How Few Remain Read Online Free PDF

nothing.’
    “And what of our United States, which were, if nothing else, left all free when the Rebels departed from the Union?” Lincoln went on. “Are we—are you—all free now? Do we—do you—enjoy the great and glorious blessings of liberty the Founding Fathers fondly imagined would be the birthright of every citizen of our Republic?
    “Or are we returning to the unhappy condition in which we found ourselves in the years before the War of Secession? Do not our capitalists in New York, in Chicago, yes, and in Denver, look longingly at their Confederate brethren in Richmond, in Atlanta, in new and brawling Birmingham, and wish they could do as do those brethren?
    “Are we not once more becoming a nation half slave, half free, my friends? Does not the capitalist eat bread gained by the sweat of
your
brows, as the slavemaster does by virtue—and there’s a word turned on its ear!—of the labor of his Negroes?” Lincoln had to stop then, for the shouts that rose up were fierce and angry.
    “You know your state, your condition,” he continued when he could. “You know I tell you nothing but the truth. Time was in this country when a man would be hired labor one year, his own man the next, and hiring laborers to work for him the year after that. Such days, I fear, are over and done. On the railroads, in the mines, in the factories, one man’s a magnate, and the rest toil for him. If you go to your boss and tell him you have not got enough to live on, the boss will tell you, ‘Live on it and like it, or I’ll put a Chinaman or an Italian or a Jew in your place and you can learn to live on nothing.’ “
    A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had shown before. Fury didn’t last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than angerto flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.
    “What do we do about it, Abe?” shouted a miner still grimy from his long day of labor far below ground.
    “What do we do?” Lincoln repeated. “The Democrats had their day, and a long day it was, from my time up until President Blaine’s inauguration last month. Did they do a thing, a single solitary thing, to help the lot of the working man?” He smiled at the cries of
No!
before going on, “And Blaine, too, though the good Lord knows I wish him well, has railroad money in his pockets. How much labor can hope for from him, I do not know.
    “But I know this, my friends: when the United States were a house divided before, they were divided, and did divide, along lines of geography. No such choice avails us now. The capitalists cannot secede as the slavemasters did. If we are not satisfied with our government and the way it treats its citizens, we have the revolutionary right and duty to overthrow it and substitute one that suits us better, as our forefathers did in the days of George III.”
    That brought a storm of applause. Men stomped on the floor, so that it shook under Lincoln’s feet. Someone fired a pistol in the air, deafeningly loud in the closed hall. Lincoln held up both hands. Slowly, slowly, quiet crawled back. Into it, he said, “I do not advocate revolution. I pray it shall not be necessary. But if the old order will not yield to justice, it shall be swept aside. I do not threaten, any more than a man who says he sees a tornado coming. Folks can take shelter from it, or they can run out and play in it. That is up to them. You, friends, you are a tornado. What happens next is up to the capitalists.” He stepped away from the podium.
    Joe McMahan pumped his hand. “That was powerful stuff, Mr. Lincoln,” he said. “Powerful stuff, yes indeed.”
    “For which I thank you,” Lincoln said, raising his voice to be heard through the storm of noise that went on and on.
    “Ask you something, Mr. Lincoln?” McMahan said. Lincoln nodded. McMahan leaned closer, so only the former president would hear. “You ever come across