
forefathers conceived a state of society in which men should live together like
brethren dwelling in unity, without strifes or envying, violence or
overreaching, and where, at the price of a degree of labor not greater than
health demands, in their chosen occupations, they should be wholly freed from
care for the morrow and left with no more concern for their livelihood than
trees which are watered by unfailing streams, - had they conceived such a
condition, I say, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They
would have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed that there could
possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired or striven for.
    But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up to?
Already we have well-nigh forgotten, except when it is especially called to our
minds by some occasion like the present, that it was not always with men as it
is now. It is a strain on our imaginations to conceive the social arrangements
of our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque. The solution of the problem
of physical maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to
us an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like real
human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless
harassment which hindered our ancestors from undertaking the real ends of
existence. We are merely stripped for the race; no more. We are like a child
which has just learned to stand upright and to walk. It is a great event, from
the child's point of view, when he first walks. Perhaps he fancies that there
can be little beyond that achievement, but a year later he has forgotten that he
could not always walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he
moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but only as a
beginning, not as the end. His true career was but then first entered on. The
enfranchisement of humanity in the last century, from mental and physical
absorption in working and scheming for the more bodily necessities, may be
regarded as a species of second birth of the race, without which its first birth
to an existence that was but a burden would forever have remained unjustified,
but whereby it is now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on
a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very
existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. In place of
the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound pessimism as to
the
