nomically weak. This principle, which on a foundering ship proclaims, "the women and children first," has been inhumanly reversed by the economic system which aims at cheapening products by cheaping the producer's life, and conditions the family loaf on the working of mother and children in the mill,which aims only at the survival of the strong, and tells us, in contradiction of history, that "we must have few men if we would have strong men;" which gives us in Clough's sarcastic rhyme the Manchester version of the Sixth Commandment :

"Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive."

But there is no doubt that a humaner spirit is even now directing legislation, and that, as Isaiah thought, a man is to be made "more precious than fine gold." The conviction is spreading, that it is not the duty of society to watch the fight, award the prize, and distribute alms to the vanquished, but, as Professor Sumner says, "to increase and multiply and extend the chances of successful effort." The tumors and cancers of congested wealth, which threaten the death of democracy, must be arrested by limitations of rights and tenures and inheritances. It cannot be that those who are born into the world shall always have to depend for a foothold on the sufferance of those whom they find in possession of what is called their country. The agrarian law of the Hebrew jubilee may be applicable only to Utopia; but its principle, already exemplified in our patent rights and copyrights, the continual redistribution and equalization of advantages, is fundamental alike to the permanence of democracy, and to the democratic aim of Christianity, the greatest good of the greatest number; so that, as Professor Bascom insists, "every child shall come from the cradle to a fresh world, with fresh incentives, not to one overworn and used up for him by the errors of past generations."

Involved in this moral imperative on behalf of the economically weak, a hitherto neglected corollary of that right to life, which is asserted by our Declaration of Independence, is now making its just demand for the right to work, as one of the inalienable rights of man. This has long been held in abeyance by the economic heresy, that

"labor is a commodity governed

by the same laws as other commodities." That this, however, is, as Professor Clark declares, "one of the most mischievous errors that still cling to the science," is shown by its logical issue in slavery. For human labor is no abstract thing, but simply a person laboring. So Dr. Thornwell, of South Carolina, argued for the slave-holders in 1861, that "the property of man in man is only the property of man in human toil." The denial and defeat of personality, at which Christianity groans, in the glutted "labor market," so-called, where a vaunted freedom of contract is annihilated by a fatal inequality between the contracting parties, is ere long to be retrieved,how, it concerns me not to affirm,-whether by some extension of public works, or, as I hope, by some restriction upon private sequestration of the unused materials of labor. Said Mr. J. S. Mill in 1865: "Where land is not intended to be cultivated [that is, used in some way as an instrument of labor], no good reason can in general be given for its being private property at all." It is a monstrous anomaly, that a criminal should be fed at public cost, and an honest laborer should be locked out to suicide. Such inversions of natural order recall the forgotten teaching of Turgot, whom Matthew Arnold calls "the best and wisest statesman that France has ever had:" "God, when he made man with wants, and rendered labor an indispensable resource, made the right of work the property of every individual in the world; and this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescriptible of all kinds of property." After long oblivion this right re-approaches recognition, and Christianity, as of old, will vindicate it. But, "obviously," as M. de Laveleye remarks, "there can be no attempt at securing to each a share in the soil, but simply an instrument of labor or a sphere for its exercise."

Here very likely some objector will protest, "But this is socialism." To which we may return Count Bismarck's answer to the same objection: "It is Christianity." Yet, in all likelihood, that objector will turn out to be merely an inconsistent socialist himself,-somebody who is now beseeching society to tax itself for his benefit, either to protect his infant industry of a century with a high tariff, or to buy his silver to coin into useless dollars, or to build a levee for his plantation, or to dig

out a trout-stream that he may float his logs to market. The real division on the present question runs not between socialists and anti-socialists, but between consistent socialists and inconsistent.

