m 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
truth, 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 attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely to be
perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room
containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The
unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as the
agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, th