Mr. Bing answered quickly, "There are plenty of people who have nothing else to do but carry cheer and comfort to the unfortunate. I have other things to do."
"That, sir, does not relieve you of the liabilities of a neighbor and a human being, in my view. If your business has turned you into a shaft or a cog-wheel, it has done you a great injustice. I fear that it has been your master--that it has practised upon you a kind of despotism. You would better get along with less--far less business than suffer such a fate. I don't want to hurt you. We are looking for the cause of a certain result and I can help you only by being frank. With all your generosity you have never given your heart to this village. Some unkind people have gone so far as to say that you have no heart. You can not prove it with money that you do not miss. Money is good but it must be warmed with sympathy and some degree of sacrifice. Has it never occurred to you that the warm hand and the cheering word in season are more, vastly more, than money in the important matter of making good-will? Unconsciously, you have established a line and placed yourself on one side of it and the people on the other. Broadly speaking, you are capital and the rest are labor. Whereas, in fact, you are all working men. Some of the rest have come to regard you as their natural enemy. They ought to regard you as their natural friend. Two kinds of despotism have prevented it. First, there is the despotism of your business in making you a slave--so much of a slave that you haven't time to be human; second, there is the despotism of the labor union in discouraging individual excellence, in demanding equal pay for the faithful man and the slacker, and in denying the right of free men to labor when and where they will. All this is tyranny as gross and un-American as that of George the Third in trying to force his will upon the colonies. If America is to survive, we must set our faces against every form of tyranny. The remedy for all our trouble and bitterness is real democracy which is nothing more or less than the love of men--the love of justice and fair play for each and all.
"You men should know that every strike increases the burdens of the people. Every day your idleness lifts the price of their necessities. Idleness is just another form of destruction. Why could you not have listened to the counsel of Reason in June instead of in September, and thus have saved these long months of loss and hardship and bitter violence? It was because the spirit of Tyranny had entered your heart and put your judgment in chains. It had blinded you to honor also, for your men were working under contract. If the union is to command the support of honest men, it must be honest. It was Tyranny that turned the treaty with Belgium into a scrap of paper. That kind of a thing will not do here. Let me assure you that Tyranny has no right to be in this land of ours. You remind me of the Prodigal Son who had to know the taste of husks and the companionship of swine before he came to himself. Do you not know that Tyranny is swine and the fodder of swine? It is simply human hoggishness.