Part 3.--The simple sole being of infinity of expansion and of duration,

who is all-knowing and all-powerful, is necessarily entirely free.

Division 3.--The simple sole being of infinity of expansion and of duration, who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and entirely free, is necessarily completely happy.

Sub-proposition.--The simple sole being of infinity of expansion and of duration, who is all-knowing, all-powerful, entirely free, and completely happy, is necessarily perfectly good.

The first objection against the foregoing arguments is that it seeks to prove too much. It affirms one existence (God) infinite in extent and duration, and another entirely different and distinct existence (the material universe) finite in extent and duration. It therefore seeks to substantiate everything and something more. The first proposition is curiously worded, and the argument to demonstrate it is undoubtedly open to more than one objection.

Mr. Gillespie has not defined infinity, and it is possible therefore his argument may be misapprehended in this paper. Infinite signifies nothing more than indefinite. When a person speaks of infinite extension he can only mean to refer to the extension of something to which he has been unable to set limits. The mind can not conceive extension _per se_, either absolute or finite. It can only conceive something extended. It might be impossible mentally to define the extension of some substance. In such a case its extension would be indefinite; or, as Mr. Gillespie uses the word, infinite. No one can therefore possibly have any idea of infinity of extension. Yet it is upon the existence of such an idea, and on the impossibility of getting rid of it, that Mr. Gillespie grounds his first proposition. If the idea does not exist, the argument is destroyed at the first step.

Mr. Gillespie argues that it is utterly beyond the power of the human mind to conceive infinity of extension non-existent. He would have been more correct in asserting that it is utterly beyond the power of the human mind to conceive infinity of extension at all, either existent or non-existent. Extension can only be conceived as quality of substance. It is possible to conceive substance extended. It is impossible in thought to limit the possible extension of substance. Mr. Gillespie having asserted that we can not but believe that infinity of extension exists, proceeds to declare that it exists necessarily. For, he says, everything the existence of which we can not but believe, exists necessarily. It is not necessary at present to examine what Mr. Gillespie means by existing necessarily; it is sufficient to have shown that we do not believe in the existence of infinity of extension, although we may and do believe in the existence of substance, to the extension of which we may be unable to set limits. But, says Mr. Gillespie, "everything the existence of which we can not but believe is necessarily existing." Then as we can not but believe in the existence of the universe (or, to adopt Mr. Gillespie's phrase, the material universe), the material universe exists necessarily. If by "anything necessarily existing," he means anything the essence of which involves existence, or the nature of which can only be considered as existent, then Mr. Gillespie, by demonstrating the necessary existence of the universe, refutes his own later argument, that God is its creator. Mr. Gillespie's argument, as before remarked, is open to misconception, because he has left us without any definition of some of the most important words he uses. To avoid the same objection, it is necessary to state that by substance or existence I mean that which is in itself and is conceived per se--that is, the conception of which does not involve the conception of anything else as antecedent to it. By quality, that by which I cognize any mode of existence. By mode, each cognized condition of existence. Regarding extension as quality of mode of substance, and not as substance itself, it appears absurd to argue that the quality exists otherwise than as quality of mode.

The whole of the propositions following the first are so built upon it, that if it fails they are baseless. The second proposition is, that infinity of extension is necessarily indivisible. In dealing with this proposition, Mr. Gillespie talks of the _parts_ of infinity of extension, and winds up by saying that he means parts in the sense of partial consideration only. Now not only is it denied that you can have any idea of infinity of extension, but it is also denied that infinity can be the subject of partial consideration. Mr. Gillespie's whole proof of this proposition is intended to affirm that the parts of infinity of extension are necessarily indivisible from each other.

I have already denied the possibility of conceiving infinity in parts; and, indeed, if it were possible to conceive infinity in parts, then that infinity could not be indivisible, for Mr. Gillespie says that, by indivisible, he means indivisible, either really or mentally. Now each part of anything conceived is, in the act of conceiving, mentally separated from, either other parts of, or from the remainder of, the whole of which it is part. It is clearly impossible to have a partial consideration of infinity, because the part considered must be mentally distinguished from the unconsidered remainder, and, in that case, you have, in thought, the part considered finite, and the residue certainly limited, at least, by the extent of the part under consideration.

If any of the foregoing objections are well-founded, they are fatal to Mr. Gillespie's argument.

The argument in favor of the corollary to the second proposition is that the parts of infinity of extension are necessarily immovable among themselves; but if there be no such thing as infinity of extension--that is, if extension be only a quality and not necessarily infinite; if infinite mean only indefiniteness or illimitability, and if infinity can not have parts--this argument goes for very little. The acceptance of the argument that the parts of infinity of extension are immovable is rendered difficult when the reader considers Mr. Gillespie's sub-proposition (4) that the parts of the material universe are movable and divisible from each other. He urges that a part of the infinity of extension or of its substratum must penetrate the material universe and every atom of it. But if infinity can have no parts, no part of it can penetrate the material universe. If infinity have parts (which is absurd), and if some part penetrate every atom of the material universe, and if the part so penetrating be immovable, how can the material universe be considered as movable, and yet as penetrated in every atom by immovability? If penetrated be a proper phrase, then, at the moment when the part of infinity was penetrating the material universe, the part of infinity so penetrating must have been in motion. Mr. Gillespie's logic is faulty. Use his own language, and there is either no penetration, or there is no immovability.

