nd his
laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man sought
it carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which he could
earn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in before
some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even the
ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While
they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for their
families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of
their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business,
preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and
everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to
poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct
which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on
the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned
the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have
been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believe me,
it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinity
within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even the fight
for life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, in which
mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the
earth.

"It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and
women, who under other conditions would have been full of gentleness
and ruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold, when we
realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. For
the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in
sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature it
meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity,
brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of
childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the
mind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those
faculties which distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a
round of bodily functions.

"Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and your
children as the only alternative of success in the accumulation of
wealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the moral
level of your ancestors?

"Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in
India, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few
score, was