We speak of other men as Polaks, Bohunks, and Dagoes; but I never stand beside the ditch or railroad where they work without closing my eyes, and immediately there comes to my vision Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Cæsar, whose names are graven deep in all literature; Dante, with his furrowed face, bringing me his immortal message of redemption; Savonarola, whose clarion call rouses every patriot to live and die for his city; and the frescoes and canvasses and statues of Tintoretto, of Correggio, and of Michael Angelo; and I know that it is the eternal Italian who sits by our fireside in every American home and keeps life beautiful and fresh with romance, color, and song. It is then that I dedicate myself to that "regenerated democracy" which shall give to my brother the Pole, my brother the Slav, my brother the Greek, my brother the Italian, and my brother the African, equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal wages with the multitudinous sons of the Mayflower. The battle for equal rights in America has never been quite won. That it has not even permeated the Christian Church itself is evident when, fresh from the study of the life of the common Brother of all mankind in 1910, they refused to march through the streets of the Capitol of our nation with other men of a darker skin. One would think that not so soon would they have played the Pharisee to the spirit of the lessons which they had themselves outlined for millions of scholars throughout the world. No! it is a slow, hard battle we have to fight; but to it let the Brotherhood of America set its hands until we shall have taught men that there is no other measure of a man than that he is a man and in his form God walked in Galilee.

But the cry to-day is rather against economic inequities. Trading one's economic liberty for physical liberty is a doubtful bargain. Slavery is slavery, no matter who wields the lash. Senator Beveridge has said that the coming battle is not so much between political parties as between the rights of the people and the powers of pillage. The common man finds that kings are not all dead when he has smashed crowns and broken scepters. There is many a king who would gladly trade his uneasy crown to live on easy street with a Morgan or a Rockefeller. For the common man is stirring to ask if democracy has not handed him a gold brick in simply changing his masters. Instead of kings on thrones he now has kings of finance; instead of the divine rights of royalties he has the divine rights of Baer and the coal barons; instead of fighting and laying down his life in the ranks of armies for the glory of empires, he now lays it down in sweatshops, in foul cattle shambles, in damp and putrid mines, in unsanitary mills, that the kings of finance may roll in luxury, and in place of the great and good George Washington he now has one who is "first in oil, first in grease, and first in the pocketbooks of his countrymen."

For it is special privilege- which changes its name but dies hard against which the people are revolting. It is that special privilege which enables a Mrs. Gould to declare she cannot live on her allowance of seventy thousand dollars a year while the average income of an American family of five is but seven hundred and fifty dollars; that special privilege which enables men to dot Newport and the North Shore with magnificent mansions built on the unearned increment of their investments while the average weekly wage of the textile trades, the iron workers, the boot and shoe workers, and the clothing workers is but $7.90; that special privilege which rears thousands of men and women in poisonous plethora of riches with never a sweat of the brow, while hundreds of thousands to-day with a plethora of sweat of the brow are caught between the millstones of an un-living wage and higher cost of living; that special privilege which in congressional investigations tells him that the trouble is that he has too much gold while he is unable to earn enough gold by a day's labor to buy back a living part of the thing his day's labor produced. It is this special privilege which has brought not only poverty of pocket but poverty of life, out of which grows discontent and socialism and anarchy. A Christian

Brotherhood has a message for such discontent. Tell the rich man, sitting in a Christian pew, that his social distinctions resting on hereditary or monetary foundations are utterly pagan; tell him that if he will climb up his ancestral tree far enough he will find himself and the man with the dinner-pail shaking hands with the same grandfather; tell him that for the cotton mills of New England to be paying enlarged dividends on a special privilege tariff is filching from the public; tell the stockholder in the southern cotton mills that for him to receive dividends taken from the lives of little children is murder; tell him that his automobiles and yachts taken from the narrow margin between a man's wage and his living is larceny; tell him that to send the women and children of the laboring man into the mill to make up that which he took from a man's output is embezzlement; tell him that unless he comes down and restores fourfold to every operator and every consumer that all his gifts to missions and colleges will never bring salvation to his house; tell him that the gate of heaven knows no complimentary passes; tell him, with or without quotation marks, that it was never so hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as now; tell him that to build a baronial estate on New England soil with porcelain markers for every shrub, a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar rockery, and a fifty thousand dollar garage, while his Italian workmen live in dog kennels and chicken coops is infamous; tell him that any business is to be measured not by the kind of goods it manufactures but the kind of men it turns out; tell him that his business has no other purpose of being than that which drove Christ to Calvary, service of his fellow-men; tell him all of this, as in Jesus' name you must, and you will doubtless know the tragedy of Jesus when "the scribes and chief priests and the Pharisees sought to lay hands on him," and you will know His defense, for "they feared the multitude because they took him for a prophet."

