istributed, when plenty of free land remained,
and when it was commonly supposed that universal free trade and
universal peace were about to dawn upon the nations, and equal
opportunity, if not yet achieved, was not far away. The obstacles in the
way of progress were not the resistance of privileged classes, but the
time and labor required for mankind to conquer the world and nature.
With the establishment of so-called democratic and constitutional
republics in the place of monarchies and landlord aristocracies, and the
abolition of slavery in the United States, all systematic opposition to
social progress, except in the minds of a few perverted or criminal
individuals, was supposed to be at an end.

A generation or two ago, then, though it was now recognized that the
golden age could not be attained immediately by merely converting the
majority to a wise and beneficent social system (as had been proposed in
the first half of the century), yet it was thought that, with the
advance of science and the conquest of nature, and without any serious
civil strife, "equality of opportunity" was being gradually and rapidly
brought to all mankind. This state of mind has survived and is still
that of the majority to-day, when the conditions that have given rise to
it have disappeared.

Not all previous history has a greater economic change to show than the
latter half of the nineteenth century, which converted all the leading
countries from nations of small capitalists into nations of hired
employees. Even such a far-sighted and broad-minded statesman as
Lincoln, for example, had no idea of the future of his country, and
regarded the slaveowners and their supporters as the only classes that
dreamed that we could ever become a nation of "hired laborers" (the
capitalism of to-day), any more than we could remain in part a nation of
"bought laborers." Lincoln puts a society based on hired labor in the
same class with a society based on owned labor, on the ground that both
lead to an effort "to place capital on an equal footing, if not above
labor in the structure of the government." This effort, marked by the
proposal of "the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the
denial to the people of the right to participate in the selection of
public officers except the legislative" (so similar to tendencies
prevailing to-day), he calls "returning despotism." And so inevitable
did it seem to Lincoln that a nation based on hired labo