In his argument for the fourth proposition, Mr. Gillespie--having by his previous proposition demonstrated (?) what he calls a substratum for the before demonstrated (?) infinity of extension--says, "it is intuitively evident that the substratum of infinity of extension can be no more divisible than infinity of extension." Is this so? Might not a complex and divisible substratum be conceived by us as possible to underlie a (to us) simple and indivisible indefinite extension, if the conception of the latter were possible to us? There can not be any intuition. It is mere assumption, as, indeed, is the assumption of extension at all, other than as the extension of substance. In his argument for proposition 5, Gillespie says that "any one who asserts that he can suppose two or more necessarily existing beings, each of infinity of expansion, is no more to be argued with than one who denies, Whatever is, is." Why is it more difficult to suppose this than to suppose one being of infinity, and, in addition to this infinity, a material universe? Is it impossible to suppose a necessary being of heat, one of light, and one of electricity, all occupying the same indefinite expansion? If it be replied that you can not conceive two distinct and different beings occupying the same point at the same moment, then it must be equally impossible to conceive the material universe and God existing together.

The second division of Mr. Gillespie's argument is also open to grave objection. Having demonstrated to his own satisfaction an infinite substance, and also having assumed in addition a finite substance, and having called the first an infinite "being"--perhaps from a devout objection to speak of God as substance--Mr. Gillespie seeks to prove that the infinite being is intelligent. He says: "Intelligence either began to be, or it never began to be. That is never began to be is evident in this, that if it began to be, it must have had a cause; for whatever begins to be must have a cause. And the cause of intelligence must be of intelligence; for what is not of intelligence can not make intelligence begin to be. Now intelligence being before intelligence began to be is a contradiction. And this absurdity following from the supposition that intelligence began to be, it is proved that intelligence never began to be: to wit, is of infinity of duration." Mr. Gillespie does not condescend to tell us why "what is not of intelligence cannot make intelligence begin to be;" but it is not unfair to suppose that he means that of things which have nothing in common one can not be the cause of the other. Let us apply Mr. Gillespie's argument to the material universe, the existence of which is to him so certain that he has treated it as a self-evident proposition.

The material universe--that is, matter--either began to be, or it never began to be. That it never began to be is evident in this, that if it began to be, it must have had a cause; for whatever begins to be must have a cause. And the cause of matter must be of matter; for what is not of matter can not make matter begin to be. Now matter being before matter began to be is contradiction. And this absurdity following from the supposition that matter--i. e., the material universe--began to be, it is proved that the material universe never began to be--to wit, is of indefinite duration.

The argument as to the eternity of matter is at least as logical as the argument for the eternity of intelligence. Mr. Gillespie may reply that he affirms the material universe to be finite in duration, and that by the argument for his proposition, part 2, he proves that the one infinite being (God) is the creator of matter. His words are:

"As the material universe is finite in duration, or began to be, it must have had a cause; for whatever begins to be must have a cause. And this cause must be [Mr. Gillespie does not explain why], in one respect or other, the simple sole being of infinity of expansion and duration, who is all-knowing [the all-knowing or intelligence rests on the argument which has just been shown to be equally applicable to matter], inasmuch as what being, or cause independent of that being, could there be? And, therefore, that being made matter begin to be." Taking Mr. Gillespie's own argument, that which made matter begin to be must be of matter, for what is not matter can not make matter begin to be, then Mr. Gillespie's infinite being (God) must be matter. But there is yet another exception to the preposition, which is that the infinite being (God) is all-powerful. Having, as above, argued that the being made matter, he proceeds, "and this being shown, it must be granted that the being is, necessarily, all-powerful." Nothing of the kind need be granted. If it were true that it was demonstrated that the infinite being (God) made matter, it would not prove him able to make anything else; it might show the being cause enough for that effect, but does not demonstrate him cause for all effects. So that if no better argument can be found to prove God all-powerful, his omnipotence remains unproved.

Mr. Gillespie's last proposition is that the being (God) whose existence he has so satisfactorily (?) made out is necessarily completely happy. In dealing with this proposition, Mr. Gillespie talks of unhappiness as existing in various kinds and degrees. But, to adopt his own style of argument, unhappiness either began to be, or it never began to be. That it never began to be is evident in this, that whatever began to be must have had a cause, for whatever begins to be must have a cause. And the cause of unhappiness must be of unhappiness, for what is not of unhappiness can not make unhappiness begin to be. But unhappiness being before unhappiness began to be is a contradiction; therefore unhappiness is of infinity of duration. But proposition 5, part 2, says there is but one being of infinity of duration. The one being of infinity of duration is therefore necessarily unhappy. Mr. Gillespie's arguments recoil on himself, and are destructive of his own affirmations.

In his argument for the sub-proposition, Mr. Gillespie says that God's motive, or one of his motives, to create, must be believed to have been a desire to make happiness, besides his own consummate happiness, begin to be. That is, God, who is consummate happiness everywhere forever, _desired_ something. That is, he wanted more than then existed. That is, his happiness was not complete. That is, Mr. Gillespie refutes himself. But what did infinite and eternal complete happiness desire? It desired (says Mr. Gillespie) to make more happiness--that is, to make more than an infinity of complete happiness. Mr. Gillespie's proof, on the whole, is at most that there exists necessarily substance, the extension and duration which we can not limit. Part of his argument involves of the use of the very _a posteriori_ reasoning just considered, regarded by himself as utterly worthless for the demonstration of the existence of a being with such attributes as orthodox Theism tries to assert.

If Sir William Hamilton meant no flattery in writing that Mr. Gillespie's works was one of the "very ablest" on the Theistic side, how wretched indeed must, in his opinion, have been the logic of the less able advocates for Theism. Every Theist must admit that if a God exists, he could have so convinced all men of the fact of his existence that doubt, disagreement, or disbelief would be impossible. If he could not do this, he would not be omnipotent, or he would not be omniscient--that is, he would not be God. Every Theist must also agree that if a God exists, he would wish all men to have such a clear consciousness of his existence and attributes that doubt, disagreement, or belief on this subject would be impossible. And this, if for no other reason, because that out of doubts and disagreements on religion have too often resulted centuries of persecution, strife, and misery, which a good God would desire to prevent. If God would not desire this, then he is not all-good--that is he is not God. But as many men have doubts, a large majority of mankind have disagreements, and some men have disbeliefs as to God's existence and attributes, it follows either that God does not exist, or that he is not all-wise, or that he is not all-powerful, or that he is not all-good.

