disappeared from earth. Human
slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of
subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to
employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as
among children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any
longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem
was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There
was no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of human
beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man
stood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain
became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and
immoderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were no
more beggars nor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation.
The ten commandments became wellnigh obsolete in a world where there
was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or
favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation
to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another.
Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked by
so many ages, at last was realized.

"As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had
been placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, so
in the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking
found themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditions
of life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to
develop the brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which
had heretofore encouraged selfishness was not only removed, but placed
upon unselfishness, it was for the first time possible to see what
unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,
which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an
extent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler
qualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into
panegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind to
fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divines
and philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that
human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by
their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish,
pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations,
instinc