social relations and pronounce them either good or bad.

Men, if we may suppose that the progress of humantiy tends upward, have inflicted and defended wrongs in the past, because they did not know those wrongs existed; for to their deficient intelligence and moral sentiment, wrong was right. Periodically in the lives of nations a time comes when the minds of the people cease to admit that some principle is right, and out of this doubt grows the conviction that it is a wrong.

New ideas are born, and, like all births, the inception. of new life brings pain. Spasms marked the transition in France when the divine right of king and nobles became, in the minds of the people, a diabolical wrong.

Convulsions in the United States thirty years ago almost destroyed the nation, when its people ceased to think that slavery was right for the black man and that only whites were justly entitled to freedom. Discontent and disturbance among the people invariably accompany these changing thoughts and herald the approach of that outward transformation in their declarations of justice, denoted by a change of social institutions.

Year by year, slowly and steadily, the real change goes on in the minds of the people, transforming their ideas of right to a conception of wrong, till a day comes when they feel that the political and social institutions they have accepted from their ancestors and revered as the acme of justice are really the enunciation of injustice.

Entertaining this opinion of social progress and the nature of justice, I shall avoid all attempts to analyze the moral sentiments or to indicate any conception of the real attributes of political and social justice. Any effort of that kind would inevitably be barren of immediate influence, because it would merely represent the writer's conception of justice, and would be neither absolute

justice nor the average conception of justice entertained by humanity of the present.

Truth, it is said, lies at the bottom of a well. Absolute justice, therefore, which is merely a portion of the illimitable, eternal, and unknown truth that forms man's environment, is to be found in the same place, and when curious investigators lean over the well-curb and peer curiously downward to discover the real nature of justice, they see merely their own reflections upon the surface of the water, while absolute justice remains concealed in its depths. The greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century has not really discovered justice in his treatise bearing that name, but the well into which his mental vision was projected has thrown back only the image of Herbert Spencer's mind.

Such is now the inevitable result of those investigations, and the future seems likely to be equally barren. The slow progress of the race continually brings into our minds new and better ideas of human duty, and a clearer comprehension of the adaptation of earth to our needs; but of the real mystery-the absolute nature of man and his environment, and the absolute justice to which his conduct should conform—we know nothing. The endless discussions of mental and moral philosophy leave us at the end of two thousand years' consideration of these problems in quite as much doubt concerning the verities of man's origin, existence, environment, and destiny as ever vexed the minds of the first heathen philosophers. Regarded as mental gymnastics, the discussions may be useful; they bring into every mind kindly toleration for every belief, and they are the natural result of man's longing for universal knowledge; but as a means of improving his condition or contributing to the real progress of the race, they are barren of result. In the language of Macaulay, we are walking on a treadmill whenever, by the ordinary

methods of logic, we inquire "what is the highest good, whether pain be an evil, whether all things be fated, whether we can be certain of anything, and whether we can be certain that we are certain of nothing." We revolve in our minds a thousand times the same inquiry and the same argument, but our investigation eventually terminates with the same uncertainty.

Whenever man has tried to estimate the infinite by the finite, he has been compelled, sooner or later, to lay down his measuring rule, no matter how great its length in terms of human ability, and to confess at last the impossibility of his undertaking. Therefore, in the ethical discussions contained in this volume, there will be no attempt to formulate undeviating principles for the guidance of humanity. There will be no appeals to a mystical and unreal justice of the future, but merely a comparison between the different social institutions of the present, showing wherein some of those we maintain are inconsistent with that spirit of fairness or justice which we have already applied to others. Social institutions are never changed evenly all along the line, and as our forefathers of the Revolution inconsistently declared that all men should be free and independent, while at the same time they owned slaves, so it will be found that the people of the present day are equally inconsistent in maintaining tyranny in one place while they deny identically the same principle in another. The only appeal will be to that sense of right and duty which men now usually recognize as fit to govern their actions, a feeling which will confer upon every human being ultimately the "natural right" to a more equitable existence than has ever been conferred in the dark history of the past.

Man's natural rights have their origin in the mind of man himself, and his conception of them will change from century to century; but the very practical and well estab

lished fact remains, in spite of this shifting, changing uncertainty as to the real nature of his rights, that at any period in his career, for those particular privileges which he then considers natural rights, he will fight like a demon and shed the last drop of his heart's blood. Of their origin he may be uncertain, but of their existence he feels quite sure. The determination of these rights, according to ideas commonly accepted in the present advancement, involves a comparison of existing institutions and principles sanctioned by the approval of civilization, for men often admit in one instance a principle which they deny in another, following the absurd example deduced from the early history of this country. The same inconsistency exists in the declarations and institutions of the present; and the appeals which the writer expects to make will urge men to apply to all social institutions the doctrines of right and wrong which they have already, in recent years, applied to a portion of them.

CHAPTER VIII.

DEAD MEN'S TYRANNY.

"Can the poor man cultivate the earth for himself? No; for the right of the first occupant has become the right of property. Can he gather the fruits which the hand of God ripens on the path of man? No; for like the soil, the fruits have been appropriated. Can he draw water from a spring enclosed in a field? No; for the proprietor of the field is the owner of the fountain. Can he, exhausted by fatigue and without a refuge, lie down to sleep upon the pavement of a street? No; for there are laws against vagabondage. What, then, can the unhappy man do? He will say: I have hands to work with, I have intelligence, I have youth, I have strength; take all this and in return give me a morsel of bread. But even here the poor man may be answered, I have no work to give you.' What is he then to do?"-LOUIS BLANC.

EVERY man who bequeaths property is a tyrant on his death-bed. The aggregate tyranny of men in their dying

I

'A Virginia colonel, who died about twenty-five years ago, in Amelia

moments has caused more misery throughout the world than all the oppressions of its political rulers, for when unavoidable hunger and cold afflict human beings within the sight of unearned comfort and plenty, do not these beings suffer the tortures of the damned? Yet, while inflicting the tyranny of the death-bed over surviving humanity, men have been almost uniformly praised for possessing the highest virtues in thus providing a store of wealth for direct posterity. The edict of the death-bed is unconscious tyranny, and sorrow instead of anger must be the feeling which it merits from the demands of progressive justice. Society will outgrow this form of wrong as it has already abandoned the horrors of cannibalism and slavery, but man's innocence of intentional wrong and his imperfect conception of human duty do not lessen the inevitable afflictions that follow his unconsciously evil acts. slavery of the disinherited to the masters of wealth succession, with all the degradation, among the masters, of idleness, pride, profligacy, cruelty, and corruption, and all the degradation of ignorance, coarseness, brutality, resentment, and destructiveness among the slaves, may be observed at the present time in every civilized nation quite as distinctly, in spite of the ameliorating effects of education and progress toward democratic government, as in the history of negro slavery in the United States. The essential feature of negro slavery on the part of the slave was the inheritance of subjection and the absence of opportunities; on the part of the master, it was the inheritance of power and privilege, unearned by any efforts of

The

county, demanded, under penalty of cutting off from all his possessions, that his widow have him put in an open coffin in a clump of woods near the house, and leave him there for six weeks. Every morning and evening of that time she was to come to him and brush his hair and whiskers. Luckily the colonel shuffled off his mortal coil in the middle of a very cold winter, so he "kept." His widow was able to carry out his wishes, therefore, and came into all his property.—Current Newspapers.