§ X.-DANGER OF SOCIAL REVolutions.

A condition of things, such as we have been describing, cannot long continue. Universal monopoly cannot, in the age in which we live, be endured by the oppressed and suffering working classes. The notion of individual and equal rights which has fastened itself so deeply in the minds of men within the last few centuries, will prompt the people to rise against the institutions to which they ascribe the existence of this frightful evil. The growing hatred of the poor for the rich-a hatred which it is useless to deny will every day grow more intense. Already among the chartists of England, a "black mutinous discontent," a hot feverish hatred of the wealthy is springing up. They are getting restless under their long discipline of a thin diet and hard labor. A notion is fermenting in their brains that society is bound to do more for them than to provide dirty poor-houses and bastiles. It will be a terrific explosion this fermenting notion will make, unless the weight of their superincumbent misery be removed. Let it be looked to in time.

Human beings are not mere commodities, whose price augments and diminishes with the supply in the market. Society owes them a guaranty of life and work. They possess a right to labor, which is the most sacred of all rights. Labor is their property; the highest form and source of all property. They have intellectual and moral faculties which must be developed. God has placed them on earth, to advance. What shall they do, then, with that society, which not only prevents them from advancing, but which degrades and brutifies them into natures worse than those of beasts? We say, worse than beasts, because to the stupidity and unreasoning violence of animals, they often add the malignity of demons.

Thus, we have stated that free competition tends to the formation of gigantic monopolies in every branch of labor; that it depreciates the wages of the working classes; that it excites an endless warfare between human arms, and machinery and capital,—a war in which the weak succumb; that it renders the recurrence of failures, bankruptcies, and commercial crises a sort of endemic disease; and that it reduces the middling and lower classes to a precarious and miserable existence. We have stated on the authority of authentic documents, that while the few rich are becoming more and more rich, the unnumbered many are becoming poorer. Is anything further necessary to prove that our modern world of industry is a veritable HELL, where disorder, discord, and wretchedness reign, and in which the most cruel fables of the old mythology are more than realized. The masses, naked and destitute, yet surrounded by a prodigality of wealth; seeing on all sides heaps of gold, which by a fatal decree they cannot reach; stunned by the noise of gilded equipages, or dazzled by the brilliance of splendid draperies and dresses; their appetites excited by the magnificence of heaped-up luxuries of every climate and all arts; provoked by all that can gratify desire, yet unable to touch one jot or tittle of it, offer a terrible exemplification of Tantalus, tormented by an eternal hunger and thirst after fruits and waters, always within his reach, yet perpetually eluding his grasp. Was the penalty of Sisyphus, condemned to roll his stone to a summit, from which it was forever falling, more poignant than that of many fathers of families, among the

poorer classes, who, after laboring to exhaustion during their whole lives, to amass somewhat for their old age or for their children, see it swallowed up in one of those periodical crises of failure and ruin which are the inevitable attendants of our methods of loose competition? Or the story of the Danaides, compelled incessantly to draw water in vessels from which it incessantly escaped, does it not with a fearful fidelity symbolize, the implacable fate of nearly two-thirds of our modern societies, who draw from the bosom of the earth and the workshops of production, by unrelaxing toil, floods of wealth, that always slip through their hands, to be collected in the vast reservoirs of a moneyed aristocracy? Walk through the streets of any of our crowded cities; see how within stone's throw of each other stand the most marked and awful contrasts! Here, look at this marble palace reared in a pure atmosphere and in the neighborhood of pleasing prospects. Its interior is adorned with every refinement that the accumulated skill of sixty centuries has been able to invent; velvet carpets, downy cushions, gorgeous tapestries, stoves, musical instruments, pictures, statues and books. For the gratification and development of its owner and his family, industry, science, and art have been tasked to their utmost capacity of production. They bathe in all the delights, sensuous and intellectual, that human existence at this period of its career can furnish. They feel no cares; they know no interruption to the unceasing round of their enjoyments. Look you, again, to that not far distant alley, where some ten diseased, destitute and depraved families are nestled under the same ricketty and tumbling roof; no fire is there to warm them; no clothes to cover their bodies; a pool of filth sends up its nauseousness perhaps in the very midst of their dwelling; the rain and keen hail fall on their almost defenceless heads; the pestilence is forever hovering over their door-posts; their minds are blacker than night with the black mists of ignorance; and their hearts are torn with fierce lusts and pas. sions; the very sun-light blotted from the firmament and life itself turned into a protracted and bitter curse? Look you, at this, we say, and think that unless something better than what we now see is done, it will all grow worse! Oh heaven; it is an oppressive, a heart-rending thought! How well has one of our noble young poets uttered:

