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over the whole Union. How did such a job come to be perpetrated?' I remember once asking a casual acquaintance who had been pointing out some scandalous waste of public money. 'Why, what can you expect from the politicians?' was the surprised answer. It is well understood that the business of politics across the Atlantic is a gainful profession. In the management of large cities, such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Ring and Bossdom, with its Mammon-hunt, wields such power, through alliance with the liquor saloons, as to control the votes of electors, secure the exclusion of good men, and perpetrate untold excesses of bribery, jobbery, and robbery. The best citizens are occupied with business, often too intent on their 'pile,' and the bosses are left to peculate corporation funds and fill offices with their creatures. If such a system were the product of democracy, there can be no doubt that, as Plato states it, the democratical man would be transformed into the tyrannical, and a despotism must follow. It is not, however, of the essence of democracy, but a separable accident due in a large measure to certain conditions, such as the existence of a Spoils System, opportunities for illicit gains arising out of the possession of office, the presence of a mass of ignorant and pliable voters, and the insufficient participation in politics of the good citizens-conditions that will disappear as a civic spirit is cultivated and the people acquire the art of selfgovernment. Although our commonwealth is exempt from such corruptions, it is marked by the same passion for wealth, and the same sordid craving for accumulation, place, and pleasure. Our chief danger at present arises from setting the highest value on riches. 'Where wealth accumulates and men decay' there cannot be national health. It must be rung into the ears of all that the true wealth of a State is men, not merchandise, that the true function of government is to foster the growth of good citizens, that material wealth is only of use when it contributes to the development of manhood, that our national prosperity is fruitful just as it distributes itself in many parts and harmonises all the elements of life. We must

recognise the reality of this great ideal, and all work to make it actual; we must learn that we have 'no rights but duties,' which can never be discharged in full. Men of property, capacity, and virtue have civic duties which it should be accounted dishonour to shirk or neglect. In all democracies the commonwealth suffers oftener from apathy and shortsightedness in the upper classes than from ignorance or recklessness in the humbler classes, who are always ready to follow when they are wisely and patriotically led. Men of worth, who know that there is a higher than selfish happiness, should strive to teach the people 'purer manners, nobler laws'; and if they refuse, as Plato and Carlyle agree, they must be made to govern. It is not noble for the Olive, the Vine, or the Fig in the State to hoard their own fatness and sweetness and leave King Bramble to set the whole forest on fire.

Other perils threaten the commonwealth from the existence of social and industrial warfare. We have still the spirit of Individualism causing hurt to general welfare; we have still an unrestrained and ruinous competition, which breeds discontent and anarchy. The education that brings intelligence and self-respect increases discontent with existing evils when there is a growing desire to remedy them. On the vision of the worker has dawned a higher ideal of life—that he too is a man, and that for him there ought to be a better and richer life; and with it has come a conviction that another order, industrial and social, ought to prevail. When the House of Have finds itself in sharp encounter with the House of Have Not, when the contrast stands out clear between wealth and poverty, comfort and want, brave men fear and wise men are perplexed, and all lovers of their country look around for counsel and help to heal this 'schism in the body,' which, if not healed, must end in death. Idealists solve the difficulty by constructing republics that have no private property, but that is only a counsel of perfection, and they cannot tell us how it is to be realised. There is a school of Socialism at present which thinks that a practical solution of the difficulty can be reached by extending

the sphere of the State to everything that may affect the public good. Its disciples look for the day when the State shall take over the land and means of industry, and shall undertake to grant to all persons equal rights to the stock and profits of the common fund. It may be that collective ownership of much that is at present entrusted to private enterprise will mark the industrial régime of the future, but State management as a remedy may be worse than the evil which it seeks to correct. It undervalues the individual, encroaches on individual rights, destroys self-reliance by making men dependent on what Government does and not on what they do themselves, and thus destroys the springs of national greatness. The plan which bestows upon society the right to exercise a despotism over the individual, to destroy individuality of character and independence of action, has not in it the ideal that will ever realise a perfect State. Men may be thus mechanically knit one to another, but this great army of dry bones will never stand upon its feet and walk, for no breath of heaven bids these dry bones live.

There is a truer Socialism, which declares man to be more than all his machines, even than the human commonwealth; which declares that every man has heritage in this world, that the good of each lies in the good of all, that possession is only stewardship, that to moral beings there are no rights but only duties, which seeks to replace a brotherhood of law by a brotherhood of love. The social and industrial changes we desire are to be reached, not by legal enactments, but through common feeling. No reform will heal social hurt while there is selfishness of heart. There will be no reign of justice till men are just, or of love till men are inspired with the charity of God. On every hand generous aspirations exist to secure among us a social order conformable to the truth of human brotherhood. When all men are brethren in deed and in truth, then will come to pass the ideal and actual Commonwealth, with its hierarchy of mutual service, its army of tamed passions, its invisible guard of ideal restraints, its

traditions of heroism, its hopes of greatness, its sympathy with the moral life of the world-itself the highest product of the providence of God, and the most impressive witness to the possibilities of man.'1

1 Hours of Thought, Martineau.

XVI.

THE CITY OF GOD.

WITH strange persistency men have in every age dreamt of a reign of justice, of a purified society, of an actual transformation of its elements into a true and blessed order; never have they ceased to form ideals of such an order, even though history has mocked them by making the actual worse. Plato wrote his Republic amid the corruption and impending destruction of the Greek States; he looked for a better, and doubtless the pattern which he brought from the mount of vision helped to stay his mind in evil days, while it has hovered like a cloud of glory above mankind ever since. Dante lived in still darker days; he saw the Church asleep and the commonwealths of Italy hastening to decay, yet in the Paradiso we see how he comforted himself amid the confusion of the time. It is the last great vision of his book, in which he comes to Mount Zion, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and from which he could look down on a troubled world, and say—

'Behold how vast the circuit of our city,

Behold our seats so filled to overflowing.'

Men must form ideals, and do this all the more because the days are evil. Some conception of the highest good of life, pure and permanent as the azure overhead, haunts our heart, and its presence in us may be taken as a prophecy of its fulfilment sometime and somewhere. After a thousand disappointments,

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