Every child is born into the world an Atheist; and if he grows into a Theist, his Deity differs with the country in which the believer may happen to be born, or the people among whom he may happen to be educated. The belief is the result of education or organization. Religious belief is powerful in proportion to the want of scientific knowledge on the part of the believer. The more ignorant, the more credulous. In the mind of the Theist "God" is equivalent to the sphere of the unknown; by the use of the Word he answers without thought problems which might otherwise obtain scientific solution. The more ignorant the Theist, the greater his God. Belief in God is not a faith founded on reason, but a prostration of the reasoning faculties on the threshold of the unknown. Theism is worse than illogical; its teachings are not only without utility; but of itself it has nothing to teach. Separated from Christianity with its almost innumerable sects, from Maliometanism with its numerous divisions, and separated also from every other preached system, Theism is a Will-o'-the-wisp, without reality. Apart from orthodoxy, Theism is a boneless skeleton; the various mythologies give it alike flesh and bone, otherwise coherence it hath none. What does Christian Theism teach? That the first man made perfect by the all-powerful, all-wise, all-good God, was nevertheless imperfect, and by his imperfection brought misery into the world, when the all-good God must have intended misery should never come. That this God made men to share this misery--men whose fault was their being what he made them. That this God begets a son, who is nevertheless his unbegotten self, and that by belief in the birth of God's eternal son, and in the death of the undying who died to satisfy God's vengeance, man may escape the consequences of the first man's error. Christian Theism declares that belief alone can save man, and yet recognizes the fact that man's belief results from teaching, by establishing missionary societies to spread the faith. Christian Theism teaches that God, though no respecter of persons, selected as his favorites one nation in preference to all others: that man can do no good of himself or without God's aid, but yet that each man has a free will; that God is all-powerful, but that few go to heaven and the majority to hell; that all are to love God, who has predestined from eternity that by far the largest number of human beings are to be burning in hell for ever. Yet the advocates for Theism venture to upbraid those who argue against such a faith.

Either Theism is true or false. If true, discussion must help to spread its influence; if false, the sooner it ceases to influence human conduct the better for human kind. It will be useless for the clergy to urge that such a pamphlet deserves no reply. It is true the writer is unimportant, and the language in which his thoughts find expression lacks the polish of a Macaulay, and the fervor of a Burke; but they are nevertheless his thoughts, uttered because it is not only his right, but his duty, to give them utterance. And this Plea for Atheism is put forth challenging the Theists to battle for their cause, and in the hope that the strugglers being sincere, truth may give laurels to the victor and the vanquished; laurels to the victor in that he has upheld the truth; laurels still welcome to the vanquished, whose defeat crowns him with a truth he knew not of before.

IS THERE A GOD?

Some of those who have heard me venture to examine the question of the existence of Deity _viva voce_, have desired to have my reasons for holding the Atheistic position briefly stated, and while I do not pretend to exhaust the subject in these few pages, I trust to say enough to provoke thought and inquiry. I do not say, "There is no God," and the scarcely polite rejoinder of those who quote the Psalmist can not, therefore, be applied with justice toward myself. I have never yet heard living man give me a clear, coherent definition of the word "God," and I have never read any definition from either dead or living man expressing a definite and comprehensible idea of Deity. In fact, it has always appeared to me that men use that word rather to hide their ignorance than to express their knowledge.*

* In Sir William Hamilton's Essay on Cousin, I find a note quoting Mr. Piesse on Kant, in which the word God stands as the equivalent for a phase of the unknowable.

Climatic conditions often, and diversity of human race always, govern and modify the meaning conveyed by the word. By "God" one nation or sect expresses love; another, vengeance; another, good; another, wisdom; another, fire; another, water; another, air; another, earth; and some even confound their notion of Deity with that of devil. Elihu Palmer well observes: "The Christian world worships three infinite gods, and one omniscient devil." I do not deny "God," because that word conveys to me no idea, and I can not deny that which presents to me no distinct affirmation, and of which the would-be affirmer has no conception. I can not war with a nonentity. If, however, God is affirmed to represent an existence which is distinct from the existence of which I am a mode, and which it is alleged is not the _noumenon_, of which the word "I" represents only a specialty of _phenomena_, then I deny "God," and affirm that it is impossible "God" can be. That is, I affirm that there is one existence, and deny that there can be more than one. Atheists are sometimes content to say to their opponents, your "proofs" are no proofs, your "evidences" are failures, you do not and can not prove the existence of Deity. This ground may be safe, but the conduct of its occupier is not daring. The swordsman who always guarded and parried, but never ventured cut or thrust, might himself escape unwounded, but he would thus make but little progress toward victory over his opponent.

It is well to show that the position of your antagonist is weak, but it is better to prove that you are strong.

In a paper as limited as the present, it is necessary to be brief both in answer to opponents and in the statements of my own opinions. This is rather intended as the challenging speech of a debate, not as a complete essay on the existence of Deity.

There are two modes in which Theists endeavor to prove the existence of God, and each of these modes is in its turn denounced by Theistic writers--1st, the _a priori_; 2d, the _a posteriori_. Of the former, Pearson, in his "Prize Essay on Infidelity," says: "The _a priori_ mode of reasoning is the exclusive idol of many of the German logicians.... But in their hands this kind of reasoning has completely failed. It conducts the mind to no firm resting place; it bewilders instead of elucidating our notions of God, of man, and the universe. It gives us no divine personal existence, and leaves us floating in a region of mere vague abstractions. Such reasonings are either altogether vain or are not really what they profess to be. In our country the name of Dr. Clarke is chiefly associated with the _a priori_ argument.... Clarke himself found it necessary to stoop to the argument _a posteriori_, and thereby acknowledged the fallacy of attempting to reason exclusively _a priori_.... The fate of Dr. Clarke's pretended demonstration, and the result, in so far as theology is concerned, of the transcendental reasoning of the continental philosophers, show the futility of attempting to rise up to the height of the great argument of the existence of God by the _a priori_ method alone."

