, for vague
war-cries--it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food--for
religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or
soil--it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud--and
between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think,
a very terrible difference indeed. But, quitting the vast variety of
mental developments, faiths, and _feelings_, let us cast a glance on the
general change which history has witnessed in man's physical condition.

First let us premise with certain general laws, that intelligence,
physical well-being and freedom have a decided affinity, and are most
copiously unfolded in manufacturing countries. That as labor is
developed and elaborated, it becomes allied to science and art, and, in
a word, 'respectable.' That as these advance it becomes constantly more
evident that he who strives to accomplish his labor in the most perfect
manner is continually becoming a man of science and an artist, and
rising to a well deserved intellectual equality with the 'higher
classes.' That, in fine, the tendency of industry--which in this age is
only a synonym for the action of capital--is towards Republicanism.

I have already remarked to the effect that so far as the welfare of man
in the future is concerned, it is to be regretted that hero-worship
should still influence men so largely. When Mr. Smith runs over his
scanty historical knowledge, things do not seem so bad on the whole with
anybody. Mark Antony and Coriolanus and Francis the First, the plumed
barons of the feudal days, and their embroidered and belaced ladies,
with the whole merrie companie of pages, fools, troubadours and heralds,
seem on the whole to have had fine times of it. 'Bloweth seed and
groweth mead'--assuredly the sun shone then as now, people wassailed or
wailed--oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But when we come to
the most unmistakable _facts_, all this sheen of gilded armor and
egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute, mandolin, and lay,
is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a leper. Pass over
the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then with the
multitude--with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact, your
knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid scents
and sounds which no modern private soldier would endure. The venison
pasty of high festival becomes the daily pork and mustard of home life,
w