a world where there was no temptation to theft, no
occasion to lie either for fear or favor, no room for envy where all were equal,
and little provocation to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure
one another. Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked
by so many ages, at last was realized.
    As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had been
placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, so in the new
society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking found themselves out of
joint with the world. Now that the conditions of life for the first time ceased
to operate as a forcing process to develop the brutal qualities of human nature,
and the premium which had heretofore encouraged selfishness was not only
removed, but placed upon unselfishness, it was for the first time possible to
see what unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,
which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an extent,
now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler qualities showed
a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into panegyrists and for the first time
in human history tempted mankind to fall in love with itself. Soon was fully
revealed, what the divines and philosophers of the old world never would have
believed, that human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that
men by their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish, pitiful,
not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations, instinct with
divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not
the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The constant pressure, through
numberless generations, of conditions of life which might have perverted angels,
had not been able to essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and
these conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its
normal uprightness.
    To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me compare
humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered with black
bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled with poison dews at
night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had done their best to make it
bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened bud with a worm at the heart, their
efforts had been unsuccessful. Many, indeed, claimed that the bush was no
rosebush at all, but a noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The
gardeners, for the most part, however, held that