Truly the remedy for these errors and evils has yet been perceived and embraced by comparatively few, but the conviction that the present organization of industry cannot be advantageously maintained, and some radical change is at hand, must have already forced itself upon very many intelligent and candid minds. The readjustment of the relations of capital and labor on a basis of harmony and mutual advantage, is manifestly the great problem of the age. But that a change is at hand is evident: the practical question regards not its probability or certainty, but its character.
The more intelligent and wealthy class have it in their power so to mould this change as to render it peaceful, gradual and universally beneficent; or they can turn a deaf ear to the calls of humanity, and let the demagogue, the envious, the selfishly discontented, pervert it into an engine of convulsion, destruction and desolation. As in the days of King John, the barons laid the foundations of English political liberty, so in our day the intellectual and philanthropic may guide the car of progress, and in establishing industrial harmony may secure to all but the stubbornly vicious or incurably afflicted, true independence and ample means of subsistence and development; or they can indolently leave all to the benighted and malignant, and see reproduced a war of classes, different indeed in its weapons and its physical aspects, but not different in its essential character from the ravages of France by the _Jacquerie_ or the butcheries of the reign of terror.
In this crisis of events, with an industrial war plainly threatened and partially commenced, the doctrine of Association appears as a mediator and reconciler. Its bow of promise shines broadly in the lurid sky; it irradiates the murky visage of the gathering, muttering tempest. It awakens a hope, and the only well grounded hope, of averting the miseries of an insane struggle between those who ought to be the closest allies, to see which can the more injure the other. Need I urge that in this crisis the friends of Association ought to be most earnest and untiring in the promulgation and advocacy of their faith; that they ought to improve the opportunities which are daily presented of commending the truth to others whose minds are but newly prepared to receive it? What Associationist so dull that he cannot improve every "strike," every collision respecting the hours or the wages of labor, to the advancement of the good cause?