R E M A R K S
of
WENDELL PHILLIPS
at the
Mass Meeting
of
WORKINGMEN
in
Faneuil Hall, November 2, 1865.
Boston :
Voice Printing and Publishing Company,
1865.
It is twenty-eight years next month since I first stood on this platform and addressed an audience of Boston citizens. I felt then that I was speaking for labor. If the speech which I make tonight be the last one I am privileged to make, I shall be glad that it is in the same strain—a speech for the laboring man and his rights. [Applause.] Those twenty-eight years have been spent in pleading for a race which individuals assumed to own, to buy and sell; but the South did not rest her social system merely on the idea of buying and selling the laborer. She rested it according to Chancellor Harper, and Vice President Stephens, Pickens, George McDuffie and John C. Calhoun, on the doctrine that labor must necessarily be owned, either by capital, the State, or by individuals; that society, to rest safely, must rest on two classes—capital and labor owned by capital. Says Judge B. Watkins Leigh, of Virginia :
“In every civilized country under the sun, some there must be who labor for their daily bread,—men who tend the herds, and dig the soil,—who have no real nor personal capital of their own, and who earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow. I have as sincere feelings of regard for that people as any man who lives among them. But I ask gentlemen to say, whether they believe that those who depend on their daily labor for their daily subsistence, can, or do, ever enter into political affairs ? They never do, never will, never can.”—Speech in Virginia Convention, 1829.
Chancellor Harper (S.C.) says : “Would yon do a benefit to the horse, or the ox, by giving him a cultivated understanding, a fine feeling ? So far as the mere laborer has the pride, the knowledge, or the aspiration of a freeman, he is unfitted for his situation. If there are sordid, servile, laborious offices to be performed, is it not better that there should be sordid, servile, laborious beings to perform them ? Odium has been cast upon our legislation on account of its forbidding the elements of education being communicated to slaves. But, in truth, what injury is done them by this ? He who works daring the day with has hands does not read in the intervals of leisure, for his amusement, or the improvement of his mind; or the exception is so very rare as scarcely to need being provided for.”—Southern Literary Messenger.
George M’Duffie says : “If we look into the elements of which all political communities are composed, it will be found that servitude in some form is one of the essential constituents. ... In the very nature of things, there must be classes of persons to discharge all the different offices of society, from the highest to the lowest. ... Where these offices are performed by members of the political community, a dangerous element is obviously introduced by the body politic. ... Domestic slavery, therefore, instead of being an evil, IS THE CORNER STONE OF OUR REPUBLICAN EDIFICE”—Message to S.C. Legislature, 1835.
F.W. Pickens (S.C.) Says : “All society settles down into a classification of capitalists and laborers. The former will own the latter, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy. If laborers ever obtain the political power of a country, it is in fact a state of revolution.”
This accursed form of human bondage seems drawing to its end, at least so far as the right of one man to sell another goes. Therefore, you commence — we commence — fitly enough now, the struggle to discover, define and arrange the true and lasting relations between capital and labor in society.
Suppose that today a son is born to one of you. He lies in his cradle the child of a man without means, with little education, with less leisure. When he begins to walk, his steps are all a struggle against the obstacles that surround him. The rich man’s child may be smothered by wealth; enervated by the very opportunities he enjoys. But the child of parents of moderate fortune rises from his cradle, borne up, as on eagles’ wings, by means, education, leisure, influence of a cultivated home and teachers in school, to easy success. Our effort is to bring these two babies into as much equality as possible. [Applause.] My principle is that every child born in America shall have, as far as possible, an equal chance with every other. This is the goal to which our effort is tending; that there shall be no separate laborer and separate capitalist as such; but that in the final arrangement every man shall combine in his own person laborer and capitalist. [Applause.]
