THE poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form an union and exert their strength - ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This. however, has been known, by the great, to be the temper of mankind, and they have accordingly laboured, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter.
John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law No. 1, August 12, 1765
[It’s Labor Day in the U.S.A., and it might be a good time to consider what we have been losing. Inequality is greater now than in colonial days, and if we needed unions then we certainly need them now.]
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