constitutional malady, that the very life forces of a competitive civilization are feeding the cancerous tissue which spreads starvation, sickness, and sin. The proletariat is the waste thrown down by our industrial mechanism. The tramp, who developed a half-decade ago into such huge proportions, over whom the Social Science Associations were so perplexed, whom Legislatures sought to exorcise by laws recalling the Elizabethan statutes of blood and iron, proved after all a product of the industrial stagnation, and not of the total depravity of the workingman's heart, and has disappeared as a serious problem with the reopening of employment. The pauper was probably unknown in the early Communism, as he is certainly unknown now in our little American Communisms and in the Communes of Russia. Even the lazy learn to work there without stocks or stone-breaking.* I had occasion to study the facts of the social evil, some years ago, in aiding to found a midnight mission; and I learned, that which all who have looked into the matter probably know,- that insufficient wages, unsteady employment, enforced idleness, too early commencement of labor in childhood, and consequent defectiveness of education, the withdrawal of motherly influence from the home under the necessity of woman's work to eke out the support of the family,- direct results all of our industrial system,― have more to do with prostitution than has lust. Who that has looked below the surface of the problem of intemperance does not know that it is not so much a crime to be repressed by statutory prohibition as a disease to be cured by better homes, purer air, more wholesome food, less wearing work, less carking cares, and greater interest and pleasure in the daily labor,-conditions withheld in our individualistic system from the great mass of laborers. We may deplore the existing morals of trade, and try all the alleviations Mr. Spencer suggests in his admirable essay; but the demoralization will continue as long as the homely *The Communistic Societies of the United States. Charles Nordhof. p. 395. Russia. D. Mackenzie Wallace. Chs. VIII. and IX. description given by Tregarva remains true to facts: "Go where you will, in town or country, you'll find half a dozen shops struggling for a custom that would only keep up one; and so they're forced to undersell one another. And, when they've got down prices all they can, by fair means, they're forced to get them down lower by foul, to sand the sugar and sloe-leave the tea and put Satan only that prompts them knows what into the bread; and then they don't thrive, they can't thrive. God's curse must be on them. They begin by trying to oust each other and eat each other up; and, while they're eating up their neighbors, their neighbors eat up them; and so they all come to ruin together." * All these social evils strike down their tap-roots beneath the very groundwork of our civilization. They are the sequela of the fever of individualism firing the social system. The tremendous force of selfishness, once freed from the strong box in which Communism shut it up. threw off the venerable bonds of fellowship, broke through the sacred laws of morality, and developed a fierceness of greed which became a root of all evil, socially. Selfishness has proven itself the nullification of true order in a general "ooze and thaw of wrong." What a terrific indictment of our economical system is presented in the simplest statement of the results of ages of competitive civilization! A few living in idle luxury, the great mass toiling slavishly from ten to eighteen hours a day; the producers of all wealth receiving just enough to keep above the hunger level; ‡ women taking the place of men in the weary work of the factory,§ consuming the mothering powers of body, mind, and soul, wherein lie the hopes of humanity;|| children, who should be accumulating in wise play the capital for life, discounting it in advance *Yeast. Charles Kingsley. Ch. XXV. tOn Labor. W. T. Thornton. Intro., p. 21. State of Labor in Europe. Intro. § Even in our new and thinly settled land, the Census Report of 1870 shows one million eight hundred and thirty-six thousand two hundred and eighty-eight females employed in all industries. || Sex in Industry. Azel Ames, Jr., M.D. pp. 41-54. in prolonged and unwholesome tasks;* mechanism competing with manhood in the "labor market," crowding man out from the cunning crafts in which he once won his best education, sinking him to the cheap mechanical attendant upon the costly intelligent automaton; † the greed of gain stimulating a cut-throat competition, which undersells men where it used to sell them, schools the business world in the arts of fraud,§ prostitutes government to the moneylust of the wealthy, || converts trade into what a Parliamentary report frankly called "war," ¶ lays waste nations in the strategic campaigns of this most desolating of struggles,** and periodically collapses wealth in bankruptcy; †† the inspiration of selfishness giving to the world a revelation of natural law which formulates over this disorder the Codex Satanis, sets up against the authority of the Mount the authority of the market, rules out ethical law from the basic * United States Census for 1870 showed ten per cent. of the total number of women employed in industries to be under fifteen years of age,- i.e., one hundred and ninetyone thousand. Mr. Charles L. Brace estimated, in 1872, that from fifteen hundred to two thousand children under fifteen years of age were employed in New York City in one branch, the manufacture of paper collars. In tobacco factories, he found children of four years of age employed, sometimes half a dozen in one room. He quotes Mr. Mundella as saying that the evils of children's overwork are as great here as in England. Cf. Dangerous Classes of New York. C. L. Brace. Ch. XXIX. How great this evil is in England is best expressed by the fact that Mrs. Browning's "Cry of the Children" is a wail drawn out by investigations made, as in "The Cry of the Children