he noblest
poets and philosophers, whose words built up the intellect of its
people; skilful navigators, to find out for its merchants the many
paths of the oceans; discoverers in natural science, whose inventions
guided its industry to wealth, till it equalled any nation of the
world in letters, and excelled all in trade and commerce. But its
government was become a government of land, and not of men; every
blade of grass was represented, but only a small minority of the
people. In the transition from the feudal forms the heads of the
social organization freed themselves from the military services which
were the conditions of their tenure, and, throwing the burden on the
industrial classes, kept all the soil to themselves. Vast estates that
had been managed by monasteries as endowments for religion and charity
were impropriated to swell the wealth of courtiers and favorites; and
the commons, where the poor man once had his right of pasture, were
taken away, and, under forms of law, enclosed distributively within
the domains of the adjacent landholders. Although no law forbade any
inhabitant from purchasing land, the costliness of the transfer
constituted a prohibition; so that it was the rule of the country that
the plough should not be in the hands of its owner. The Church was
rested on a contradiction; claiming to be an embodiment of absolute
truth, it was a creature of the statute-book.

The progress of time increased the terrible contrast between wealth
and poverty. In their years of strength the laboring people, cut off
from all share in governing that state, derived a scant support from
the severest toil, and had no hope for old age but in public charity
or death. A grasping ambition had dotted the world with military
posts, kept watch over our borders on the northeast, at the Bermudas,
in the West Indies, appropriated the gates of the Pacific, of the
Southern and of the Indian ocean, hovered on our northwest at
Vancouver, held the whole of the newest continent, and the entrances
to the old Mediterranean and Red Sea, and garrisoned forts all the way
from Madras to China. That aristocracy had gazed with terror on the
growth of a commonwealth where freeholders existed by the million, and
religion was not in bondage to the state, and now they could not
repress their joy at its perils. They had not one word of sympathy for
the kind-hearted poor man's son whom America had chosen for her chief;
they jeered at his larg