themselves to believe
that humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat
stature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood
upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction
must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able
to stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.

"Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with which
the grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless
because it could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none were
needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world
often cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet of
the human race at last in the right way.

"Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our
resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet
I have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in this
serene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition,
when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the
kindling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had
closed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of
light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have
lived then, when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the
centuries trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of
fruition?

"You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of
revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social
traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order
worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their
habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the
science of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, and
wherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning and
ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when once
it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal
standpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be
clothed?'--its difficulties vanished.

"Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity,
of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual
standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist
and employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last
vestige of the serfdom of man to man