nothing is plainer than that the more the operative becomes interested
in the success of the enterprise which employs him, the better is it for
him and it. And all _work_ in it--the owner and the employee. But then,
we are told that 'the owner gets the profits.' Does he? Sum up the
companies and capitalists who have failed during the past
decade,--compare what they have lost with what they have paid their
workmen, and then see who have really pocketed the money, and whether on
the whole the capitalists have been more than properly repaid for their
risks, and wear and tear of _brains_. To be sure we are as yet far from
having realized a regularly arranged harmony of interests. But I see
that here, even in this New England, there is nothing which the great
and most intelligent capitalists desire more than this harmony, or a
system in which every man's brains and labor shall be properly and
abundantly remunerated, since they see (as all must see who reflect)
that the nearer we approach such practical adjustment of forces, the
less liable will they be to fail. And the world, as it has reflected
that labor has flourished among barren rocks, covering them with smiling
villages, under the fostering care of capital, when fertile Southern
lands are a wilderness for want of this harmony between it and capital,
has concluded that the old battle between rich and poor was a folly. The
obscure hamlets of New England, which have within thirty years become
beautiful towns, with lyceums, libraries, and schools, are the most
striking examples on earth of the arrant folly of this gabble of
'capital as opposed to labor.' In the South, however, the old theory is
held as firmly as in the days when John Randolph prophesied Northern
insurrections of starving factory-slaves against manufacturing lords,
and--as President Lincoln recently intimated in his Message--the effort
is there being made to formally enslave labor to capital. That is to
say, the South not only adheres to the obsolete theory that labor is a
foe to capital, but proposes to subdue it to the latter. The progress of