There is no quarrel, fellow-citizens, between labor and capital. There can be none. No man comes here tonight to lift an ignorant hand against capital. We all know what makes our lives easier and our hours more valuable, what surrounds us with facilities. It is that six generation of Massachusetts workingmen have made the State a great treasure-house of capital. When our fathers landed on Plymouth Rock this country was a wilderness. They have covered it with roads; they have dotted it with cities; they have filled it with school-houses; they have joined it to the markets of the world by sailships, steamships and railways. A bushel of wheat raised today in Massachusetts is worth much more than a bushel of wheat raised two hundred miles west of the Mississippi. Why ? Because the labor of six generations — which we call capital — has crowded men here to buy it, and opened for it the markets of the world. One of you, in search of employment, wishes or needs to go from Boston to Springfield. Had you lived a hundred years ago it would have cost you, perhaps, fifteen dollars and nearly a week to do it. At that time it would have taken you a month to earn fifteen dollars. So to seek labor a hundred miles off would have cost you a month’s work and a week’s idleness. Now capital has made a road that will carry you to Springfield in three hours for about three dollars. Thus much it has lengthened your life by making one of your hours capable of accomplishing so much more. So much has it enriched you. So much has it advanced you, by giving you choice of markets and making wages rise by competition. There can be no quarrel, therefore, between capital and labor. They are only the two arms of the same pair of scissors — each one of them useless when alone. It is only when they are joined together that they cut everything before them.
Let every man understand, therefore, that we call ourselves the best allies of the capital of Massachusetts, for it is we who are in reality using the capital of today and producing the capital of the next year. There is no quarrel. What, then, do we come here for ? We come to take the first step to find out what are the true relations of labor and capital, what arrangements can be planned that will make the laborer more intelligent, more comfortable, more a man; more able to develope all the powers God has given him, and enjoy all God has created around him.
We have a government resting on the masses. I undertake to say that when a government rests on the people, government is bound to seek, at least, so to arrange labor and capital that the laboring class may have time to understand matters of government and vote intelligently. [Applause.] Shut a man up to work ten, eleven, sixteen hours a day, he comes out the fag-end of a man, [applause] with neither brain nor heart rightly to discharge the duties of citizenship. Where government is in the hands of one man or a few nobles, it matters little to it that millions of such grown men and women are fagged out with daily toil, and millions of their children are dragged up instead of being brought up. As horses are sent to a stable after the race, these may be sent to bed to recruit another day’s strength, and to the grog-shop to forget their misery and double it. Only in times of tumult do such neglected classes rise and revenge themselves, justly on those who forgot them. But, where all men vote, such are the daily food and tools of demagogues, and poison every hour of political life. Our form of government cannot safely tolerate such. Capital, for its own security, seeing that labor holds the majority at the ballot-box, is bound, moved only by its own selfishness, to see that labor has leisure to look calmly into and patiently comprehend the great question of politics. Therefore I say it is a fair division of a man’s day — eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, eight hours for his soul. [Applause.] Eight hours for his own, to idle if he pleases, to rest, to study if he pleases, — to improve himself. It is not my business to say — “Sir, you shall not have the leisure unless you come under bonds to use it well.” It is no business of mine how he uses what belongs to him. I do not go to the millionaire on Beacon street and say to him — “Sir, the laws of Masschusetts will not protect your bank stock unless according to my ideas you use it well.” He has a right to his bank stock, and to do with it, under God, what he pleases. I may argue with him, I shall, [laughter] I may agitate in order to induce him to do certain things with it. When you have eight hours leisure I shall be with a bayonet at your heels trying to drive you into useful and honorable use of it. Be sure of that. But my first object is to give it to yon, since it belongs to you.
Again, in claiming this, fairly considered, our right, we are not infringing the rights of any man. No man’s rights, properly considered, interfere with any other man’s rights. Show me the rights of a man or a class, and I will show you something with which nobody else has a right to interfere. Yon know I have been told on this platform, for twenty years, that the negro did not deserve his freedom, and would idle it away. My reply was — “What God gave him he shall have, and he is responsible to God for using it well or ill.” My view, therefore, of this reform, is simply this : It is an endeavor to discover the true relation between labor and capital and, arrange matters in accordance with it. It is an endeavor to give the laboring classes of Massachusetts more leisure, and give them therefore better opportunity to become more intelligent. I defy a million of men, having got leisure and comfort, not to improve. There is no such instance in history. It is the universal excuse and pretence of the oppressor that they will not. In 1789, the talk of the nobles of France was — “the peasant is naturally idle, and would not work if he could live without it.” But France rose up and broke her chains, and although the throne there rests in theory on universal suffrage, all feudalism abolished, still Frenchmen set example to the world in their painstaking and patient industry. So in regard to the system of slavery at the South. Men said — “the negro will never work unless you whip him to it.” But we’ve tried it, and find Mr. Cash is a more efficient master than Mr. Lash.