Of the latter, William Gillespie, in his "Treatise on the Necessary Existence of Deity," writes that it "can never make it appear that infinity belongs in any way to God." It "can only entitle us to infer the existence of a being of finite extension, for, by what rule in philosophy can we deduce from the existence of an object finite in extent (and nothing is plainer than that the marks of design which we can discover must be finite in their extent) the existence of a cause of infinity of extension? What, then, becomes of the omnipresence of the Deity, according to those who are content to rest satisfied from the reasoning of experience?... It will be vain to talk of the Deity being present by his energy? although he may not be present by his substance, to the whole universe. For, 'tis natural to ask not so much how it is proved that God is virtually present, though not substantially present, in every part of nature, as what can be meant by being everywhere present by mere energy?" This reasoning can no more make out that the Deity is omnipresent by his virtue, than that he is omnipresent as to his substance.... And, from the inaptitude of the reasoning under consideration to show that immensity, or omnipresence, belongs to God, it will be found to follow, directly and immediately, that his wisdom and power can not be shown to be more than finite, and that he can never be proved to be a free agent.... Omnipresence (let it be only by energy) is absolutely necessary in a being of infinity of wisdom. And therefore, 'the design argument' is unable to evince that the Deity is in possession of this attribute. It likewise plainly follows, from the inaptitude of this argument to show that God is omnipresent, that thereby we can not prove infinity of power to belong to him. For, if the argument can not make out that the being it discovers is everywhere present, how can it ever make out that he is everywhere powerful? By careful reflection, too, we may perceive that omnipotence of another kind than power, winch can exert itself in all places, requires the existence of immensity. "The design argument" can never evince that God is a free agent....

If we can not prove the immensity or omnipresence of the Deity, we can for that reason never show that he is omniscient, that he is omnipotent, that he is entirely free.... If the Deity can not be proved to be of infinity in any given respect, it would be nothing less than absurd to suppose that he could be proved to be of infinity in any other respect. It "can do no more than prove that at the commencement of the phenomena which pass under its review, there existed a cause exactly sufficient to make the effects begin to be. That this cause existed from eternity, the reasonings from experience by no means show. Nay, for aught they make known, the designer himself may not have existed long before those marks of design which betoken his workmanship." This reasoning "can not prove that the God whom it reveals has existed from all eternity, therefore, for anything it intimates, God may at some time cease to be, and the workmanship may have an existence when the workman hath fallen into annihilation.... Such reasonings can never assure us of the unity of the Deity." Whether there be one God or not, the argument from experience doth by no means make clear. It discovers marks of design in the phenomena of nature, and infers the existence of at least one intelligent substance sufficient to produce them. Further, however, it advances not our knowledge. Whether the cause of the phenomena be one God or many Gods, it pretends not to determine past all doubt.... But did this designer create the matter in which the design appeared? Of this the argument can not convince us, for it does no more than infer a designing cause from certain appearances, in the same way we would infer from finding some well-contrived machine in a desert that a human being had left it there.... Now, because this reasoning can not convince us of such a creation, it can not convince us there is not a plurality of deities, or of the causes of things.... If we can not prove the eternity of God, it is not possible we can prove the unity of God. To say that, for anything we know to the contrary, he may have existed from all eternity, being much the same as saying that, for anything we know to the contrary, there may be another God or many Gods beside." Sir W. Hamilton considered that the only valid arguments for the existence of a God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man's moral nature.

Dr. Lyman Beecher issued, some few years since, a series of lectures on Atheism, without merit or fairness, and which are here only alluded to as fairly illustrating a certain class of orthodox opposition. His statements of Atheistic opinions are monstrous perversions, and his answers are directed against the straw man built together by himself. The doctrine of "almighty chance" which Dr. Beecher attacks, is one which I never heard an educated Atheist teach, and the misrepresentation of Freethought objects is so obvious that it can only be effectual with those who have never freed themselves from the trammels which habit and fashion-faith bound upon them in their infancy, and which have strengthened with their growth. The Rev. J. Orr, in his "Treatise on Theism," says, "All inquiry about chance is, however, impertinent in the present day. The idea is an infantine one, possible of entertainment only in the initial state of human knowledge. Chance is _not_ the position relied upon by modern Atheism. And when, therefore, the Theist expends the artillery of his argument upon this broken down and obsolete notion, he is intermeddling with the dead, and after accomplishing the destruction of the venerable fallacy, the modern Atheist will likely ask him to come down to the nineteenths century and meet him there."

The only attempt at argument in Dr. Beecher's book is founded on the assumption:

1st. That there is an existence called matter.

2d. That there are certain effects perceivable which can not result from matter.

3d. That therefore there is a God the cause for these effects. Where are there any Materialists who accept Dr. Beecher's limitation of matter? It is a word I do not use myself.

On the question of evil, Coleridge, in his "Aids to Reflection," says: "1st. That evil must have had a beginning, since otherwise it must either be God or a co-eternal and co-equal rival with God. 2d. That it could not originate in God; for if so, it would at once be evil and not evil, or God would be at once God--that is, infinite goodness--and not God." If God be infinite goodness, can evil exist at all? It is necessary above all that we should understand the meaning of each word we use. Some men talk as if their words were intended rather to conceal than to express their ideas. So far as this essay is concerned I will endeavor to avoid this difficulty by explicitly defining each special word I use. Dugald Stewart, indeed, says, "That there are many words used in philosophical discourse which do not admit of logical definition, is abundantly manifest. This is the case with all those words that signify things un-compounded, and consequently unsusceptible of analysis--a proposition, one should think, almost self-evident; and yet it is surprising how very generally it has been overlooked by philosophers."

