Excerpt from The Wage-Workers of America and the Relation of Capital to Labor It is said that all the laboring classes of the civilized world have been, and are, as a body poor. This is an incorrect statement, for the ques tion arises who are the poor and who are the rich Poverty and wealth are at best only relative states or conditions. When the ques tion is viewed philosophically, it is not proper to make a comparison from the standpoint of ownership. Or how much wealth one has, but conditions. One may be miserably poor and have plenty of money. Our object, however, is not to champion the cause of the poor with a View of making everybody rich, or to make the rich richer, or to take from them what by right belongs to them but what we contend for is justice, that all men may have an equal chance under the law of the land to acquire a competency, the same right that nature gives to every man. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.