ral ease, pleasure, and amusement,--and the other,
incessant toil, with the absence of every privilege and blessing of
human existence. Life thus divided, we aristocrats keep the good for
ourselves and our children, and distribute the evil as the lot of the
general mass of mankind. The desire to monopolize and to dominate is the
most rooted form of human selfishness; it is the hydra with many heads,
and, cut off in one place, it puts out in another.

"Nominally, the great aristocratic arrangement of American society has
just been destroyed; but really, I take it, the essential _animus_ of
the slave system still exists, and pervades the community, North as well
as South. Everybody is wanting to get the work done by somebody else,
and to take the money himself; the grinding between employers and
employed is going on all the time, and the field of controversy has only
been made wider by bringing in, a whole new class of laborers. The Irish
have now the opportunity to sustain their aristocracy over the negro.
Shall they not have somebody to look down upon?

"All through free society, employers and employed are at incessant feud;
and the more free and enlightened the society, the more bitter the feud.
The standing complaint of life in America is the badness of servants;
and England, which always follows at a certain rate behind us in our
social movements, is beginning to raise very loudly the same complaint.
The condition of service has been thought worthy of public attention in
some of the leading British prints; and Ruskin, in a summing up article,
speaks of it as a deep ulcer in society,--a thing hopeless of remedy."

"My dear Mr. Theophilus," said my wife, "I cannot imagine whither you
are rambling, or to what purpose you are getting up these horrible
shadows. You talk of the world as if there were no God in it, overruling
the selfishness of men, and educating it up to order and justice. I do
not deny that there is a vast deal of truth in what you say. Nobody
doubts, that, in general, human nature _is_ selfish, callous, unfeeling,
willing to engross all good to itself, and to trample on the rights of
others. Nevertheless, thanks to God's teaching and fatherly care, the
world has worked along to the point of a great nation founded on the
principles of strict equality, forbidding all monopolies, aristocracies,
privileged classes, by its very constitution; and now, by God's
wonderful providence, this nation has been brough