The advantages, however, accruing from frequent definitions are very great; at the least they serve to explain what was meant by the persons using the word, whereas sometimes two men confuse each word by using words to which each attaches an opposite or a dissimilar value.

Men will talk of "First Cause," and "Intelligent First Cause." Do they know what they mean? I confess I do not, and from the manner in which they use the words, the most charitable conclusion is that they use them because others have done so, and for no worse or better reason. They talk of the "Beauties of Creation," and "Works of the Great Creator." If by creation is meant the origin of existence, then each utterance of the phrase is an absurdity. The human mind is utterly incapable of construing it in thought as possible that the complement of existence has either been increased or diminished. Man can neither conceive nothing becoming something nor something becoming nothing.

Definitions.--1. By existence, or substance, I mean that which is in itself and is conceived _per se_--that is, the conception of which does not require the conception of anything else as antecedent to it. Whenever I use the words universe or matter, I use them in the same sense as representing the totality of existence. Existence can only be known in its modes, and these by their attributes. 2. By attribute, I understand that by which I cognize any mode of existence. Hardness, brightness, color, life, form, etc., are attributes of conditional existence. 3. By mode, I understand each cognized condition or accident of existence. 4. By eternity I mean indefinite duration; that is duration which is to me illimitable. 5. By infinity, I mean indefinite extension. The axioms, so far as I shall give them, are in the precise language of Spinoza. "1. Everything which is, is in itself, or in some other thing.. 2. That which cannot be conceived through another _per aliud_, must be conceived _per se_. 3. From a given determinate cause, the effect necessarily follows; and, _vice versa_, if no determinate cause be given, no effect can follow. 4. The knowledge of an effect depends on a knowledge of the cause, and includes it. 5. Things that have nothing in common with each other, can not be understood by means of each other--that is, the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other."

Propositions.--Existence is prior to its modes. This follows from definitions 1 and 3, because modes of existence are conceived relatively and in dependence on existence, which is absolutely precedent in such conception. Existences having different attributes have nothing in common with each other. This is founded on definition 1. Existences have nothing in common with each other, can not be the cause of, or affect one another. If they have nothing in common, they can not be conceived by means of each other (per axiom 5), and they can not be conceived as relating to each other, but must be conceived _per se_ (per definition 1); and as (per axiom 4) the knowledge of an effect depends on the knowledge of the cause and includes it, it is impossible to conceive any existence as an effect, so long as you can not conceive it in relation to any other existence. By "cause" in the absolute, I mean "existence." In its popular or relative sense, I use "cause" as an effect of some precedent causative influence, itself the cause of some consequent effect, as the means toward an end, in the accomplishment of which end it completes itself.

What fact is there so certain that I may base all my reasonings upon it? My existence is this primary fact; this, to me, indubitable certainty. I am. This logic can neither prove nor disprove. The very nature of proof is to make a proposition more clear to the mind than it was before, and no amount of evidence can in-crease my conviction of the certainty of my own existence. I do not affirm that I am in existence, but I affirm that there is existence. This existence is either eternal, that is, unlimited in duration, that is, indefinite in duration; or else it had a beginning, that is, it has been created. If created, then such creation must be by some existence the same as itself, or by some existence differing from itself. But it can not have been created by any existence the same as itself, because to imagine such, would be to conceive no more than a continuance of the same existence--there would be no discontinuity. "But," says S. T. Coleridge, "where there is no discontinuity, there can be no origination." And it can not have been created by any existence differing from itself, because things which have nothing in common with one another can not be the cause of, or affect, one another. Therefore, this existence has not been created, that is, its duration is indefinite--that is, you can not conceive a beginning--that is, it is eternal. This eternal existence is either infinite in extent, that is, is unlimited in extent, or it is finite, that is, limited. If limited, it must be limited by an existence the same as itself, or by an existence differing from itself. But the same arguments which applied to a limitation of duration, also apply to a limitation of extension. Therefore, this existence is unlimited in extent; that is, is infinite and eternal--that is, there is only one existence. It is at this point that Atheism separates from Pantheism. Pantheism demonstrates one existence, but affirms for it infinite attributes. Atheism denies that attributes can be infinite. Attributes are but the distinguishing characteristics of modes, and how can that be infinite which is only the quality of finity? Men do not talk of infinite hardness or of infinite softness; yet they talk of infinite intelligence. Intelligence is not an existence, and the word is without value unless it strictly comprehend, and is included in, that which is intelligent. The hardness of the diamond, the brilliancy of the burnished steel, have no existence apart from the diamond or the steel. I, in fact, affirm that there is only one existence, and that all we take cognizance of is mode, or attribute of mode, of that existence.

I have carefully abstained from using the words "matter" and "spirit." Dr. Priestly says: "It has generally been supposed that there are _two distinct kinds of substance_ in human nature, and they have been distinguished by the terms _matter_, and _spirit_, or _mind_. The former of these has been said to be possessed of the property of _extension_, viz., of length, breadth and thickness, and also of _solidity_ or impenetrability, and consequently of a _vis inertiæ_; but it is said to be naturally destitute of all other powers whatever. The latter has of late been defined to be a substance entirely destitute of all extension, or relation to space, so as to have no property in common with matter; and therefore to be properly _immaterial_, but to be possessed of the powers of perception, intelligence, and self-motion. Matter is alleged to be that kind of substance of which our bodies are composed, whereas the principle of perception and thought belonging to us is said to reside in a spirit, or immaterial principle, intimately united to the body; while higher orders of intelligent beings, and especially the Divine Being, are said to be purely immaterial. It is maintained that neither matter nor spirit (meaning by the latter the subject of sense and thought) correspond to the definitions above mentioned. For that matter is not that _inert_ substance that it has been supposed to be; that powers of _attraction or repulsion_ are necessary to its very being, and that no part of it appears to be _impenetrable_ to other parts; I therefore define it to be a substance possessed of the property of extension, and powers of attraction or repulsion; and since it has never yet been asserted that the powers of _sensation_ and _thought_ are incompatible with these (_solidity or impenetrability_, and, consequently, a _vis inertiæ_, only having been thought to be repugnent to them), I therefore maintain that we have no reason to suppose that there are in man two substances so distinct from each other as have been represented. It is likewise maintained that the notion of two substances that have no common property, and yet are capable of intimate connection and mutual action, is absurd."

