A man in St. Louis purchased a sheep’s kidney for seven-and-a-half dollars.  In his rage at the price he exclaimed:  “As a public man I have given twenty of the best years of my life to bringing about a friendly understanding between capital and labor.  I have succeeded, and may God have mercy on my meddlesome soul!”

The remark was resented, a riot ensued, and when the sun went down that evening his last beams fell upon a city reeking with the blood of a hundred millionaires and twenty thousand citizens and sons of toil!

Students of the history of those troublous times need not to be told what other and more awful events followed that bloody reprisal.  Within forty-eight hours the country was ablaze with insurrection, followed by intestinal wars which lasted three hundred and seventy years and were marked by such hideous barbarities as the modern historian can hardly bring himself to relate.  The entire stupendous edifice of popular government, temple and citadel of fallacies and abuses, had crashed to ruin.  For centuries its fallen columns and scattered stones sheltered an ever diminishing number of skulking anarchists, succeeded by hordes of skin-clad savages subsisting on offal and raw flesh—­the race-remnant of an extinct civilization.  All finally vanished from history into a darkness impenetrable to conjecture.

* * * * *

In concluding this hasty and imperfect sketch I cannot forbear to relate an episode of the destructive and unnatural contest between labor and capital, which I find recorded in the almost forgotten work of Antrolius, who was an eye-witness to the incident.

At a time when the passions of both parties were most inflamed and scenes of violence most frequent it was somehow noised about that at a certain hour of a certain day some one—­none could say who—­would stand upon the steps of the Capitol and speak to the people, expounding a plan for reconciliation of all conflicting interests and pacification of the quarrel.  At the appointed hour thousands had assembled to hear—­glowering capitalists attended by hireling body-guards with firearms, sullen laborers with dynamite bombs concealed in their clothing.  All eyes were directed to the specified spot, where suddenly appeared (none saw whence—­it seemed as if he had been there all the time, such his tranquillity) a tall, pale man clad in a long robe, bare-headed, his hair falling lightly upon his shoulders, his eyes full of compassion, and with such majesty of face and mien that all were awed to silence ere he spoke.  Stepping slowly forward toward the throng and raising his right hand from the elbow, the index finger extended upward, he said, in a voice ineffably sweet and serious:  “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them.”