rkness may have seemed tolerable. The
keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the
poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the
social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from
these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them
was, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of
that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and
generous hearted of them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by the
intensity of their sympathies.

"Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, the
reality of human brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended by
them as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to suppose
that there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read you
passages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that
the conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by
many more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth
century was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial
and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of the
anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit it was
strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.

"When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long after
a vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of the
existing social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contented
themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon an
extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of men
at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which
a social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities.
They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all
that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall
to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or
curb their operation. In a word, they believed--even those who longed
to believe otherwise--the exact reverse of what seems to us
self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities
of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the
cohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men lived
together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one
another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while a
society tha