the
motives of judges. Generally speaking, they are honest; but the whole
system of court procedure is hampered by detailed statutes and
technical rules, that mean an amount of cost and delay which in itself
is the very quintessence of injustice. A citizen is offered a choice
between submitting to the wrong inflicted by a fellow-citizen and
accepting the wrong inflicted by a dilatory and crushingly costly legal
procedure. We probably excel some nations in the rightfulness of the
decisions we can get if we live long enough and have money enough to
get them; but there are few civilized nations that do not excel us in
the rapidity and cheapness of the process. A Chinese student in
Columbia University served, during the first year of his residence in
New York, as judge of Chinatown, and, by giving up only the Saturday
evening of each week to the service, he settled the disputes which
arose between Chinese residents. As he was learned in the principles of
Confucius, I doubt not he settled them justly, and many a time in that
same city I have sighed for his services for native Americans.

The line of division between labor and capital ought not always to be
the sharp boundary that it is. Labor should be enabled to acquire a
modest share of capital and to invest it securely. Protection for small
investments is urgently needed, and would do much to change a
proletariat into an independent working-class. This is an essential
feature of the social system we wish for and work for. The man who
hereafter shall correspond to Longfellow's "village blacksmith" will
perhaps be the owner of a hundred shares in some corporation. In
agriculture small holdings may always survive; but there may be large
ones also, and in that case the farmer of the future may have either
five acres and a hoe, or forty acres and a mule, or a hundred and sixty
acres and a reaper, or an undivided share in a thousand acres and a
traction engine.

If we could carry through even the reforms thus far enumerated, it
would make us feel as if we had been lifted from a slough and placed on
a plateau abounding in air and sunlight; but if we stopped with this,
we should leave much to be desired. There are still more pressing
measures to be enacted.

Nearly the greatest evil we are facing is monopoly. This is not the
universal view. Though there are few who approve of monopoly, there are
those who regard it with toleration and think that, if we accept it and
regulate