LINCOLN AND THE SOCIALISTS.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 29, 22 September 1911, Page 9

LINCOLN AND THE SOCIALISTS.

In his message to Congress in December, 1861, Lincoln said: "Labor is prior to and. independent of capital. Ca.pital is only the fruit of labor, and cooild never have existed first. Labor is the superior of capita], and deserves much the higher consideration." Naturally, this would have pleased Karl Marx, who was then an exile in London, engaged in writing Capital, and in, directing the growing SocialistLabor movement. Our Civil War box© most disastrously upon England's great cotton industry, and we!J-to-dq._opinioji there sympathised with the South. In a speech at Newcastle-on-Tyne, in Oc-

The'great American orator (deceased), whose speeches and essays sell by the million. (Read speech on page 4.)

toher, 1862, Gladstone declared that the Southern, leaders "have made an army ; they aa'o making a navy ; and they have, made what is more than either —the 3 T have made a nation," whiefi seemed to foreshadow recognition of the Confederacy by the English Government. Before the end of the year, indeed, such recognition was deemed imminent. Now Socialist history assorts that this recognition of the Confederacy, which would have been a hard blow to the North, was defeated only by the protests of English work-ing-men in mass meetings at London, Manchester and elsewhere, which were astutely instigated by Karl Marx, partly out of admiration for President Lincoln. Other history may shako its head rather dubiously over this extreme claim j but everybody knows that a great deal of all history is more or less dubious. We like tlxe version that a bold, humane, true'word spoken by Lincoln and caroming upon the brain of an exiled enthusiast on the other sid<s of the world —of 'whose existence perhaps he liad never heard—was really what saved the day.—Philadelphia "Saturday Post."