small plat of ground for his temple, Heaven who gives thee all, this whole earth, so much broader than thou canst cultivate, thou hast to provide bread and soup societies for the poor starving men and women, who would work, but can get no work.

Here we are, in Ireland, every third person reduced to live on third-rate potatoes, these scantily obtained, and for only thirty-six weeks in the year; in England and Scotland, with dark lanes, Stockport cellars, and St. Ives workhouses, Manchester insurrections, gloomy enough; in France, no great better, daily émeutes, kept down by sheer force of armed soldiery; and in this country, following rapidly on in the same way, godless and heartless, sneering at virtue, philanthropy, owning no relation of man to man but what Carlyle terms "cash payment. What is to be the upshot of all this? My countrymen, I have before to-day told you all this; but though you are wise, intelligent, virtuous-the freest, noblest, meekest, humblest people that ever breathed this blessed air of heaven, I see nothing that you are doing to guard against worse, or to remedy what is bad. I read the newspapers, the protecting genii and guardian angels of the land. I seize the leading editorials, and in the simplicity of my heart and the eagerness of my spirit ask, What cheer? Surely, with so many Able Editors, all toiling and sweating at the anvil, all devoted heart and soul to the public good, we must be safe, and the means of averting the calamity dreaded must be within our reach; the remedy must be found out and insisted on. Alas! brother editors, I love and honor ye; but I must say, I see not as ye touch the problem, conceive of it even, far less propose a solution. Ye are all at work with details, with petty schemes, proposing nothing that comes up to the mark. Some of you talk of Home Industry; the wisest among you talk of Free Trade; none of you, as I hear, speak of God, and tell your readers that for a people who worship Mammon, there is no good. Nay, you must not speak of these matters; for if you do, who will advertise in your columns or subscribe for your papers? Nay, how many subscribers will my friend, the Editor of this Journal, lose by inserting this very Article? Am I not trenching at every moment on forbidden

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ground? Do I say one word that party leaders will not turn pale or look cross at? What political capital can be made out of what I say? Alas! brother Editors, do not think I intend to upbraid you. God knows our condition is not one to be envied. With the whole weight of the Republic on our shoulders, and we, alas! none of the strongest in bone or muscle! God pity us! For to carry this huge Republic, with its Mammon worships, and its Christian Churches reared on traders' shops, and its party strifes, its rush for office, its forgetfulness of man's brotherhood to man, its morality of Let us alone, Save who can, and the Devil take the hindmost; workers no longer finding work to do; master-workers counting their obligations to their workmen discharged in full when the stipulated wages are paid; it is no easy matter.

But, after all, what is the Remedy? Let us not deceive ourselves. The whole head is sick, the whole heart is faint. Our industrial arrangements, the relations of master-workers and the workers, of Capital and Labor, which have grown up during these last three hundred years, are essentially vicious, and, as we have seen, are beginning throughout Christendom to prove themselves so. The great evil is not now in the tyranny or oppressions of governments as such; it is not in the arbitrary power of monarchies, aristocracies, or democracies; but it is in the heart of the people, and the Industrial Order. It is simply, under the industrial head, so far as concerns our material well-being, in this fact, this mournful fact, that there is no longer any certainty of the born worker obtaining always work whereby he can provide for the ordinary wants of a human being. Nor is this altogether the fault of the master-workers. To a very great extent, the immediate employer is himself in turn employed; and as all who produce, produce to sell, their means of employing, constantly and at reasonable wages, evidently depend on the state of the market; workmen must, therefore, with every depression of trade, be thrown out of employment, whatever the benevolence of the master-workers.

Nor is it possible, with the present organization, or rather disorganization of Industry, to prevent these ruinous fluctuations of Trade. They may undoubtedly be exaggerated by bad legis

lation, as they may be mitigated by wise and just administration of government, but prevented altogether they cannot be. For this plain reason, that more can be produced, in any given year, with the present productive power, than can be sold in any given five years, we mean sold to the actual consumer. In other words, by our vicious method of distributing the products of labor, we destroy the possibility of keeping up an equilibrium between production and consumption. We create a surplus-that is a surplus, not when we consider the wants of the people, but when we consider the state of the markets-and then must slacken our hand till the surplus is worked off. During this time, while we are working off the surplus, while the mills run short time, or stop altogether, the workmen must want employment. The evil is inherent in the system. We say it is inherent in the system of wages, of cash payments, which, as at present understood, the world has for the first time made any general experiment of only now, since the Protestant Reformation.

