ed
and established. Along with this improvement has come, of course,
a train of evils and abuses, due to our ignorance of how best
to manage and apply our new privileges and advantages; but such
evils are transient, and the conditions which created them will
suffice, ere long, to remove them. The conflict between labor
and capital is not permanent; it will yield to better knowledge
of the true demands of political economy. The indifference or
corruption of law makers and dispensers will disappear when men
realize that personal selfishness is self-destructive, and that
only care for the commonweal can bring about prosperity for the
individual. The democracy is still in its swaddling clothes,
and its outward aspect is in many ways ugly and unwelcome, and
we sigh for the elegance and composure of old days; but these
discomforts are a necessary accompaniment of growth, and will
vanish when the growing pains are past. The Press is the mirror of
the aspirations, the virtues and the faults of the new mankind; its
power is stupendous and constantly increasing; many are beginning
to dread it as a possible agent of ill; but in truth its real
power can only be for good, since the mass of mankind, however
wedded to selfishness as individuals, are united in desiring
honesty and good in the general trend of things; and it is to
the generality, and not to the particular, that the Press, to
be successful, must appeal. It is the great critic and the great
recorder; and in the face of such criticism and record abuses
cannot long maintain themselves. Men will be free, first of external
tyrannies, and then of that more subtle but not less dangerous
tyranny which they impose upon themselves. As might have been
expected, extremists have arisen who sought to find a short road
to perfection, and they have met with disappointment. The dreams
of the socialists have not been realized; men will not work for one
another unless they are at the same time working for themselves.
The communist and the nihilist are yet further from the true
ideal; there will always remain in human society certain persons
who rule, and others who obey. There must always, in all affairs,
be a head to direct as well as hands to execute. Men are born
unequal in intelligence and ability; and it will never be possible
to reduce leaders to the level of followers. The form of society
must take its model from the human form, in which one part is
subordinate to another, yet all