MOB AND THE LAW.

By FRED ELLIOTT, of Monmouth College.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

The second-prize orator of 1896 is another example of energy and perseverance. Fred Elliott was born at Monmouth, Illinois, February 2, 1870, where he lived on a farm until fourteen years of age. After spending two years in a small academy and the high school at Lenox, he entered Monmouth College. His resources being limited, he was obliged to teach school several terms, and a year was spent as bookkeeper in the Bank of Essex, Iowa, when he was enabled to reenter college, from whence he graduated in 1896. Mr. Elliott has always been fond of public speaking, and during his college course he entered every literary contest to which he was eligible,-eight in number. Of these he won first honors five times; second twice, and third once. Much of his success in oratory is due to the excellent training he received in the Eccritean Literary Society, which society he twice represented in inter-society debates, winning honors in both essay and oratory. After graduation he took a course in the Theological Seminary at Xenia, Ohio, and is now pastor of the United Presbyterian Church at Waterloo, Iowa.

THE ORATION.

Delivered at the Inter-State Oratorical Contest at Topeka, Kansas, May 7, 1896, taking second honors. Judges: Thought and Composition, ANGELL, CORNELL, GRAVES. Delivery: REED, YOUNG, WARNER.

Society is a strange commingling of human souls. It is many, yet one: a sea of countless adverse currents, which has no level, and shall experience no calm till thought shall cease, and passion die within the human breast.

Men are not equal, nor can any social regu

lation make them so. be the problem of the widely differing classes may be united for the common good; how the inequality of condition may be compensated by securing the inherent rights of intelligent manhood. This is the mission of the state; this the exalted purpose of the law.

Yet it will never cease to

ages to discover how the

To accomplish this end, the most powerful impulses of human nature must be subdued. By nature, man's first care is self, his first desire, present, his first motive, passion. But by loyalty to law, we must acknowledge that the community is above the individual, that tomorrow is better than today, that we live not for self but for humanity, and that back of all reason and sentiment there is an eternal right; for these are the principles that render law supreme and society enduring. And no matter how intense the feeling, how inflamed the passions, or rebellious the spirit, there is a power in law to check violence and enforce submission. But when the storm is past and society resumes again the arts of peace, inflexible law becomes mobile at the touch of progress, and the master of destiny becomes the parent of industry.

But we cannot claim infallibility for the law. The state is never greater than its statesmen; and while statesmen are corrupt, the law must still bear witness to their crimes. Legal action

will be delayed or taken in ruinous haste. Wise measures will be defeated, and disastrous ones confirmed. Nationalism will be subordinated to sectionalism, and justice itself bartered for whatever vice will pay. Until every trace of human infirmity is removed from men, the law must remain an eternal compromise. Legislative halls will be but the battle-fields of the classes, and law but the terms of peace agreed upon.

The first great principle of law is, that men are morally identical; that reason for one is reason for every other; that no man is to be privileged in crime, or denied the common protection of the state. This is the distinctive principle of civilized society. Without it civilization reverts to barbarism and government becomes but an instrument of force. It presents the only true sense of human equality, the only basis of permanent organization. But there is no principle of government more constantly violated than this. Indeed, there is scarce a crime in the whole calendar of iniquity which is not a direct violation of this broad principle of humanity. If the moral identity of men were as completely the sentiment of the people as it is the spirit of the law,-wars, rapine, riot and bloodshed would cease among us and be known only among the savage and insane. But such is not the case. Human nature still asserts itself, crime is everywhere prevalent, and law is subjected to every indignity.

We would gladly explain our social wrongs by

tracing them to an ignorant and vicious foreign class. But the blame must not all rest there. True, Hungarian nihilists make a Haymarket tragedy possible; Italian outlaws find their way into New Orleans politics; the Clan-na-Gael is involved in the darkest plot of modern crime; the Chinese congregate where white men dare not enter. Law is evaded, trampled upon, openly defied; but while deprecating these abuses and demanding "America for Americans," we ourselves are capable of producing a lynching party, more senseless and shameful than all the rest. True it is that if we scratch the surface of society, we find barbarism beneath it. We see that atavism which reaches back through the silent ages and resurrects brutal passions which seem to belie divine origin for the race. Mankind, the noblest of all creation, and yet in the very face of his Creator he hurls back the wretched libel and proclaims himself nature's solitary-libertine.

What a shameful blot upon our national life is the lynching party! For it is distinctively an American institution. Its birthplace was among those rugged mountaineers whose summary justice created order ere yet there was society. But if it had a mission there, it has no mission here. Its only significance today is, that those who participate in such crimes are, and acknowledge themselves to be, incapable of performing the simplest functions of self-government.

An evil of greater significance is the growing prevalence and severity of our labor difficulties.

Forty years ago Macaulay predicted concerning our free institutions that when the day of our Manchesters and Birminghams should arrive, our democratic institutions would prove inadequate to the task of securing order and maintaining freedom; and we should be compelled either to sacrifice our civilization to save our freedom, or to surrender our freedom to preserve our civilization. The day of our Manchesters and Birminghams has arrived. Industrial conflicts with their violence and bloodshed have come. Shall we confess weakness, or shall we prove equal to the emergency, and add one more conquest to the triumph of democracy?

We deplore the conflicts of industry, but we shall never outgrow them. When labor can live without capital, and capital exist without labor, then shall the strife be ended, and not before. It is a chronic ailment which it is the province of diplomacy, not to cure, but to alleviate. Economy may reach just conclusions and propose needed reforms; but its logic is not equal to all the phases of this great question of civil order. The passions and sentiments of the people are involved as well as their reason; and in this fact lies the great difficulty of the labor problem. It is not because law is inadequate that we suffer these periodic disturbances, not because of constitutional weakness in the government, but be