Let us not be misinterpreted. We repeat not here the folly of some men about equality, and every man being in all things his own guide and master. This world is not so made. There must be in all branches of human activity, mental, social, industrial, Chiefs and Leaders. Rarely, if ever, does a man remain a workman at wages, who could succeed in managing an industrial establishment for himself. Here is my friend Mr. Smith, an excellent hatter, kind-hearted, charitable, and succeeds well; but of the fifty hands he employs, not one could take his place. Many of these journeymen of his have been in business for themselves, but failed. They are admirable workmen, but have not the capacity to direct, to manage, to carry on business. It is so the world over. There must be Chiefs in Religion, in Politics, in Industry; the few must lead, the many must follow. This is the order of Nature; it is the ordinance of God; and it is worse than idle to contend against it. The great question concerns the mode of designating these chiefs, and the form of the relation which shall subsist between them and the rest of the community. Our present mode of designating them in the Industrial world-in the political

we manage it in this country somewhat better-is obviously defective, and the relation expressed by wages, in our modern sense of the term, is an undeniable failure. Under it there is no security, no permanency, no true prosperity, for either worker or masterworker; both hurry on to one common ruin.

This, we are well aware, will not be believed. We do not believe ourselves ill. We mistake the hectic flush on the cheek for the hue of health. "We have heard," say our readers, "this cry of ruin ever since we could remember, and yet we have gone on prospering, increasing in wealth, refinement, art, literature, science, and doubling our population every thirty years." Yes, and we shall continue to prosper in the same way. The present stagnation of trade will last not much longer; business will soon revive, nay, is reviving; and we shall feel that the evil day is too far off to be guarded against. We shall grow richer; we shall build up yet larger industries; the hammer will ring from morning till night-till far into the night; the clack of the cottonmill will accompany the music of every waterfall; the whole land be covered by a vast network of railroads and canals; our ships will display their canvas upon every sea, and fill every port; our empire shall extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Northern Ocean to the Isthmus of Darien; we shall surpass England as much as ancient Carthage surpassed the mother Phænicia; be the richest, the most renowned nation the world ever saw. All this, it needs no prophetic eye to foresee; prosperity of this sort we may have, shall have. It is not of outward, material ruin we speak. But what will avail all this outward prosperity, our industries, our wealth, our arts, our luxuries, our boundless empire, our millions of people, if we contain in our midst a greater mass of corruption, of selfishness, of vice, of crime, of abject misery and wretchedness, than the world ever saw before? And yet, such will be our fate if we continue on in the path, nay, the broad road, in which we are now travelling.

But once more, we are asked, what is the remedy? Shall we go back to the Middle Ages, to Feudalism and the old Catholic Church? No, my coun

trymen, no. This is no longer possible even if it were desirable. We have got fire-arms, heathen literature, printing, and the new world; with these it is not possible to reconstruct the Middle Ages. How often must I remind you that there is no going back? Who ever knew yesterday to return? From the bottom of my heart I believe these much decried Middle Ages were far preferable, regarded as definitive, to our own. What we have as yet obtained by departing from them,-unless we make it the stepping-stone to something more, is far beneath them. The Israelites in the wilderness, I must needs believe were,-saving the hope of reaching the promised land,-worse off than in Egypt making bricks for their task-masters; but this promised land, flowing with milk and honey, lay before them, not behind them, and could be reached not by returning to Egypt, but by pressing onward through the wilderness. I pray thee, gentle, or rather ungentle reader, not to misinterpret me, on this point, as thou art wont to do. No more than thou dost do I believe in the perfection of the Middle Ages, as much as I may admire them, and as much superior to the present as I certainly hold them. I would not bring them back if I could. They do not come up to my ideal of what is most desirable for the human race; nor to what is attainable even. They had many and heavy drawbacks. Out from under the veil of Romance, which Time and Genius have woven for them, we see ever and anon the ghastly Death's Head peering. No wise man regrets their departure; no wise man labors to reproduce them; and herein the Schlegels and Oxford Divines are not wise, and do but kick against the pricks. We grieve not that we can have these ages no more; that Feudalism is gone, and the Church of Gregory VII, that Napoleon of the Ecclesiastical Order, is gone, never to return; but we do grieve that in getting rid of them, we have supplied their place by nothing better; by nothing so good. In contrasting them with the present, we have wished to show our countrymen that they should not be contented with the present, nor despair of something better; for better once was and may be again; though not in the old form.