The cry here is — “You can’t make a white laborer work unless you starve him.” I don’t believe it. The cry here is in the, same spirit — “drag a man down to absolute necessity, hang his wife and children like dead weights to him ; let him have no hope outside a factory, with its fourteen or eleven hours ; then he’ll work ; you have starved him to it, and it is the only motive that the working man will obey.” I don’t believe it. At any rate I wish to lift the weighht off a while, and see if it be true. No harm in the experiment. In other words, I want eight hours a day for work, and eight hours a day for leisure, secured as far as possible to the laboring masses of this nation. Give them the opportunity to show what they’ll do with leisure. My plan has another element. Eight hours of leisure and public, free, evening schools for adults, to teach them everything worth knowing. No one who was neglected in childhood shall have, in his poverty, any excuse for continuing an ignorant man. Leisure, Schools and Libraries — the means to use that leisure well — that is the programme.
Now, fellow-citizens, how shall this thing be done. I will tell you. I have a little experience in this matter. I never held an office, and never expect to : but this you know—the man who looks at the game can sometimes criticise it better than the player. Let us, fellow-citizens, consider this : our country—to its honor be it said—is ruled by ideas. You never will carry your cause by threats. It would be a disgrace to New England if any class could bully any other class into submission. It never has been true ; it is not true today. The only reason why the laboring class has apparently been threatened into submission, is because the laboring class, in its ignorance, its divisions, and its indifference has allowed the other class to have its own way. But we should consider the country disgraced if we supposed that you could carry your question, or that any question could be carried here except by men’s being argued into it. We are ruled by brains; let us be thankful for it. In the East, where dreams hide truth, the story runs that a Hindoo dreamer once saw the human race led out to its varied fortune. First, he saw men driven,—bits in their mouths,—with iron-reins, and these went back to an iron hand. That was despotism—the bayonet—a government of force. Then he dreamed on and on, till at last he saw men driven by tiny threads which came from the brain and went back to an invisible hand : this was a government of ideas, where brains rule.
Such a government is ours. You may as well try to force back Niagara as to govern New England long against her ideas. You must submit to them or change them. You can’t flank them, as Grant did Lee, when he went down into Virginia. You must face them, and if they stand out against you, you must change them. No need to despair, if you have truth on your side and are willing to work for it. That will effect its object, but you must have the truth, and be willing to work for it. There are men who have the truth, and keep it very precious ; lock it in a safe. Then there are some men who have no truth, but work like the devil, and for him. There is another class that has the truth and is willing to stand by it, and force it at last on the reluctant conscience of the nation. Let these men be your models. But how shall you spread the truth ? For this you need living lips to speak it and argue it, and you need journals to discuss it, day by day, week by week. Here is my friend interested in the Daily Voice. I am glad you have such a journal. You ought to have it; you ought to sustain it liberally. The time will never come when you can dispense with such. But one journal cannot cover the State, cannot cover the North. You need something by which you shall make all journals discuss your doctrines. You need something by which you shall press into your service all the cultivated intellects of the country. You need something by which you shall make every leading public man open his lips for you or against you.
I said this country is ruled by its brains. You must do something which will make the brains of the country take up this question of eight hours making a day. All men are not agreed upon it. Some still doubt the plan; laboring men doubt it; capitalists doubt it. It is an honest difference of opinion. It is not scoundrelism; it is not knavishness; it is not want of heart; it is absolute want of light in many minds. What you want is to make the intellect of the country discuss your question, to make every man that can speak to the nation speak about it. How did we make the country discuss the anti-slavery question. How did we force every journal in the country to speak for it or against it ?
