may seem less so when we reflect that human nature is unchanged, and that
which has to be satisfied in this world is the mind. And there are some
exceptions to this general material prosperity, in its result to the
working classes. Manufacturing England is an exception. There is nothing
so pitiful, so hopeless in the record of man, not in the Middle Ages, not
in rural France just before the Revolution, as the physical and mental
condition of the operators in the great manufacturing cities and in the
vast reeking slums of London. The political economists have made England
the world's great workshop, on the theory that wealth is the greatest
good in life, and that with the golden streams flowing into England from
a tributary world, wages would rise, food be cheap, employment constant.
The horrible result to humanity is one of the exceptions to the general
uplift of the race, not paralleled as yet by anything in this country,
but to be taken note of as a possible outcome of any material
civilization, and fit to set us thinking whether we have not got on a
wrong track. Mr. Froude, fresh from a sight of the misery of industrial
England, and borne straight on toward Australia over a vast ocean,
through calm and storm, by a great steamer,--horses of fire yoked to a
sea-chariot,--exclaims: "What, after all, have these wonderful
achievements done to elevate human nature? Human nature remains as it
was. Science grows, but morality is stationary, and art is vulgarized.
Not here lie the 'things necessary to salvation,' not the things which
can give to human life grace, or beauty, or dignity."

In the United States, with its open opportunities, abundant land, where
the condition of the laboring class is better actually and in possibility
than it ever was in history, and where there is little poverty except
that which is inevitably the accompaniment of human weakness and crime,
the prevailing discontent seems groundless. But of course an agitation so
widespread, so much in earnest, so capable of evoking sacrifice, even to