ng on
the part of the winners of duty or obligation toward the losers. If one
chooses to be charitable, he may; if not, society has no claim upon him,
no right to _expect_ that he will make the care of others a part of his
duty or his business. Thus the community is arrayed in two great
classes: the intelligent, the strong in mind, and those of larger
capacities, who, as a class, are rich, on the one side; and the
ignorant, the weak-minded, the crude, who, as a body, are poor, on the
other. A great gulf separates these two classes, who have nothing in
common, and society rests on a social basis composed of forlorn,
dissatisfied, ignorant people, developing day by day still more the
accompaniments of ignorance and poverty--brutality, viciousness,
drunkenness, and ferocity. This separation has too long continued, has
too long left the country a prey to political demagogues, who have
plunged it into repeated turmoils, and finally into civil war, by being
able to operate upon the fears and feelings of the ignorant, deprived of
all natural and proper guidance. It is a question, not only of duty, but
of safety, for the rich and intelligent, whether they will suffer the
lower orders to remain in their wretchedness and sullen dissatisfaction,
sinking daily into still deeper degradation, and engendering still more
bitter hatred; or whether they will accept their proper position as the
organized guides and permanent social providence of the weak, and
faithfully perform its functions.

In pressing upon the higher classes the obligation which they owe to the
lower orders of society, and in urging them to assume the guardianship
of the latter, the writer is not referring to vague and diffuse measures
of ordinary philanthropy, but to definite and practical ones, of vast
importance to the welfare of the wealthiest as well as to that of the
poorest member of society. The individuals who have been most actively
engaged in the stirring scenes of commercial life, are little aware, for
the most part, of the rapid advances made in social science during the
last twenty years, and especially within the last ten of these.
Extensive as the new principles evolved in the department of mechanical
discovery, during this period, have been, those in that of commercial
and social activity have fully equalled them. The true method of
organizing the workshop, the farm, and the manufactory, the right
adjustment of capital and labor so as to secure larger