But that will be your easier task. The time was when it took a brave man to beard the rich man in his pew, but now he is a rare man who does not have some millionaire's scalp adorning his vestments. Hunting down the predatory rich is as popular and safe a pastime as chasing lions in the shadow of T. R. But now will come the real test of your prophethood, for it is easy in this day to play the demagogue and accept the position of court preacher when the people is king. Now, if you have the

courage, turn to the laboring man who has been attracted by your preaching against privilege and tell him that limiting the output when humanity is unclothed, unfed, and unhoused, and needs his all and his best, is economic suicide; tell him that to admit but one apprentice once in four years in a stereotype shop is on a par with the robber monopolies; tell him that what he will not do to a union man, that he shall not do to a non-union man or his brotherhood is a dwarf; tell him that to deny a man by force the right to sell his only commodity, his labor, where he may, is tyranny; tell him that the boycott is in a neck-to-neck competition with the black-list for first place in the Hall of Infamy; tell him that to demand equality of reward with no equality of service is an equality built on sinking sand; tell him that the new man must precede the new age; tell him there is no social alchemy whereby he can get a Golden Age out of leaden habits; tell him that sobriety and thrift sew up many a hole in an empty pocket; tell him that the true order of industrial supremacy is "seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you "; tell him that the kingdom for which he seeks will come not by calling "lo here or lo there," to any economic program or any industrial law, so much as it will begin "within him "; tell him that if his union has not sufficient argument to accredit it to the outsider without the argument of force and starvation, it has no argument for existence; tell the non-union laboring man that for him to reap the benefits of the battles and sacrifices of organized labor and contribute nothing to its success is taking that which is not his own; tell him that the American right to labor where he pleases and for what he pleases does not carry with it the right to make war on standards of decent living; tell him all of this, and you will know what Jesus experienced when he looked upon his dwindling audience and cried, with a voice dripping with tears and choking with sobs, "And will ye go away also?"

It is at this convergence of the streams of social life forming a whirlpool of unrest and passion where the Congregational Democratic Brotherhood stands, and if we have no message we have no justification for being. Let us not be deflected from our path. We have tried toadying to the rich on the one hand and patronizing the poor on the other; let us now move through this clash of class interests sublimely indifferent to all colors and

badges, recognizing only that which the millionaire has in common with the beggar. Our mission is not to the rich or to the cultured, neither is our mission to the laboring man or to the poor. Our mission is simply to a man as a man. That a man bears the lineaments and possesses the needs of a man forms the union card in our fraternity. Of the church we shall say, as Roosevelt said of the White House, "The door of the church shall swing open as wide to any laborer as to any capitalist, but no wider." We shall have no economic program and form no tail to a socialistic kite, but we shall have a prophet's passion for righteousness, and no cry for equal rights against special privilege shall fall on deaf ears or find dumb lips. When this modern giant, blinking at the new light which has come to his eyes, fresh from his grappling with the beast of privilege, shall bear before us his wrongs and his beloved liberty in his arms, he shall find the thumbs of the Christian Brotherhood turned up in sympathy and pity, but he shall find more, - he shall hear the whole voice crying out to the modern Neros for life and liberty. We shall ever be Nathans, rebuking all kings who would take the lamb from the household of the poor man for the mills of the rich or who would force to the wall Naboth the gardener that they may add to the possessions of Ahab the monopolist. For to this end have we been born, we who have never known a bishop, we who have stripped from all ecclesiasticism the vestments of privilege and defied the pretense of the priest, Anglican and Roman alike.

This is not an easy path we shall tread, but it is the path of the Master, who stripped the robes from a Nicodemus and the rags from a Bartimeus and passed them through a common gate into the kingdom; whose greatest offense in life was that he recognized neither the pretense of the religious Pharisee nor the arrogance of the political Pilate, but measured each as a man. But make no mistake; it is not a path for dilettantes but for martyrs, for down at the end athwart the sky-line stands a Cross, - for the servant is not greater than his Lord. But it is worth while if

"There shall come, from out this noise and strife and groaning,
A broader and a juster brotherhood;

A deep equality of aim postponing

All selfish seeking to the general good.

There shall come a time when each shall to another

Be as Christ would have him, brother unto brother."