mily, but also the families of his neighbors, have access
to a superior library. And it is almost as necessary for your comfort
that your neighbor's children have access to a library as for your own.

While social evolution tends to relieve the individual of the
compulsion of law, and also to lessen the pressure of public opinion, in
those affairs that pertain only to his own life, correlatively his
action is more and more restricted in so far as it affects his neighbors
and society in general--though here, too, law and custom tend more and
more to individual freedom. It was once regarded as a public scandal not
to go to church; and 50 years ago in St. Louis Unitarians were shunned
as suspicious characters. But pari passu with the growth of individual
liberty has grown the recognition of the duty of society to see that all
persons have equal liberty--to protect the weak against the strong.
Nothing in Victoria's reign has done more for the progress of England
than the series of acts that have been passed to curb the greed of mine
and factory owners, to prevent them from coining the muscle and manhood
of Britain into gold--in a way that, at one period, threatened to
exhaust the vitality of the race--to kill the goose that lays the golden
eggs.

The whole history of mankind is a continuous struggle of the weak and
ignorant many to secure the rights withheld from them by the superior
strength and cunning of the few. The oppression and injustice of the
past are apparent to all; but many of us, like the conservative
antagonists of Cobden and Bright, fail to see anything seriously wrong
in the present; and, like them, we fear change. But it is the part of
wise men to welcome change as the natural order of the universe--to see
that it is a change for the better.

It does not by any means follow that every new idea is a good one, that
every proposed change would be an improvement. But as progress is the
law of the universe, it rests with the old order to show why it should
be continued. Wisdom, therefore, urges us to give careful consideration
to new ideas, however contrary they may be to prevalent opinions,
bearing in mind the frequent lesson of history that "the stone which the
builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner," and
approaching all questions in the spirit of St. Paul's injunction: "Prove
all things; hold fast that which is good." For all political and social
problems, which are the burning questio