To them, it seems, their God has cursed,
This race of ours, since they were born;
Willing to toil, and yet deprived

Of common wood or store of corn.

I do not weep for my own woes,
They are as nothing in my eye;

I weep for them, who starved and froze,
Do curse their God, and long to die.

§ XI. SOMETHING TO BE DONE AND WHAT?

What, then, in a world like this, is to be done? The question of ques. tions is this! Either we are to close the shells of our selfishness around us, sinking down into the mire, with stupid indifference, or we are to ad. dress ourselves, at once, like noble and true hearted men, to the solution of the difficulty. The fact of human misery is a broad and glaring one, written in characters of fire and blood across the whole earth. What is to be done with it-we iterate the question.

1. We remark that little or nothing is to be done by any form of politi cal action, that we know of, using the word political only in its common application to the movements of government. And there are two

reasons for this; first, that politics have accomplished all that is required of them to accomplish; and second, that their sphere is so limited, that they cannot be made to touch the source of the evil. We wish to say nothing here against any of our great political parties; but we do assert that the doctrines of either of them, carried out to the hearts content of the most sanguine advocates of them, would achieve nothing in the way of social reform. The Whigs, by the system they propose, would only consecrate by law those abuses and distinctions which are the evidence and result of our rapid tendency to a commercial feudality. On the other hand, the Democrats, by the repeal of all restraining laws, would only give a broader field for the freer development of the elements of disorder-they would only deepen and widen the breaches in society opened by the operation of the principle of unlimited competition. The truth is, that there is everywhere spreading a secret dissatisfaction with the results of our political contests. Among our best minds, there has long been a conviction that the strife of politics was an utterly inane and useless one, fit only, like the bull-baitings and carnivals of older nations, to amuse the coarser tastes of the populace; while the people themselves are conscious of a growing indifference to the magniloquent appeals of statesmen and editors. It is now more than half a century since the controversies of our politics begun, and it would require the sharpest optics to discover in what particular they had advanced. There has been infinite labor with no progress. The same questions have been argued and re-argued, without coming to a decision. We have heard speech after speech; we have seen election after election; the bar-rooms have resounded with appeals; the streets have re-echoed with clamorings ; now this faction has triumphed, and now that; victory and defeat have alternated more swiftly than the changes of the moon; legislature and senate have met, and Presidents have fulminated; yet it does not appear, after all this noise and commotion, after all this everlasting talk and expense, that we are at all nearer to a conclusion, in these days of John Tyler, than we were in the days of Thomas Jefferson. If would be impressed with this view, let him compare the daily newspapers

any one

of the two epochs; he will find that with the change of a few names and dates, the articles of one might well answer for the pages of the other. Our long discussion seems to have been afflicted with the curse of perpetual barrenness. This protracted struggle, this ever renewed debate, has resulted, when all is told, to the net quotient-zero.

