they
even struggle to wring from them the largest possible amount of work for
the smallest possible pay! Day by day they grow more exacting as they
grow wealthier; day by day the laboring orders sink into more harassing
and hopeless conditions. Had the functions of Government in our own
country and in England been those only of protection to persons and
property; had not the general and local authorities in some degree
assisted the oppressed toilers; had not the Church by her admonitions
and pleadings kept some sparks of feeling alive in the breast of the
people of this money-getting age, and stimulated somewhat their
benevolence, the laboring classes of England and America would long
since have sunk to utter destitution. Nor would this have been all. For
when the mass of the people reach such a point; when they are driven to
despair, as they are now fast being driven, and would long ago have been
driven but for the circumstances stated, then comes the terrible
reaction, the frightful revolution, the upheaval of all order, anarchy,
and--who shall tell what else? The Riot of July is still ringing its
solemn warning--all unheeded--in the ears of this people. Society has
yet and speedily to lift the masses out of their ignorance, poverty,
squalor, and accompanying brutality, or to sink awfully beneath their
maddened retaliation.

In thus criticizing the Industrial Polity of modern times as, in the
respects indicated, inferior to that of the Feudal System, the writer
does not wish to be understood as affirming any more than is really
said. The idea which it is desired to express is this: that the plan
upon which this system was founded--the mutual interdependence of
classes and their reciprocally cooeperative labor--was far superior to
the method of Competitive Industry now in vogue; and the true type--when
rightly carried out, without the drawbacks and the evils of the Feudal
System--of Social organization. That there are compensations in our
modern mode, and that, on the whole, Society advances in adopting it, is
true. But it will take a further step in advance when it reverts to that
plan on the footing above indicated; when it adopts the _plan_ without
the evils which in an ignorant and undeveloped age necessarily
accompanied it.

It has not been forgotten that the Church has arrayed itself, to no
small extent, against the advent of new knowledge; that the State has
suppressed the enlarging tendencies of individual li