I do not conceive _spirit or mind_ as an existence. By the word _mind_, I simply express the totality of perception, observation, collection, and recollection of perceptions, reflection and various other mental processes. Dugald Stewart, in his "Essay on Locke," says: "We are conscious of sensation, thought, desire, volition, but we are not conscious of the existence of the mind itself."

It is urged that the idea of God is universal. This is not only not true, but I, in fact, deny that any coherent idea exists in connection with the word "God." The chief object to which the emotions of any people were directed in ancient times became their God. When these emotions were combined with vague traditions, and a priesthood became interested in handing down the traditions, and increasing the emotions, then the object becoming sacred was hallowed and adored, and uncertain opinions formed the basis of a creed. Any prominent phenomenon in the universe, which was not understood, was personified, as were also the various passions and phases of humanity. These, in time, were preached as religious truths, and thus diverted the people from inquiry into the natural causes of phenomena, which they accounted for as ordained by God, and when famine or pestilence occurred, instead of endeavoring to remove its cause or using preventive measures against a recurrence of the evil, they sought to discover why the supernatural power was offended, and how it might be appeased, and ascribing to it their own passions and emotions, they offered prayers and sacrifices. These errors becoming institutions of the country, the people, prompted by their priests, regarded all those who endeavored to overturn them by free and scientific thought and speech as blasphemers, and the Religion of each State has, therefore, always been opposed to the education of the people.

Archbishop Whately, in his "Elements of Rhetoric," part 1, chap, ii, sec. 5, urges that "those who represent God or Gods as malevolent, capricious, or subject to human passions and vices, are invariably to be found among those who are brutal and uncivilized." We admit this, but ask is it not the fact that both the Old and New Testament teachings do represent God as malevolent, capricious, and subject to human passions and vices--that is, are not these bible views of God relics of a brutal and uncivilized people?

There is, of course, not room in a short essay like the present to say much upon the morality of Atheism, and it should therefore suffice to say, that truth and morality go hand in hand. That that is moral which tends to the permanent happiness of all. The continuance of falsehood never can result in permanent happiness; and therefore if Atheism be truthful, it must be moral, if it be against falsehood, it must tend to human happiness.

Yet if quoting great names will have effect, Lord Bacon, who is often quoted against Atheism, also says: "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, _though religion were not_; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the mind of men; therefore Atheism never did perturb states, for it makes men wary of themselves as looking no further; and we see the times inclined to Atheism, as the times of Augustus Caesar were civil times; but superstition has been the confusion of many states." George Combe says: "I have known men in whom the reasoning organs were amply developed and well cultivated, who assured me that they could not reach the conviction of the being of a God. I have known such men equal in point of integrity and practical benevolence to the most orthodox believers." In the West Riding of Yorkshire, among the men themselves, a wealthy employer bore favorable testimony to the conduct and intelligence of Atheistic working men. Nay, even the fanatical Dr. Lyman Beecher is obliged to concede that Atheism made converts among "females of education and refinement--females of respectable standing in society."

HAS MAN A SOUL?

[This lecture was originally delivered to the Sheffield Secular Society, and was printed from the reporter's notes without efficient correction from myself, I, at that time, suffering under a severe attack of acute rheumatism. The lecture has since been often re-delivered; and three editions having been exhausted, I have again corrected and revised the present edition. It is not intended as an answer to the question which forms the title, but it is intended to provoke thought upon this important subject.]

What do you mean by soul? What is the soul? Is it I? Is it the body? Is it apart from the body? Is it an attribute of the body? Has it a separate and distinct existence from the body? What is the soul? If I ask one of those who claim to be considered orthodox men, they will tell me that the soul is a spirit--that the soul lives after the body is dead. They will tell me that the soul is immortal, and that the body is mortal; that the soul has nothing whatever in common with the body; that it has an existence entirely independent of the body. They will tell me that after the body has decayed--after the body has become re-absorbed in the universe, of which it is but a part, that the soul still exists. Is there any proof of the existence of the same individual soul apart from all material conditions? I have endeavored to examine this subject, and, up to the present time, I have not found one iota of proof in support of the positions thus put forward. I have no idea of any existence except that of which I am part. I am. Of my own existence I am certain I think. I am. But what is it that thinks? Is it my soul? Is it "me," and yet distinct from me? I am but a mode of existence. I am only part of the great universe. The elements of which I am composed are indissolubly connected with that great existence which is around me and within me, and which I help to make up. If men tell me I am a compound, and not a compound--a mixture, and not a mixture--a joining together, and not a joining together--of two entirely different existences, which they call "matter" and "spirit," I am compelled to doubt those men. The ability to think is but an attribute of a certain modification of existence. Intelligence is a word by which we express the sum of certain abilities, always attending a certain mode of existence. I find intelligence manifested so far as organization is developed. I never find intelligence without animal organization. I find intelligence manifested in degree, only so far as I find a higher or lower type of organization--that is, I find man's intellectual faculties limited by his organization. But the orthodox tell me that my soul has an immaterial existence, independent of all organization--independent of all climatic conditions--independent of all education. Is that so? When does the soul come into man? When does it go out of man? If the soul is immortal, why is it that standing here, in the prime of health and strength, if part of that roof should fall fracturing my skull, and pressing upon my brain--how is it, if my soul is not subject to material conditions, that it then ceases to act? Is the plaster roof more powerful than my immortal soul? Or is it that intelligence is the necessary result of a certain condition of existence, and that the moment you destroy that condition--the moment you destroy the organization--the result ceases to be realizable? By the course of reasoning you adopt (says the orthodox objector) you reduce man to the same level as the beasts. And why not? I stand on the river's bank, I see there a man full grown, possessed of the physical figure of man, but an idiot--an idiot from his birth upward--one who could not, even if he would, think and act as other men. A little child is there playing on the bank, and the idiot, having large destructive propensities, has thrust the child into the water, and he stands there jabbering and gesticulating while the little child is drowning in the river. And see how half-vacantly, half-triumphantly, he points to the helpless child. A Newfoundland dog has come to the bank; it jumps in and brings the child out and saves its life. Yet theologians tell me that the idiot has a soul, and that the Newfoundland dog has not one. I can not understand these nice distinctions, which make the man so superior to the beast in matters in which he is positively inferior. Man has doubtless an organization on the whole far superior intellectually to that of any other animal, but he is only superior by virtue of his superior organization and its consequent susceptibility for development or education. Many brutes can see more clearly than man; but they possess not the capability for the manufacture of telescopes to aid their vision. Many brutes can run more swiftly, but they manifest no capacity for the subjugation of a steam power which far outstrips their speed. But man himself, a well-organized, thoughtful, intelligent, well-educated man, by a fall from a horse, by a tile from a roof, may receive an injury to his nervous encephalic apparatus, and may be, even while a man in shape, as low as the brute in the imbecility of his reason, and inferior to the brute in physical strength. There is as much difference between different races of men, there is, in fact, more difference between a pure Caucasian and a Sahara negro, than between the Sahara negro and the infant chimpanzee.