But let us not be understood as saying that there has been no progress in American society. God forbid! How could we say it, when we know that the mighty muscles of the human hand, the mighty powers of the human mind and heart, have been at work? How could we say it, when giant miraculous Labor has been felling the forests, and turning the glebe, and whirling the spinning jennies, and putting down its thoughts in words and deeds; when the spires of an hundred thousand schoolhouses point to the skies, when the fires of truth and self-sacrifice have glowed in many more thousand beings, when the noblest aspirations were ascending from millions of noble souls? Yes, we thank God, there has been progress: but it has not been by means of, so much as in spite of, our politics. We mean that our politics has never been thorough enough to touch the root of our social distress. It has now no vitality. All the sap has dried out and withered from our discussions. The old straw has been thrashed and re-thrashed until it is reduced to the merest impalpable powder-out of which nothing can be made, not even snuff strong enough to tickle a grown man's nostrils. Something deeper, more searching, more comprehensive, more true-is wanting, to raise us from the slough into which we have lamentably fallen.

2. Our help, if any is to come to us, is to be found in the better adjustment of our social relations. The vice for which we seek a remedy is in the heart of society, not its extremities; and it is to the heart that we must apply the cure. What that cure may be, is partly indicated by the whole tenor of this essay. We have shown that capital and labor are at open war. The field of industry, in all its branches, is an eternal field of battle. Either capital tyrannises over labor, or Labor, driven to extremes, rises in insurrection against its oppressor. One or the other of these effects inevitably follow the working of the system of unrestrained competition. How obvious the suggestion, then, that this competition must be brought to an end? If we can introduce peace, where there was before war, if we can make a common feeling where there was before antagonism and hatred, if we can discover a mode of causing men to work for each other instead of against each other, then, we say, we have advanced a most important step towards the solution of the problem.

Now, the power which is able to effect this change, which can turn opposition into accord, divergence into convergence, contest into co-operation, is the principle of the ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY ON THE BASIS

OF A UNION OF INTERESTS.

§ XII.-UNITY OF INTEREST.

The three productive elements of society, the three sources of its wealth, the three wheels of industrial mechanism, are Capital, Labor, and Talent. Is it not conceivable that these three powers could be wisely combined so as to be made to work together, that these three wheels could be made to roll into each other with a beautiful harmony? Can we not suppose that for the anarchical strife of blind competition; that

for the war of capital against capital, labor against labor, workman against workman and against machinery; that for general disorder, the universal shock of productive forces, and the destruction of value in so many contrary movements; might be substituted the productive combination and useful employment of all these forces? Most assuredly such an arrangement can be supposed; and why not accomplished? At any rate, does it not become our first and most imperative duty to seek out the conditions of industrial reconciliation and peace?

There is no radical antagonism in the nature of things; there is no eternal and necessary repulsion between the various elements of production. The frightful combats of capital against capital, of capital against labor and talent, of laborer against laborer, of masters against workmen and workmen against masters, of each against all and all against each, is not a remorseless and inexorable condition of the life of humanity. They pertain only to the actual mechanism of industry, to the system of chaotic and unregulated competition, to that liberty of whose triumphs we have boasted with such hollow and ill-timed joy. A better and truer mechanism, a nobler organic liberty, to which these awful evils do not adhere, can be found. The wisdom of man is able to discover, if it has not already under God discovered, an outlet to this labyrinth of suffering-a pathway upward from this dark, disordered, howling abyss.

This is what we mean by true democracy—a state in which the highest rights and interests of man shall be the means and appliances of a full development; and this Democracy, Constructive and Pacific in its character, becomes the object for which every benevolent and conscientious man should labor. How far we have already advanced towards the realiza. tion of it, and what yet remains to be done, shall be our topic in some future inquiry. Meanwhile, look to it, Oh ye people!

SONG OF CONSOLATION.

(FROM THE GERMAN.)

Is Love with watching weary?
Soon comes the star of morn!
A brighter day will dawn
Upon a night so dreary!

Does Faith begin to waver?
The day of light will come,
That lighteth to his home
Each trusting, true believer.

Does Virtue quail inglorious?

There comes a day of rest,
A sun who shineth best,

O'er threatening clouds victorious.

D.

AFFIRMATIONS-BY J. P. GREAVES.

As man becomes that which he loves, so will he the more and more submit to be one with that which makes him a beloved.

Man must be a happiness-being, and represent the same by all the means that can be used for the same in each sphere.