The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer

Agrarianism and Demagoguery.

From the Providence Journal.

We wonder if it ever occurred to the men who, never having earned a day's wages with their own hands, and certainly never with their brains, run about the country, talking nonsense at workingmen's conventions and labor leagues, what would be their condition if values represented only the actual labor of the men who held them, if all property, which is the accumulation of labor, were confiscated, as soon as it passed into the hands of men who did not earn it. To destroy the rights of property, to prevent a man from enjoying his own earnings and giving his earnings to his children, whether other people thought them entitled to the bequest or not, would be the shortest direct cut to barbarism that the folly of man could devise: but long before that rapid descent could be made, all of this class of lecturers would have starved. The only thing in their programme which appears like looking out for themselves is the point that they make against brain work being accepted as labor. They seem to know what little chance they would have in that line.

The men who have risen to wealth under our free institutions, are more largely from the working class than from any other. Men ride in their coaches, who, in their youth, wielded the hammer and the axe. In the discipline of poverty they inured themselves to the habits and the sacrifices that lead to wealth. In no other country is so large a share of the property in the hands of the men who earned it. Their children are too apt to squander it; and it passes into the hands of those who begin as their fathers did. It is by working, not by talking, that men accumulate property. Law protects property, but labor creates it. There is no more mischievous enemy of the working man than he who persuades them that there is any road to wealth but by patient industry and economy. That is the way by which other men became rich; and it is by the neglect of this that rich men grow poor.

There is no danger that such senseless theories as have been propounded by these gassy speakers will produce any considerable effect upon the working men of the country. Any one who has the sense to wield an implement of labor knows the folly of such talk. The working men of America, educated in our free schools, reading the newspapers, familiarizing themselves with political discussions, and taking the active part which is their right and their duty, in public affairs, have too much good sense and too much cultivation to be caught by the crude and flimsy gabble of demagogues who wish to rise to power on their shoulders.