and
the world's great workshop, on the theory that wealth is the greatest
good in life, and that with the golden streams flowing into England from
a tributary world, wages would rise, food be cheap, employment constant.
The horrible result to humanity is one of the exceptions to the general
uplift of the race, not paralleled as yet by anything in this country,
but to be taken note of as a possible outcome of any material
civilization, and fit to set us thinking whether we have not got on a
wrong track. Mr. Froude, fresh from a sight of the misery of industrial
England, and borne straight on toward Australia over a vast ocean,
through calm and storm, by a great steamer,--horses of fire yoked to a
sea-chariot,--exclaims: "What, after all, have these wonderful
achievements done to elevate human nature? Human nature remains as it
was. Science grows, but morality is stationary, and art is vulgarized.
Not here lie the 'things necessary to salvation,' not the things which
can give to human life grace, or beauty, or dignity."

In the United States, with its open opportunities, abundant land, where
the condition of the laboring class is better actually and in possibility
than it ever was in history, and where there is little poverty except
that which is inevitably the accompaniment of human weakness and crime,
the prevailing discontent seems groundless. But of course an agitation so
widespread, so much in earnest, so capable of evoking sacrifice, even to
the verge of starvation and the risk of life, must have some reason in
human nature. Even an illusion--and men are as ready to die for an
illusion as for a reality--cannot exist without a cause.

Now, content does not depend so much upon a man's actual as his relative
condition. Often it is not so much what I need, as what others have that
disturbs me. I should be content to walk from Boston to New York, and be
a fortnight on the way, if everybody else was obliged to walk who made
that journey. It becomes a hardship when my neighbor is whisked over the
route in six hours and I have to walk. It would still be a hardship if he
attained the ability to go in an hour, when I was only able to accomplish
the distance in six hours. While there has been a tremendous uplift all
along the line of material conditions, and the laboring man who is sober
and industrious has comforts and privileges in his daily life which the
rich man who was sober and industrious did not enjoy a hundred years