to practical affairs would deny to self-styled workingmen, organized into
a cooeperative society, any political means not enjoyed by every other
organized cooeperative society, and by each and every citizen, individually,
to himself and his heirs and assigns, forever.

"But in a country like ours, what right has any body of men to get together
and, labelling themselves workingmen, to talk about political means and
practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single
right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a
workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his
library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his
labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with
darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in
the face, yet--if he be a true man--with a little bird singing ever in his
heart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and
Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whom
the world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of the
centuries. We are all workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, the
doctor--toiling from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for our
toil, to represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less than
the farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the team
afield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with a
hoe to laugh a harvest.

"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments of
exuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the American
editor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by the majesty
and the mystery of his pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no less than the
poor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils of the midnight
rounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more perilous temptations