896 JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS [Mar. 14,

ests is in the city of Baltimore, where it is most expensive to
live, and we feel that without some increase of our privileges,
so as to give us more time to do extra work, for which, of
course, we receive extra pay, that we cannot support our
families and educate our children as our pride would prompt
us to do. We want to be useful citizens, and we want to dis-
charge our social duties fully to society, as well as to our-
selves. We cannot rear and educate our children.as we
would like, to do it, unless we can get more money for our
honest labor; and this is the only lawful way, perhaps, in
which we can call upon you to assist us in it. The bone and
muscle of a people are, at all times, invaluable to a State,
and no people can be overworked without showing it in their
physiognomy and in their general structure. Whatever
frees, white it beautifies and adorns the human body, should,
in the habits of a people, become their rule. But whatever
frees them the most should also become their religion. It is
then, without irreverence, almost a religion with us to demand
from our employers, from time to time, and to solicit from the
Legislature, protection, in those matters which so nearly con-
cern our lives, our happiness; and our healths, of course.
For it is wilful, sinful, outrageous devastation of the soul it-
self—it is an absolute breaking down of the human spirit—
for a man to work too long from day to day in the
familiar and, to him, monotonous round in which he has to
move, in a business which, perhaps, does not present to his
mind one new feature, and which has in it no relief. These
things are wearing to the soul itself. Added to this constant
round of labor, the laboring man has his financial cares also,
as well aa the roan of millions. " It will thus be seen by your
Honorable Body that the task of the laboring man's life is
not a light one, and that he should be protected from the
encroaching exactions of Capital. So we say that these
efforts with us for our families, and the respectability in
which we may bring our children up—our boys to be honor-
able and intelligent members of society, and our daughters
to be pure and virtuous Christian women, themselves, in
turn, the mothers of like children, under the law—we say
that to do these things, and to protect our wives and our
daughters from the criminally vitiating influences of poverty,
and to secure our own health and our manhood at the same
time, becomes, with us, a sacred, religious duty, and that we
owe these efforts to ourselves and our families. And, with-
out troubling your Body with a longer memorial, we hope
that you will, at once, see the necessity for this law, and will,
at once, enact it. Capital, itself, will profit by it, because it
will secure to its entsrprises a much higher degree of fidelity