When did the soul come into the body? Has it been waiting from all eternity to occupy each body the moment of birth? Is this the theory that is put forward to man--that there are many millions of souls still waiting, perhaps, in mid air, 'twixt heaven and earth, to occupy the still unborn babes? Is that the theory? Or do you allege that God specially creates souls for each little child at the moment it is born or conceived? Which is the theory put forward? Is it that the soul being immortal--being destined to exist for ever, has existed from all eternity? If not, how do you know that the soul is to exist for ever; when it only comes into existence with the child? May not that which has recently begun to be, soon cease to be? In what manner does the soul come into the child? Is it a baby's soul, and does it grow with the child? or, does it possess its full power the moment the child is born? When does it come into the child? Does it come in the moment the child begins to form, or is it the moment the child is born into the world? Whence is it this soul comes? Dr. Cooper, quoting Lawrence on the "Functions of the Brain," says: "Sir Everard Home, with the assistance of Mr. Bauer and his microscope, has shown us a man eight days old from the time of conception, about as broad and a little longer than a pin's head. He satisfied himself that the brain of this homunculus was discernible. Could the immaterial mind have been connected with it at this time? Or was the tenement too small even for so etherial a lodger? Even at the full period of uterogestation, it is still difficult to trace any vestiges of mind: and the believers in its separate existence have left us quite in the dark on the precise time when they suppose this union of soul and body to take place." Many of those who tell me that man has a soul, and that it is immortal--that man has a soul, and that the beast has not one--forget or ignore the fact that at a very early stage in the formation of the brain the state of the brain corresponds to that of the avertebrated animal, or animal that is without vertebra. If the brain had stopped in its first month's course of formation, would the child have had a soul? If it would have had a soul, then have avertebrated animals souls also? If you tell me it would not have had a soul, then I ask, How do you know it? and I ask you what ground you have for assuming that the soul did not begin to form with the formation of the brain? I ask you whether it was pre-existing, or at what stage it came? In the second month this brain corresponds then to the brain of an osseous fish. Supposing the development of the child had been then stopped, had it a soul at that time? If so, have fishes souls? Again, if you tell me that the child had not a soul, then, I ask, why not? How do you know it had not? What ground have you for alleging that the soul did not exist in the child? We go on still further, and in the third month we find that brain corresponds then to that of a turtle, and in the fourth to that of a bird; and in the fifth month, to an order termed _rodentia_; sixth, to that of the _ruminantia_; seventh, to that of the _dugitigrada_; eighth, to that of the _quadrumana_; and not till the ninth month does the brain of the child attain a full human character. I, of course, here mean to allege no more than Dr. Fletcher, who says, in his "Rudiments of Physiology," quoted by the author of the "Vestiges of Creation": "This is only an approximation to the truth; since neither is the brain of all osseous fishes, of all turtles, of all birds, nor of all the species of any of the above order of mammals, by any means precisely the same; nor does the brain of the human fetus at any time precisely resemble, perhaps, that of any individual whatever among the lower animals. Nevertheless it may be said to represent, at each of the above-named periods, the aggregate, as it were, of the brains of each of the tribes stated."

