verted into standard silver dollars, placed side by side in solid column, would extend 1,578 miles. By charitable estimate, 1,200 miles of this startling distance comes each year from the pockets of American workmen. This is the most important phase of the silver question now before the people. The saloon is every way the poor man's curse, his incessant temptation. Soulless greed could have no better ally than the grogshop. Here the intemperate workman wastes his money and his strength-and loses at last the courage to demand, or the wisdom to use the liberty that else were his. In the name of progress, the saloon must go.

I would urge, finally, that by orderly political action what remains to be done to advance the cause of organized labor can be most surely accomplished. The laborer, armed with a ballot he knows how to use, has little need of a fiercer weapon.

"It executes the freeman's will,
As lightning does the will of God."

There is not a wrong the people cannot right without the shedding of a drop of blood, if they will only use persistently and wisely their law-making powers. Monopoly today is entrenched behind law law that could not endure a single year if the people really willed to change it.

The true watchwords of labor reform are, -Education, Agitation, Legislation. The more numerous and powerful organizations become who hold these ideals and methods, the better for America and the world.

During the Butler campaign of 1871, Wendell Phillips said to the workingmen of Massachusetts, and I propose the sentiment as platform and creed for organized labor to-day :

A hundred guns

"No more strikes. for the PEOPLE who furl the flags of disorder and discontent in the streets, to take their place in the cabinet and at the council board."

III.

LESSONS OF THE WAR FOR MEN OF TODAY.

[MEMORIAL-DAY ADDRESS, FARRAGUT POST, G. A. R., BATTLE CREEK, MICH., 1889.]

WENTY-ONE. years ago surviving veterans of the Union Army marched from the abodes of living men to the silent encampments of the dead, and for the first time placed upon the graves of our fallen soldiers the laurel wreaths of a comrade's love and a nation's gratitude. For two decades and more this beautiful custom has been observed in all the land. Our interest in it does not diminish. Our gratitude toward the nation's defenders has not waned. Time hallows, but does not lessen the sorrows of that terrific struggle; sobers, but does not decrease our meed of gratitude and love for the soldier living, and the soldier dead.

I sometimes think, in troubled reverie, of future Decoration Days. When the generation of the men who fought beneath the flag has passed away, when the last hero who wore the blue has been laid to rest, will the children seek the graves of the fathers, that by them they may honor those who saved the country? I know not. But this I know: A just appreciation-that and nothing more of the services and sufferings of the men who ventured all that the nation might live, would compel grateful observance of these memorial days so long as the flag of a redeemed republic shall wave on sea or land.

We are occasionally told that the soldier has been over-praised. That men thoughtlessly enlisted. Some did. That men sought refuge in the ranks from the arduous occupations of civil life. True, doubtless, of some. That others longed for the mad excitement of war and thirsted for military glory. We do not deny it. Granting all, we yet declare that any man who is able to reproduce

in his own mind, by the magic power either of memory or imagination, the dread scenes of the war, to that man the thought is incredible that any considerable number of our brave boys were ever influenced by such motives as these.

The old days return. Throughout the North the dread news speeds that treason, armed and desperate, is in the land. We see again the great assemblies of anxious freemen. We see, as though it were but yesterday, groups of palefaced women, upon whom the shadows of a great sorrow have begun to fall. The enlistment books are open. Some thoughtlessly, some with a bravado that but poorly hides their deep emotion, but most with blanched cheek, and unsteady hand, sign their names to the Nation's honor roll.

And then the camp. Then the submission of free-born lads to military discipline, often to the petty tyranny of scoundrels clothed in a little brief authority.

Now comes the order: "On to Wash

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