 maintained, but the iron-bound environment of humanity,
and it was merely a question of the thickness of their skulls when they would
discover the fact and make up their minds to endure what they could not cure.
    The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen's aspirations
were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but there were grounds to
fear that they would not discover this fact until they had made a sad mess of
society. They had the votes and the power to do so if they pleased, and their
leaders meant they should. Some of these desponding observers went so far as to
predict an impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed to
the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into
chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to
climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort in historic and prehistoric times
possibly accounted for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium. Human history,
like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning.
The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the
imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a
yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward
from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization
only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
    This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men among my
acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times, adopted a very similar
tone. It was no doubt the common opinion of thoughtful men that society was
approaching a critical period which might result in great changes. The labor
troubles, their causes, course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the
public prints, and in serious conversation.
    The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more strikingly
illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from the talk of a small band of
men who called themselves anarchists, and proposed to terrify the American
people into adopting their ideas by threats of violence, as if a mighty nation
which had but just put down a rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to
maintain its political system, were likely to adopt a new social system out of
fear.
    As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of things, I
naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. The particular grievance I had
against the working classes at the time of which I write, on
