The question of the times

Abstract

Introduction: Standing amid the realities of this present and viewing with watchful eye the national highway on which we have been traveling we see it strewn with the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, the struggles and triumphs of the human race. We see the “countess son’s of Toil” perishing miserably because of unrequited labor. We see a favored few entrenched in the throws of justice and holding in their mighty grasp the destiny of forty million people. We see children coupled by necessity stern and relentless as fate itself, to make their playground in the gutter, and in the tender years of childhood to pass the schoolhouse on their way to the mines and factories, there to labor through the long weary hours of the day for barely enough to sustain life. Utterly deprived of an education, the only means that will ever enable the race to break the shackles that for centuries has bound them to the rock of ignorance and made them the servile slaves of the millionaire.