A Voice — “You kept at it.”
Mr. Phillips — Yes my friend, we kept at it, and we kept at it together — a long pull, a strong pull and a pull ALL TOGETHER — that is the secret of success. You know the patriarch Job said, “Oh ! that mine adversary had written a book !” He was a wise man. When, formerly, I made a speech here, the Daily Advertiser used to abuse me. It could not abuse justice so cunningly but that men could see through the delusion. I defy a man to make an argument against the laws of God that will hold water. All I want him to do is to open his mouth, and if he don’t prove himself a fool before long, I’ll be silent. Take an illustration : Our President, the other day, addressing Major Stearns, said, substantially, “If I give these black fellows the suffrage there will be all sorts of trouble. It is the slaveholder that loves the negro. It is the poor white men who shoot him, and whip him, and abuse him. It is not the good old leading families that do this. It is the non-slaveholding, poor, idle, mean whites. Now, if I give the negro the ballot he will help aristocracy, and go and vote for the slaveholders and not for the poor whites !” Well, why, in the name of common sense, shouldn’t he ! What a fool he’d be if he voted for the man who whips him. The truth is, it is not the poor white that oppresses the negro, and it is not the slaveholder for whom he would vote. The President borrows his facts of his fancy, and his arguments don’t run in a line, because he was trying to dodge, and like any man trying to dodge justice, he will certainly answer himself and shut up his own mouth.
How will you make the Advertiser, the Journal, the Traveller, the Transcript, the Springfield Republican and the Worcester Spy discuss your question and not have the agitation confined to the DAILY VOICE ? How will you make Henry Wilson, Bullock and Boutwell speak on the labor question. I’ll tell you. Go into the political field, and by the voice of forty-thousand workingmen in this State, say, “We mean that eight hours shall be a working day; we mean that no man shall go into municipal, federal or state office, who does not support that measure. [Applause.] We don’t care for Democrat : we don’t care for Republican : we are going at last to attend to our own concerns.” What will be the result ? Why, exactly what the result was in ’46, when the Abolitionists said, “We won’t vote, one for the Democrats and another for the Whigs, but we are going to vote for Abolitionists.” What was the result ? Every-paper in the country pelted them with fierce columns of editorials. Every Rip Van Winkle woke up and said, “Lord a massy, what’s this new cause that’s got a footing in every house ?” [Laughter.] And so the friends of the country took up the question; the brains, the intellect, the education of the country began to discuss it. It took them twenty years to see light. They finally settled it by stirring such Northern principle and purpose as made the South say, “Neck or nothing; rule or ruin ; we’ll secede and try outside; ballots failing us, let’s try bullets.”
Now, you will never get the journals, you will never get public men, you will never get the brain of the country to think for you, crumbled and divided as you are, resolved on nothing, united on nothing, demanding nothing. How are you situated ? You have not the leisure, you have not had the education, you can’t take a pen and wield it as your enemies can. How shall you make them wield it ? By saying, “This is my political creed ; I believe in it. All men are liable to mistake, may be mistaken; but I mean to send my representatives to the place where they discuss these things and make the laws.” You will say to the country, “We are not absolutely certain that all our ideas are correct. We don’t wish to risk anything; but the subject shall be discussed by the best brains of the land.” The man that has only a dollar is just as much concerned in the safety of all the invested capital of Massachusetts as the man that has hundreds, for it is for his interest that labor—accumulated labor—shall be protected. Who uses the railroads and the ships ? You are the men that use them. Open the schoolhouse then under the State House dome, where we pay the scholars four dollars a day to talk. Make the debating society in the State House debate whether it is safe and best that eight hours make a working day. Thus you go forward wisely and safely. Set the whole country to thinking and talking. Ask men why, if six or seven hours are a working day for clerks on high pay in the Custom Houses and Departments at Washington, eight hours a day may not be enough for the working men in the Navy Yards and Arsenals of the Government. Keep asking that question till somebody answers it.