But if we would not reconstruct the

old Feudal and Catholic society, we would have what Feudalism and Mediæval Catholicity sought to realize; and to some extent, though in a rude and imperfect manner, it may be, did realize. We would have men governed, and well governed, let who will be the governors, or what form adopted there may be for selecting them. God's curse and Humanity's curse also do and will rest on the no-government schemers. Satan himself was chief Anarch, and all anarchs are his children. Men need government, nay, have a right to demand government, without which there is no life for them. We would also see revived in all its mediæval force and activity the Christian Faith, and as the interpreter of that Faith, the Christian Church, one and indivisible; the ground and pillar of the truth; clothed with the authority which of right belongs to it; and enjoining and exercising a discipline on high and low, rich and poor, as effective as that of the Middle Ages, but modified to meet the new wants and relations of Christendom. There is no true living on this God's earth, for men who do not believe in God, in Christ, in the ever present Spirit of Truth, Justice, Love; in the Reality of the Spiritual World; nor without the Church of Christ, active and efficient, authoritative over faith and conscience, competent to instruct us in the mysteries of our destiny, and to direct us wisely and surely through the creation of a heaven here on earth, to a holier and higher heaven hereafter. We must revoke the divorce unwisely and wickedly decreed between politics and religion and morality. It must not be accounted a superfluity in the politician to have a conscience; nor an impertinence to speak and to act as if he believed in the eternal God, and feared the retributions of the unseen world; nor inconsistent with the acknowledged duties of the minister of religion, to withhold absolution from the base politician, the foul wretch, whatever his private morals, who will in public life betray his country, or sup port an unjust policy through plea of utility or mere expediency. It must not always be in vain that a public measure is shown to be unjust in order to secure its defeat, or just, in order to secure its adoption. Nations must be made to feel that there is a Higher than they, and that they may lawfully do

only what the Sovereign of sovereigns commands. Right must be carried into the cabinet councils of ministers, into legislative halls, into the bureaus of business, and preside at the tribunals of justice; men must be made to feel deep in their inmost being, whether in public life or in private life, that they are watched by the all-seeing Eye, and that it is better to be poor, better to beg, better to starve, than to depart in the least iota from the law of rigid justice, and thrice blessed charity. This is what we need; what we demand for our country, for all countries; and demand too in the reverend name of Him who was, and is, and is to be, and in the sacred name of Humanity, whose maternal heart is wounded by the least wound received by the least significant of her children.

But how shall this faith be reproduced? It is not for me to answer this question. There are, as I compute, some fifteen thousand clergymen in this country, of all names and grades; all, I am bound to presume, good men and true; apostolic men; laboring with an eye single to the glory of their Master in the salvation of men; able ministers of the New Testament, comprehending all mysteries, and competent to unfold to us the destinies of man and society; speaking with an unction from the Holy Óne, words of truth with power, as men having authority. To these belongs the prerogative to answer the question proposed. I have no disposition to encroach on their peculiar province. But, holy fathers, permit me with all respect for your order, to ask, you being what I have presumed, how happens it that truth dies out of the hearts of the people, that God's altars are everywhere digged down, and those of Mammon set up? It is not for me to rebuke an elder, but, holy fathers, does not this fact speak of neglected duty, of unfaithfulness to your charge Your profession falls into disrepute; your flocks run after strange gods, and set up those to be gods which are no gods. Some of your most zealous supporters, who are severest against those who reverence you not, who carry around the box of charity, put a penny in but do take a shilling out; your well dressed hearers, in their soft cushioned pews, smile or sleep when you talk of heaven, of hell, of eternity, of man's accountability and the neces

sity of seeking heaven by self-denial, by crucifying the world, and exercising faith towards God and charity towards men. These old-fashioned notions seem to be outgrown, and men fancy themselves now gliding on safely to the Celestial City, as my friend Hawthorne has it, on recently constructed railroads, with Apollyon himself for conductor and chief engineer. Could this have happened, holy fathers, if you had been faithful to the Great Head of the Church? O, it is a fearful thing that you and I shall be compelled to answer at the dread tribunal for the faith of this people! God will ask of us, Where are the children I committed to your charge? What shall we have to answer?

