Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Rome, and they were established in England by the Romans and thus probably gave rise to the mediæval guilds.

Ward, to whom I have referred, gives a list of thirty-five trades unions existing at one time under the law of Constantine. All the stone cutting, mason work, everything in the way of art was done by the unions. The victualing systems were carried on by unions, as well as the manufacturing trades. There were also unions of players among the Greeks and the Romans. We have heard something of the influence of St. Crispin in this commonwealth. They had a powerful trade union in the olden time. The story of the origin is too long to be repeated, but it grew out of the persecution of two brothers named Crispin and Crispinian. These Crispins offended by embracing christianity, settled in Soissons and preached by day and made shoes in the evening. They were finally executed by Maximian, but they had first founded the order of Crispins which exists at the present time.

There was a remarkable and curious trade union of patch-workers and junkmen or rag-pickers. This is shown by inscriptions to have existed. The image makers are perhaps among the most interesting in ancient history. These organizations worked for the gods, the Pagan objecting to the new religion because christianity repudiated idolatry. Thus they fought christianity because it interfered with idol, amulet, palladium and temple drapery manufacture.

The trades unions were organized of skilled workers, and they directed their talents to the protection of the Pagan priesthood with its innumerable images and Pagan worship. It is remarkable that most of the work in the times of which we are speaking was performed by trades unions instead of isolated individuals, as in our modern age. The ancient people were then fairly prosperous both during war and peace. All labor was humiliating, and this made it easier for the governing powers to encourage trades unions, for the State was their great employer.

It is quite evident that the labor organizations of ancient times had a good effect in an economical way, but the members were branded by the political and religious jealousy of Paganism as wretches, so they could take no part in any political question by which the system of organization could be developed, all the power being in the employers. Those who gave up Paganism saw in the birth of christianity a new source or a new power for the development, and it is now contended that Christ himself was a member of a trade organization of some kind, and that he sought to regenerate the earth or to bring heaven on earth through such organization, by removing the humiliation under which the laborer worked, bringing him to realize the social results of developed organization and thus enabling him to see that his true salvation depended upon lifting himself out of the cramped conditions in which he lived. All agree as to what Christ sought to do on earth, but all will not agree that he used for his means the trade organizations of his day, although he may have been a member of one or more of them. Coming as he did from the ranks of labor it is reasonable to suppose that he worked with them in their organizations.

From this brief statement relative to trades unions in ancient times, it is seen that they more nearly resembled the modern trade union than the mediæval organizations, for the ancient unions were economic in their purposes, regulating or seeking to regulate, conditions of labor and the control or monopoly of trades. This allies them more closely with the modern trades unions.

GEORGE F. HOAR.

BY EDWARD E. HALE.

THE PRESIDENT of the Society has asked me to prepare a paper for our records, on what I will call the literary life of Senator Hoar. By this the President and I both mean, some notice, however brief, of his literary and historical interests. Of these he never lost sight even in the darkest gloom of the great political questions of half a century. He says himself in a sentence which is pathetic, "Down to the time when I was admitted to the bar, and, indeed for a year later, my dream and highest ambition were to spend my life as what is called an office lawyer, making deeds, and giving advice in small transactions. I supposed I was absolutely without capacity for public speaking."

So little does a man know himself. So little does a young man forecast his own future. I can remember those days. And I know how sincere this statement of his is. He really thought that he could not speak extemporaneously, and yet I lived to hear him make some of the most quick retorts which were ever listened to in either house of Congress.

He says, "I expected never to be married; perhaps to earn twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, which would enable me to have a room of my own in some quiet house and to collect rare books which could be had without much cost."

It was at that early period that I first knew him and from that early period till he died, I may say that we were near friends. I have a certain right, therefore, to speak of the underlying tastes and principles which asserted

themselves in the fifty-five years of life which followed on his entrance at the bar. I remember hearing someone laugh at the advice which he gives to young men who would prepare for public life. Some one had asked what was the best training for a public speaker, and quite unconsciously Mr. Hoar replied that if a young man wanted to be a public speaker he would do well to read the Greek orators in the original language. There is something a little droll in the thought of such advice as given to what the public calls a "rail splitter" or a "bobbin boy." But he said it perfectly unconsciously. I suppose he was thinking of his own young life and he knew very well that what Mr. Adams calls the Greek fetish is a fetish very easily conciliated. I remember him the first winter he was in Worcester, as preferring to read Plato in the original to going into the pleasant evening society of the town, so that it was with some little difficulty that we youngsters made him take his part in social entertainments. Almost to the day of his death he maintained such early studies, which were, indeed, no longer studies.

By the kindness of Mr. Rockwood Hoar, I have here his unpublished translation of Thucydides. When of late years you called upon him of a sudden at his own home, you were as apt as not to find him standing at his desk and advancing that translation by a few lines, or revising it. Indeed, he reverenced the masters in whatever line of literature or life. You never met him but he surprised you by some apt quotation, perhaps from somebody you had never heard of, and it seems to me fair to say that the wide range of such reading is to be rememhered at once as cause and effect in that sunny cheerfulness, confidence, and courage which everyone has noted who has attempted. to give any analysis or discussion of his character.

As I have spoken of the translation of Thucydides, I ought to say that I do not believe he had any thought of publishing it. He did not mean to throw discredit in any

way upon the translations which existed. But rather, he meant, if I may use the phrase, to bind himself to the determination that he would once more read Thucydides and would read him carefully. I do not know, I wish someone would tell us, who first called Thucydides's history "the hand book of statesmen." Within intelligible limits, I think, perhaps, Mr. Hoar would have accepted that phrase. In making one more version into English of the great historian, however, he was working to please himself, without any care or thought as to whether his work was or was not a better literary work than Jowett's or Dale's, or any other translator's. I like to say this because there was not in him the least of that eagerness to have everything published which is one of the superficial absurdities of our time.

With such tastes and habits he was glad to accept the invitations which he received right and left to address the literary societies of the colleges. A collection of such addresses, many of them elaborate in their detail, would in itself make a very interesting volume of the history of the higher education. I have an address at Amherst on the "Place of the College Graduate in American Life," with the date of 1879. In an address before the Law Class of the Howard University he spoke on "The Opportunity of the Colored Leader." At the anniversary of the Yale Law School he spoke on the "Function of the American Lawyer in the Founding of States."

His addresses at Plymouth on Forefather's Day, his Eulogy on Garfield, delivered in this city, his address on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of Worcester, his address at the dedication of the Public Library in Lincoln, Massachusetts, his address on Robert Burns, his address on Emer son, are to be spoken of as studies of permanent value When in 1888 the state of Ohio celebrated its own centen nial, Mr. Hoar was very properly requested by the authorities in Ohio to deliver the oration as representing the State

« AnteriorContinuar »