I quite agree with my gallant friend, Major Mahan, that we don’t want this thing political in the bad sense of the word, but I do want it so in the high sense of the word. Our institutions are based on this principle, that any man who has a wrong to complain of may go to the ballot-box and make society consider and set it right for him. That is the meaning of democracy. That is why I like universal suffrage. Men say — What, would you invite every ignorant man to vote ? I say yes. Universal suffrage means taking a bond from the wealthy and learned to educate the poor — the machinery of God’s College to ensure the education of the masses. Governments, books, wealth, churches are valuable only as they help to educate man. Universal suffrage is one of the best means to that end. I claim it because it is every man’s natural right. I value it because it takes bond of property and education to make a straight path from every cradle to the schoolhouse.
Now, workingmen, what is my advice as an agitator ? This : You will never gain anything till you convince fifty thousand voters in this Commonwealth that your claim is just, sound, and based on good principles and true philosophy. You never will reach them simply by a meeting like this. State Street don’t come here; Beacon Street don’t come here; Worcester County don’t come here ; but let this meeting break up, and the next time there is an election in Boston for Mayor, let the workingmen of Boston go to the candidate for Mayor and ask him if it is his opinion that eight hours should be a working day. If he says yes, let it be known in a meeting like this that he shall have every workingman’s vote, and if he don’t say that, he shan’t have one. What will be the result ? I don’t want you to conquer in a year. It would be a disgrace if you did.
A Voice — “Why ?”
Mr. Phillips — Because it would show that you had frightened Boston. We should all despise any man or class that could be frightened into anything. You ought to argue your way to victory. Your victory must be gained by a wise, judicious conscientious exposition of your views. Thus it will be lasting. When you have said that to the candidate for Mayor, the Journal will take it up and discuss the eight hour system; the Advertiser will discuss it, and the Transcript will have articles about it. The whole State will talk the matter over. The intellect of Massachusetts will take the question, as the teethed drums of Lowell do a mass of ragged and dirty cotton, tear it into fragments and clean it fit for use. That is what will be done if you use your power.
You fight a much easier battle than we did. You have no prejudices of race to wipe out — you have no Constitution to change. You may do in twelve months what it took us twelve years to accomplish. Stand by each other night and day; claim nothing of the community but what the community sees it right to grant, and in three years or five it will be the law of the Commonwealth that eight hours in all the incorporated companies, and in the State and Municipal workshops, is the length of a workingman’s day. I know some of you may think this is nothing but a political address. I have no political end to serve. I belong to neither party. I ask no man here, even if he live to the age of Methuselah, to give me a vote. I only ask that this, the great question to which the arena belongs, this question of labor, should gain for itself recognition, agitation and discussion. I want this platform occupied by Charles Sumner with his views on this question. I want Sam Hooper gently compelled to come down here and look his constituents in the face. I want Henry Wilson, with his tireless activity, to do for the laboring man what he has helped do for the negro. And the advise I give you is, make your claim as a united political party, and thus give these men a motive, and subjugate the journals, to discuss it for you. They are bound to furnish their readers with the news. See that you manufacture them the right kind of news for their readers to chew on.
Let me tell you a story : Twenty years ago, between 1840 and 1850, a committee of anti-slavery men wrote to Abbot Lawrence, then a candidate for Congress and expecting an election, to ask his opinion on the question of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. Mr. Lawrence was an honorable, humane, generous-hearted man. They said to him, “You are likely to be elected to Congress ; we have some votes to dispose of and we venture to ask what is your opinion of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.” He looked at them, counted them over, saw that they didn’t represent anybody, and wrote, “I don’t know whether I have any opinion, and if I had I should not think it worth while to mention it.”
