wish his destiny other, and yet I have often thought that
I would fain exchange my share in this serene and golden day for a place in that
stormy epoch of transition, when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and
revealed to the kindling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall
that had closed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of
light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have lived then,
when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuries trembled,
was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?
    You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of
revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social traditions
and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order worthy of rational and
human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their habits, they became co-workers,
and found in fraternity, at once, the science of wealth and happiness. What
shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed? stated as a problem
beginning and ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when
once it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal standpoint,
What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed? - its
difficulties vanished.
    Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity, of
attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual standpoint,
but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist and employer than not
alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last vestige of the serfdom of man to
man disappeared from earth. Human slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was
killed. The means of subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by
employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as
among children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any longer to
use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the only sort of
gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There was no more either arrogance or
servility in the relations of human beings to one another. For the first time
since the creation every man stood up straight before God. The fear of want and
the lust of gain became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and
immoderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were no more beggars
nor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation. The ten commandments
became well-nigh obsolete in