HENRY WARD BEECHER ON THE WASTES AND BURDENS OF SOCIETY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5504, 16 November 1878, Page 3

HENRY WARD BEECHER ON THE WASTES AND BURDENS OF SOCIETY.

(From the Melbourne Daily Telegraph,.') The Kev. Henry Ward Beecher has been lecturing in San Francisco upon " The Wastes and Burdens of Sooiety," and told the immense audiences which gathered together to hear him some home truths, clothed in that earnest and eloquent language of which he is such a perfect master. California has had its Kearney, who told the people of that State that they were slaves, just as Sir Bryan O'Loghlen told the electors of West Melbourne that the people of this colony are. And animadverting upon such mischievous balderdash, Mr. Beecher remarked :

"You are hearing it bawled all over the country that the great mass of laboring men that create the property of the community are being trodden down into the dirt. They earn your wealth, and you grab' their land, and the top of society gobbles up everything they earn; they are suffering ; they are the slaves of capitalists and bloated bondholders ; of men that live at ease on the top of society. No man that brings merely hard manual labor to bear does more than ■ that; somebody has done the thinking for him, and he is merely doing the work of another man's thought. The man that only knows how to work with his hands, and not with his head, must be content to stand where the hoof stands, where the foot stands. He is at the bottom, and there is no lever that can raise him up. I say to all the workingmen throughout the land—lf you are intelligent and know how to organise dead matter into living powers by your intelligence, then you create property; but if you are mere appurtenances to men that organise the plan, that organise the machinery and all the proceeses, you cannot hope to bo on a footing of equality with the organisers. It is thrown out that men are slaves. I say that you are the slaves. I say that the ignorant man is the slave of the wise man the world over; that the animal man is subject to the intellectual and spiritual the world over. It is just as true of laboring men as of everything else."