aced. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

will be the result; but to the working-man division of labor is mental
death. The ancients might call these masses the _ignobile vulgus_, the
French nobles might sneer at them as _sans-culottes_, we may deride them
as the 'common herd,' all attempting to ignore their existence in
history or politics; but it will be all in vain--for in the end it is
the people that rule, be the government of the surface what it may.
Either they will raise their rulers by their intelligent freedom, or
drag the brilliant crowd down with them to destruction in spite of
theory or law. Not only in mad sedition and revolution, but always, the
masses govern.

The next great characteristic of the age is the increased complexity of
outward relations, while the inner mental power does not increase in the
same ratio. The former causes had a mechanical tendency in that they
lessened the mental strength, for all volition must have its foundation
in thought; but this has the same tendency, inasmuch as it increases the
objects of thought beyond the power of the mind to satisfy the demand.
If any intelligent man should stop in the midst of his life, and
consider the relations by which he is surrounded, and for the satisfying
of which he is responsible, he will shrink amazed from their enormous
complexity: demands from the state for support and thoughtful fidelity,
demands from his fellow men for love and charity, children demanding
education and training, his own nature demanding cultivation and
development, and, last of all, or rather first of all, his God demanding
thoughtful love and service. When he proceeds to consider how he may
best satisfy all these, there pours in upon him knowledge unbounded,
schemes, theories, and methods innumerable, so that he retreats at last
in despair and returns to his business--so he calls it, as though to
make money were all that a man was sent into the world for, as though
his children, his country, his fellow man, were not all his business.
The outer world seems to have risen to overwhelm him, and the reason of
it lies in this same great cause of undue attention to outward
prosperity.

In the pursuit of wealth, men have aggregated themselves into towns and
cities, whose area is measured by square miles, and their population by
hundreds of thousands or millions; the mind meanwhile, instead of
increasing in p