in the Brick Yards of England" and in parliamentary reports. Children were found of three and one-half years in the brick fields; girls of nine carrying lumps of clay on their heads, weighing forty pounds, for thirteen hours a day; children working sixteen hours a day in Lancashire mills for six days, and then spending six hours on Sunday in cleaning the machinery, the Lancashire hymn teaching the little ones to sing on the Day of Rest: "I must work, but must not play, Before the Hewitt Committee, one man testified to seeing a child carried on its father's back to work in a factory. + Principles of Political Economy. Mill. II., 340. Cf. Testimony presented before the Hewitt Congressional Committee, pp. 108, 232, etc. Mr. Carey, in 1874, estimated the power of steam in Great Britain at six hundred million men,- with what displacement of labor in a land of thirty million must be imagined, since it is not yet tabulated, I believe. Mr. Jas. Caird estimates that one hundred reaping-machines displaces one thousand men. + Mr. Evarts, in the Introduction to the State of Labor in Europe, holds out as the magnificent destiny of this country a girding of all its energies to the sublime task of selling cheaper than Europe.... When the heathen Chinee" enters this race with machinery, as he is preparing to do, what a vista of the industrial millennium will open! State of Labor, p. 37. § Cf. the writer's Morals of Trade. Cf. The Tariff Legislation and Railroad Subsidies in our Congress. **Social Science and National Economy. R. E. Thompson. pp. 240, 241, 308, 309, 359, 362, etc. tt Panics are now reduced to terms of law, and take their place in the due order of civillzation in recurrent cyles of about ten years. sphere of life, sustains all appeals of avarice from the court of equity, narcotizes conscience with the statutes of irresponsibility, and leaves to the blind working of demand and supply the equation of the conditions of life for the great mass of human beings;* society vainly striving to correct with the left hand of charity the wrongs which the right hand of injustice is creating; † our very progress whirling us along at a rate that strains all bands of fellowship, exhausts the endurance of the feeble, and flinging off their relaxing grasp hurls them out into the débris of soul dust that strews the pathway of our world through time. Well might John Stuart Mill confess that such facts "make out a frightful case either against the existing order of society, or against the position of man himself in this world." We are tempted to call the science of such a soci ety "the philosophy of despair resting on an arithmetic of ruin." § VIII. Is society, then, hopelessly retrograding? By no means. Dark as is this picture, it is the shadow-depth cast by the strong white light of our high noon of civilization, which tells of a new phase of social revolution opening beyond the meridian. With our eyes upon the long, slow pendulum swing of the historic movement of society, we recognize the significance of the disorders of our civilization, and discern the secret of their correction. Between individualism and Communism, society has oscillated in rhythmic alternations, whose sweeps have been counted by ages, each movement carrying humanity into conditions fatal to its continuance, and then being drawn slowly back by polar forces only to swing out into the antipodal extreme; civilization mounting higher through these successive reactions, and centring toward the golden mean, the happy equipoise of these two essential forces. Feeling only the sweep of this force of Cf. any of the orthodox English economists on prices, wages, etc. + In England, where the charities are ubiquitous and the pauperism has steadily increased until lately, one is almost forced to see this relation. Cf. The Peasantry of England. F. T. Heath. Ch. I. Chapters on Socialism (Posthumous Fragment). § Manual of Social Science. H. C. Carey. p. 486. individualism, we might imagine civilization rushing into certain destruction, as many prophesy; but below the surface currents there pulse, even now, to our perception, the forces of an opposite movement, long gathering head and at last checking the centrifugal rush of society; and, out in the aphelion of its pathway, the orbit of civilization rounds into a new sweep down "the ringing grooves of change backward toward Communism. IX. This is the meaning of the recoil everywhere making itself felt from the economic system in which has been formulated the principles of our order; of the stir in the deep under-waters of society, setting steadily against the whole trend of competitive civilization. This new movement assumes different forms, and takes different names in different lands. It mingles itself in some countries with political currents, as in Russia; and occasionally loses any distinctively economic character in a wild outburst of all the turbulent elements, a civic craze, as in the war of the Parisian Commune in 1871, when the stream suddenly becomes a whirlpool, and sucks all counter-currents into a maddening vortex that engulfs society. Substantially, however, Russian Nihilism, German Socialism, French Communism (distinguishable always from the purely political system of the commune, civic autonomy), English Trades-Unionism, and the legion varieties of labor organizations in our own country, are the changing crystallizations of the huge mass characterized by the Nation as "the party of discontent." The discontent is often groundless, as against society, being caused in reality by the personal faults and follies of the discontented, by the "laws mighty and brazen " which press so hard round all life. It is often inflamed by ignorance and diverted by dem. agogism from its legitimate aim to further selfish schemes. Not unfrequently, also, it is the cloak under which dishonesty seeks to shirk its just responsibilities. Nevertheless, at bottom, this discontent grounds itself upon the admitted evils of our civilization. There is thus massing over against our |