me. While this is doing,--while the English are
striving to raise the indigent classes of their society, the French
speculating to elevate the condition of woman, and to open the career of
life to all rational beings, the Germans waiting to throw off the
despotism of absolute rulers, and the Americans struggling to free the
negroes,--the fraternal sentiment will be growing, in preparation for
yet higher results. The principle, acted upon at home, will be gaining
strength for exercise abroad; and the more any society becomes like a
band of brothers, the more powerful must be the sympathy which it will
have to offer to other such bands.

Far off as may be the realization of such a prospect, it is a prospect.
For many ages poets and philosophers have entertained the idea of a
general spirit of fraternity among men. It is the one great principle of
the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind.
It is the loftiest hope on which the wisest speculators have lived.
Poets are the prophets, and philosophers the analysers of the fate of
men, and religion is the promise and pledge of unseen powers to those
who believe in them. That cannot be unworthy of attention, of hope, of
expectation, which the poets and the analysers of the race, have reposed
upon, and on which the best religion of the world (and that which
comprehends all others) is based. That which has never, for all its
splendour, been deemed absurd by the wisest of the race is now beginning
to be realized. We have now something more to show for our hope than
what was before enough for the highest minds. The fraternal spirit has
begun to manifest itself by its workings in society. The helpless are
now aided expressly on the ground of their helplessness,--not from the
emotions of compassion excited by the spectacle of suffering in
particular cases, but in a nobler and more abstract way. Classes,
crowds, nations of sufferers are aided and protected by strangers,
powerful and at ease, who never saw an individual of the suffering
thousands, and who have none but a spiritual interest in their welfare.
Since missions to barbarous countries, action against slavery, and the
care of the blind, deaf and dumb, and paupers, have become labours of
society, the fraternity of men has ceased to be a mere aspiration, or
even prophecy and promise. It is not only that the high-placed watchmen
of the world have announced that the day is coming,--it has dawned; and
there