene, shall be the future leader of a fraternal race.
God, Nature, Man, shall be unified by Love.
It is time to make some arrangement in regard to Oread hall. Either the members of the society should immediately take steps towards revivification, or if this is impossible then they should declare that its mission is over and that Oread is dead. This sounds sad and mournful, no doubt, but business is business, and room is room. If the members of the society take no action, then the faculty ought to confiscate the room, turn it over to the musical department or make such disposition of it as they see fit. Some action ought to be taken.
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A. G. Menger's is Headquarters for Boots and Shoes.
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