es from a suspicious source. It comes
generally from men who abound, and are at ease; who think more of
property than of any other human interest; who have little concern for
the mass of their fellow-creatures; who are willing that others should
bear all the burdens of life, and that any social order should continue
which secures to themselves personal comfort or gratification. The
selfish epicure and the thriving man of business easily discover a
natural necessity for that state of things which accumulates on
themselves all the blessings, and on their neighbor all the evils, of
life. But no man can judge what is good or necessary for the multitude
but he who feels for them, and whose equity and benevolence are shocked
by the thought that all advantages are to be monopolized by one set of
men, and all disadvantages by another. I wait for the judgment of
profound thinkers and earnest philanthropists on this point,--a
judgment formed after patient study of political economy, and human
nature and human history; nor even on such authority shall I readily
despair of the multitude of my race.

In the next place, the objection under consideration is very much a
repetition of the old doctrine, that what has been must be; that the
future is always to repeat the past, and society to tread for ever the
beaten path. But can any thing be plainer than that the present
condition of the world is peculiar, unprecedented? that new powers and
new principles are at work? that the application of science to art is
accomplishing a stupendous revolution? that the condition of the
laborer is in many places greatly improved, and his intellectual aids
increased? that abuses, once thought essential to society, and which
seemed entwined with all its fibres, have been removed? Do the mass of
men stand where they did a few centuries ago? And do not new
circumstances, if they make us fearful, at the same time keep us from
despair? The future, be it what it may, will not resemble the past.
The present has new elements, which must work out new weal or woe. We
have no right, then, on the ground of the immutableness of human
affairs, to quench, as far as we have power, the hope of social
progress.

Another consideration, in reply to the objection that the necessary
toils of life exclude improvement, may be drawn not only from general
history, but from the experience of this country in particular. The
working classes here have risen and are sti