We come now to the other moral demand of our renascent Christian ethics, which has already been briefly stated. It is, That social burdens be proportioned to individual abilities, as when in war the strongest are sent to the battle because they are strong. In the struggle for political rights this social right to the strength of the strong has been suffered to fall asleep. The plutocrat, succeeding to the claims of the baron, has escaped the baron's debt to the public service, which has rolled chiefly upon the laborer. Amid all the clamor of the so-called tax-payers, their silent partner deserves most regard. The man whom assessors never trouble, and tax-collectors never see, is he who indirectly and ignorantly pays the heaviest tax of all, first in high rents for low lodgings, next, as he goes to work, in tolls to the holders of franchises, who exact much for what the State has given them cheap; then in taxes upon the other necessaries of life, his tools and clothes, his salt and sugar. It is Mr. Edward Atkinson, no radical, who has written: "The man on whom the burden of taxation falls heaviest is he who possesses no property whatever. It finds him poor, it keeps him poor, and it may even reduce him to pauperism." This system of indirect taxation simply grazes the millionaire, but grinds the wage-worker. It annihilates the possible savings of all but the thriftiest few, and steadily augments the inequalities it ignores. A careful investigator,* himself not a poor man, has produced tables, which show that, out of every dollar of possible savings after supporting a family, the laborer pays in taxes 83 cents, the average rich man 30 cents, the enormously rich 3 cents. The result, he declares, will be, in less than two generations, to transfer more than one-third of the whole wealth of the country to the hands of less than 10,000 persons. In such a result, or any result that but distantly approaches this, democ racy would perish, through the folly of the economic science which "has no concern with questions of moral right." But even apart from the reaction of ethical principle against an

* Mr. T. G. Shearman.

economic wrong like this, the wrong is doomed, at least in a democracy, the moment that the ignorance which endures it acquires intelligence enough to say to the selfishness which imposes it "Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?"

But the principle which, in this signal instance, is so surprisingly violated, is destined to receive in the growing ethical reaction an honor of wider range than it gained in the Athenian liturgies and in the medieval chivalry. "Men are bound," says Professor Walker, "to serve the State in proportion as themselves." Undoubtedly the feeling is gaining hold among those who have most to lose by social disturbances, that not only are the duties of property as sacred as its rights, but the discharge of them the best guarantee of respect to its rights. Munificent foundations for public benefit from resources not always justly accumulated are pointing the evangelic moral, "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness." The lost patrician virtues revisit Scrooge's counting room, reënforced by Marley's ghost confessing, "Mankind was my business; the common welfare was my business; the dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business." Here is the starting point of that reform of the morals of trade, which, however briefly mentioned, must be accentuated with all emphasis as promising most for the relief of social troubles-viz: in the moral conception of self-interest as the interest of the integral or social, not the fractional or isolated self, of business as the high calling of the social self for social service, and of business gains as most gainful to the gainer when gaining most for the common wealth. To this the ethical reaction now impelled by the pure Spirit of Christianity is vigorously tending. The old monastic vows of poverty, the abnegations now required by public sentiment of preachers of the Gospel, the frugal lives of many whose devotion to science leaves to them, as to Agassiz, "no leisure to make money," the increasing number of philanthropists who are content to be poor while making many rich, will ere long by accumulated iteration impress their lesson. The anti-social notion, that the property which society feeds and guards is exclusively one's own, is to give way to the moral

fact, that it is in large part, as Professor Graham says, trust, to be administered for the common good."

It is often intimated that we are on the eve of important changes. There is a predisposition to expect them. The eighties and nineties have for centuries brought with them momentous turning-points of history. In the fourteenth century, they witnessed the suppression of Lollardry and of the Peasants' Revolt, and the resulting ebb of English liberties for two hundred years. In the fifteenth century, they saw Columbus open the door to the conquest and civilization of a hemisphere. In the sixteenth century, they erected on the overthrow of the "invincible" Armada an impregnable bulwark against priestly domination. In the seventeenth century, by the expulsion of the Stuarts and the Declaration of Rights, they secured constitutional government in England. In the eighteenth century, they saw the consolidation of our republic under its federal Constitution, and the explosion of the French Revolution under the strongholds of privilege and tyranny. Such a series is of good omen for the hope which the present ethical reaction inspires, that the nineteenth century is yet to add to it another term, no less auspicious for that civilization which Matthew Arnold has well defined, as "the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life of the whole body of society."*

The communal institutions of earlier times, however unsuited to wide enterprise and diversified industry, nevertheless involve a truth essential to that social stability in which many expansive communities have proved wanting. Not for himself alone does the general lead or the soldier fight. "No man liveth unto himself." It is the merit of our century-old economic theory that it has set individualism free, like an unleashed

*On the day before these words were spoken, the Emperor William II., on his accession to the throne of the German Empire, spoke as follows: "I appropriate to myself in its full significance his message of Nov. 17, 1881, and shall continue to strive in the spirit of that document so that imperial legislation may afford to the working people that further protection which in accordance with Christian morality is needed by the weak and oppressed in their struggle for existence. I hope that in this way it may be possible to arrive at an equalization of unhealthy social contrasts."