That is the way men in political life treat those who are weak. Twenty years later do you believe there was a man or a party in Massachusetts [who] would have dared to use such words ? Twenty years later that class of men would come to us and say, “Couldn’t you write me a letter and let me express my views on your subject.” Do as much in the next five years as you have done in the last, and instead of having an unpopular Ishmaelite like myself here, you may take your pick out of all the politicians in Massachusetts. Instead of one journal, you may have all the journals in Massachusetts to report your doings and record your arguments. Let me compare for you two causes, the one still halting, the other in full success. You know that the Abolition party for the last twenty-five years never had but one idea ; — that, to be sure, was being well off, for most men don’t have even that ; — but they did have one idea, and when the ballot-box came round they still held on to that idea. They held to it at some risk, at considerable sacrifice, amid great ridicule, and finally crushed the Whig party and flung the Democratic party out of the arena. Certainly they did it. I don’t say they were wise or unwise, good or bad, but the machine at last did its work. I don’t say who made the locomotive, but it took the train on to Gettysburg and Richmond. Now turn to the Temperance party. I am a temperance man of thirty years standing, and I think it one of the most momentous questions ever before the country. But how did the temperance party act. They came to Faneuil Hall and passed resolutions. They met in Tremont Temple and passed another set of resolutions, and when November came each man sneaked up to the ballot-box and voted Whig or Democratic as he was inclined. What was the result ? Why, the great public, seeing the men did not value their question enough to stand by it, left it out in the cold. Sometimes they rock the whole Commonwealth, but in ordinary times they get little discussion but what they pay for. They got a law by herculean effort, but after all that they couldn’t execute it because they had not conquered the brains of the State first. Choose which example you will follow. When, with one practical point at a time before you, united in one party, you make journals, statesmen, and colleges discuss your question, you will convert the State and stereotype your idea into a statute. Until, laying aside all differences, you so unite, your cause will lie wind-bound and sunk in shallows. The conviction of the justice of your claim which granted you the statute will in time harden into national habit and ensure permanent triumph to your idea. What saves every working man from being driven to toil on the Sabbath ? Conscientious opinion hardened into national custom. Show any being, not acquainted with our world, the greediness of wealth for increase and the starving need of the working man, and then tell him that in spite of both every seventh day was given up to rest, he would laugh at the improbable tale. But we have seen that the strange story is true nevertheless. What has made it possible for greedy capital and starving labor to surrender every seventh day to rest ? Conscientious conviction that it is right to do so, hardened into custom. Once do you plant in men’s winds the conviction that it is right to give you eight hours rest, and the conviction will become custom and soon firmly fixed like the saving of every seventh day from labor.
I see before me enough men to govern the city of Boston on this plan. There are men enough in this hall—and I’ll give you every other man for a dough-face—to make eight hours a day the rule in the workshops of Boston in three years. The opinions of so many men will set to work the intellects of the peninsula to tear open this question and let the light shine through it. When you have convinced the thinking men that it is right, ind the humane men that it is just, it will go into the statute book. The workingmen of Massachusetts have brains enough and light enough to challenge the capital of the country to the discussion in the way I have pointed out. Your challenge cannot be made in words. It cannot be printed in the VOICE : it cannot be announced here. A mass meeting is a flaming meteor—seen today and gone tomorrow; but a political movement behind which stand ten thousand men, saying, “This is our right : we’ll have it, if we grow gray in fighting for it;” that never adjourns. It is in everlasting session. It is a committee that never rises except to report progress and sit again. Every hour gives you an advance; every day furnishes an argument; every single step in the public history gives you a text. Thus, workingmen, instead of timidly looking now and then into the Journal for an article, you may subject the whole press to your purpose.
We turned the Congress of the United States into a debating society. Henry Clay said, in 1839, to talk about slavery is moral treason, and the last four years of his life he talked of nothing else. Tom Benton said, “Find me talking of slavery or anti-slavery and I’ll give you my head,” and yet the speeches which will be his monument in history are on this subject. What did it ? The determination of the men of the North that one way or another the subject should be discussed. We could not have made Clay give a lecture on slavery if we had paid him a hundred thousand dollars; but the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society turned those men into its agents and made them pay their expenses besides. Filtered through the ballot-box comes the will of the people, and statesmen bow to it.
Go home, my friends, with the declaration that the workingmen of Massachusetts are a unit on this subject, that they mean to have this subject thoroughly discussed by the best minds, and all that comes pure metal out of that crucible they expect ere long to stereotype into statutes. [Loud applause and cheers.]