the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.

"Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with which the
grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless because
it could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none were needed. The
change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world often cost more
lives than did the revolution which set the feet of the human race at
last in the right way.

"Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our
resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet
I have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in this serene
and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition, when
heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the kindling
gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had closed its
path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of light, still
dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have lived then, when
the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuries
trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?

"You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of
revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social
traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order
worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their
habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the
science of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, and
wherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning and
ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when once
it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal
standpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be
clothed?'--its difficulties vanished.

"Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity,
of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual
standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist and
employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last
vestige of the serfdom of man to man 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 fel