low-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 well nigh 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, instinct with
divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of God
indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The constant
pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of life which
might have perverted angels, had not been able to essentially alter the
natural nobility of the stock, and thes