The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo

CLASS LEGISLATION.

There are two classes in this country who desire government intervention. These are the protectionists, whether manufacturers or workingmen.

Both are opposed to the genius of Democracy and neither should receive any aid or comfort from it. An industry that is not able to protect itself in legitimate trade is not worth preserving.

A laborer who wants government intervention to give him more wages than he earns, is simply a beggar, and is deserving of no more consideration than a public pauper. The tenderness with which the newspapers are dealing with the workingmen's organization is simple folly. They are encouraging a class of hornets which would sting, if they had the power, not only the republic but civilization itself to death. The hard times are no more oppressive to labor than it is to capital. All classes and conditions feel it. It is a prevalent and periodic depression which is common to all commercial and industrial communities.

It is especially an incident of such great convulsions as our civil war.

With us, as with all other people, the remedy is in patience and economy. In this country, there is no good reason why any class of people should want for bread. If one industry ceases to be remunerative, another can be sought, and back of all lies a continent of limitless prairies and teeming forests waiting for the husbandman and inviting settlement. It requires no capital but industry - no genius but labor. As long as these exist in such boundless profusion, the exactions of the workingmen, stripped of the surplusage of cant, is nothing but a menacing robbery. It is simply asking that the farmer, the merchant, the lawyer, the banker, the capitalist - every class of industry except that of the day laborer - shall be taxed to give them higher wages than their industry earns. It is demanding that every farmer who ships a bushel of wheat shall pay a cent more for its transportation than the freight is worth, so as to keep up the wages of the railroad laborer. It never occurs to the railroad man that he should go into some other business. He likes railroading, and he wants the community to give him a gratuity for the indulgence of his taste. This is a fair and legitimate analysis of the demands of the working men who are organizing for the purpose of menacing the government into making laws for them as a class.

They want to make industry a pensioner and labor a beggar - They seek to become the stipendiaries of economy and thrift, and demand that the toiling farmer and the hard worked merchant - the men whose genius and industry has webbed the iron avenues of trade and commerce and whose accumulations are the result of an obedience to that homely maxim which bids all to live within their income - shall be taxed for the benefit of a class who only wish to work eight hours a day, while being paid for twelve. They make a virtue of their improvidence and ask that thrift shall make it good. Until organized labor which is degenerating into organized tumult shall be told plain truths, instead of being petted by the press of the country, its unreasoning fanaticism will be the bane of constituted society.