Politically, also, we need something, and something may unquestionably be done, especially in this country where the people are supreme, inasmuch as the people are wise and virtuous. Were it my province to suggest anything to be done under this head, I should recommend the complete destruction of the paper money system, the repeal of all measures facetiously called Protection of Home Industry, which tax one interest for the purpose of building up another, and labor for the enhancement of the profits of capital; and the adoption of a uniform measure of values, so that men shall buy and sell by the same measure, and trade cease to be only a respectable form of gambling with loaded dice. But, I am told that the great merit of the politician is to find out and conform to the will of the people; I will therefore make no proposition. There are at least in this country, computing Federal and State officers, from President down to tide-waiters, and Governors down to field-drivers, all told, not less than some hundred and fifty thousand office-holders, to say nothing of twice as many office-seekers, hardly if at all their inferiors. These are the Political Chiefs of the people. The people are virtuous and intelligent. They will always therefore select the most virtuous and intelligent of their number for their chiefs. These officeholders, therefore, are and must be held to be a fair and full representation of the virtue and intelligence of the American people.

Now, it belongs to these, the selected chiefs of the people, to introduce

and carry through all needed political reforms. Political Chiefs, you are intrusted with power; you have the confidence of the people; you are selected by us to be our governors and guides. Now, in the name of our common country we call upon you, since you unquestionably have the ability, to put an end to the evils we have complained of, so far as they belong to your department. I am sure the people, if they are as wise and as virtuous as you tell them they are, and have made them believe they are, have never wished the political state of things which now is. I am sure, that the great mass of your constituents, how ever they may err as to means, do really prefer good government, which maintains freedom for all, and which at least gives us this simple kind of liberty of which Carlyle speaks, to buy where we can cheapest, to sell where dearest. Do you then regard this will, resign your functions, or work out something better than we now have; and better not merely for rich capitalists and trading politicians, but better for my poor sister the washerwoman, and the still poorer sister, the sempstress, with her three little children growing up in ignorance, to be corrupted by the rabble rout with which they must associate.

Of Industrial Reforms properly so called, we speak not. Owenisms, St. Simonisms, Fourierisms, Communisms, and isms enough in all conscience are rife, indicating at least, that men are beginning to feel that the present industrial relations are becoming quite unbearable. Three years ago, I brought forward my "Morrison Pill," but the public made up wry faces, and absolutely refused to take it; so much the worse for them. I cannot afford to throw away my medicines, even if they are quack medicines. I cease attempting to prescribe. I leave this matter to the natural chiefs of Industry, that is, to Bank Presidents, Cashiers, and Directors; to the Presidents and Directors of Insurance Offices, of Railroads and other Corporations; heavy manufacturers, and leading merchants; the Master-Workers, in Carlyle's terminology, the Plugsons of Undershot. Messrs. Plugsons of Undershot, you are a numerous and a powerful body. You are the Chiefs of Industry, and in some sort hold our lives

in your pockets. You are a respectable body. I see you occupying the chief seats in the synagogues, consulted by Secretaries of the Treasury, constituting boards of Trade, Conventions of Manufacturers, forming Home Leagues, presiding over Lyceums, making speeches at meetings for the relief of the poor, and other charitable purposes. You are great; you are respectable; and you have a benevolent regard for all poor laborers. Suffer me, alas, a poor laborer enough, to do you homage, and render you the tribute of my gratitude. Think not that I mean to reproach you with the present state of Industry and the Working Men. I have no reproaches to bring. But, ye are able to place our Industry on its right basis, and I come as one to call upon you to do it; nay, to tell you that not I only, but a Higher than any of us, will hold you responsible for the future condition of the Industrial Classes. If you govern industry only with a view to your own profit, to the profit of master-workers, I tell you that the little you contribute to build Work Houses, and to furnish Bread and Soup, will not be held as a final discharge. If God has given you capacities to lead, it has been that you might be a blessing to those who want that capacity. As he will hold the Clergy responsible for the religious faith of the people, as he will hold the Political Chiefs responsible for the wise ordinance and administration of government, so, my respected Masters, will he hold you responsible for the wise organization of industry and the just distribution of its fruits. Here, I dare speak, for here I am the interpreter of the law of God. Every pang the poor mother feels over her starving boy, is recorded in Heaven against you, and goes to swell the account you are running up there, and which you, with all your financiering, may be unable to discharge. Do not believe that no books are kept but your own, nor that your method of book-keeping by double entry is the highest method, the most perfect. Look to it, then. What does it profit, though a man gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Ay, my respected Masters, as little as ye think of the matter, ye have souls, and souls that can be lost too, if not lost already. In God's name, in humanity's name, nay, in the name of