Now, should a birth have taken place at any of the eight stages, would the child thus prematurely born have had a soul? That is the question I propose to you. You who affirm that man has a soul, it lies upon you, here, without charging me with blasphemy--without charging me with ignorance--without charging me with presumption--it lies upon you who affirm, to state the grounds for your belief. At which stage, if at any, did the soul come into the child? At the moment of the birth? Why when a child is born into the world it can scarcely see--it can not speak--it can not think--but after a short time I jingle my keys, and it begins to give faint smiles; and after a few weeks, it is pleased with the jingling of my keys. Is it the soul which is learning to appreciate the sound of the jingling keys, and pleased with them? Is it the immaterial and immortal soul amused and pleased with my bundle of keys? Where is the soul? How is it that the soul can not speak the moment the child is born--can not even think? How is it, that if I keep that child without telling it any thing of its soul until it become fourteen or fifteen years of age, it would then speak and think as I had taught it to speak and think; and if I kept it without the knowledge of a soul, it would have no knowledge of a soul at that age? How is that? Rajah Brooke, at a missionary meeting in Liverpool, told his hearers there that the Dyaks, a people with whom he was connected, had no knowledge of God, of a soul, or of any future state. How is it that the Dyaks have got this soul and yet live knowing nothing whatever about it? And the Dyaks are by no means the only people who live and die knowing nothing of any immortal and immaterial soul. Again you tell me that this soul is immortal. Do you mean that it has eternally existed--has never been created? If so, you deny a God who is the creator of all things. If the soul began at some time to exist, where is the evidence that it will not also at some time cease to exist? It it came into existence with the body's birth, why not cease with the body's death? You say the soul is immaterial; do you mean that it is susceptible to material conditions or do you not? If susceptible to material conditions, what do you mean by its being immortal and immaterial? If not susceptible to material conditions, then explain to me how it is that under good conditions it prospers and advances, and under bad conditions deteriorates and recedes. If a child is born in some of the back streets of our city, and lives on bad food in a wretched cellar, it grows up a weak and puny pale-faced child. If allowed to crawl into existence on the edge of a gutter, imperfectly educated, in fact mis-educated, it steals--steals, perhaps, to live--and it becomes an outcast from society. Is this immortal soul affected by the bodily conditions? or is the soul originally naturally depraved? And if the soul is primarily naturally depraved, why is God so unjust as to give a naturally depraved soul to any body? If not, how is it that this immortal soul, when the body is kept without food, permits the man who has no money to buy food, to steel to satisfy his hunger? You allege that the soul moves my body. You assert that matter is inert, unintelligent; that it is my active, intelligent soul that moves and impels my inert and non-intelligent body. Is my immortal soul hindered and controlled by the state of my body's general health? Does my soul feel hungry and compel my body to steal? Some theologians declare that my soul is immaterial--that there is no means by which I can take any cognizance whatever of it. What does that mean, except that they know nothing whatever about it? Sir W. Hamilton admits that we are entirely ignorant as to the connection between soul and body. Yet many who in so many words admit that they have no knowledge, but only faith in the soul's existence, are most presumptuous in affirming it, and in denouncing those who dispute their affirmation. It is an easy method to hide ignorance, by denouncing your opponent as an ignorant blasphemer.

Joseph Priestley, in his book upon matter and spirit, quotes from Hallet's discourses, as follows; "I see a man move and hear him speak for some years. From his speech I certainly infer that he thinks, as I do. I then see that man is a being who thinks and acts. After some time the man falls down in my sight, grows cold and stiff, and speaks and acts no more. Is it not then natural to conclude that he thinks no more; as the only reason I had to believe that he did think was his motion and his speech. And now that his motion and speech have ceased, I have lost the only way of proving that he had the power of thought. Upon this sudden death, one visible thing, the one man, has greatly changed. Whence could I infer that the same being consisted of two parts, and that the inward part continues to live and think, and flies away from the body? When the outward part ceases to live and move, it looks as if the whole _man_ was gone, and that he, with all his powers, ceases at the same time. His motion and thought both die together, as far as I can discern. The powers of thought, of speech and motion, equally depend upon the body, and run the same fate in case of declining age. When a man dies through old age, I perceive his powers of speech, motion, and thought decay and die together, and by the same degrees. That moment he ceases to move and breathe he appears to cease to think, too. When I am left to my reason it seems to me that my power of thought depends as much upon the body as my sight and hearing. I could not think in infancy; my power of thought, of sight, and of feeling are equally liable to be obstructed by the body. A blow on the head has deprived a man of thought, who could yet see, and feel and move; so naturally the power of thinking seems as much to belong to the body as any power of man whatsoever. Naturally there appears no more reason to suppose that a man can think out of the body than he can hear sounds and feel cold out of the body."

What do those mean who say that man is made up of two parts--matter and mind? I know of only one existence. I find that existence manifested variously, each mode having certain variations of attributes by which it is cognized. One of these attributes, or a collection of certain attributes, I find in, or with, certain modifications of that existence, that is, in or with animal life--this attribute, or these attributes, we call intelligence. In the same way that I find upon the blade of a knife brightness, consequent upon a certain state of the metal, so do I find in man, in the beast, different degrees, not of brightness, but of intelligence, according to their different states of organization. I am told that the mind and the body are separate from one another. Are the brightness and steel of the knife separate? Is not brightness the quality attaching to a certain modification of existence--steel? Is not intelligence a quality attaching to a certain modification of existence--man? The word brightness has no meaning, except as relating to some bright thing. The word intelligence, no meaning, except as relating to some intelligent thing. I take some water and drop it upon the steel, in due course the process of oxidation takes place and the brightness is gone. I drop into man's brain a bullet; the process of destruction of life takes place, and his intelligence is gone. By changing the state of the steel we destroy its brightness, and by disorganizing the man destroy his intelligence. Is mind an entity or result? an existence or a condition? Surely it is but the result of organic activity, a phenomenon of animal life. Dr. Engledue says: "In the same way as organism generally has the power of manifesting, when the necessary stimuli are applied, the phenomena which are designated life; so one individual portion--brain, having peculiar and distinct properties, manifests on the application of its appropriate stimuli a peculiar and distinct species of action. If the sum of all bodily function--life, be not an entity, how can the product of the action of one portion of the body--brain, be an entity? Feeling and intelligence are but fractional portions of life." I ask those who are here to prove that man has a soul, to do so apart from revelation. If the soul is a part of ourselves, we require no supernatural revelation to demonstrate its existence to us. D'Holbach says: "The doctrine of spirituality, such as it now exists, affords nothing but vague ideas; it is rather a poisoner of all ideas. Let me draw your attention to this: The advocates of spirituality do not tell you anything, but in fact prevent you from knowing anything. They say that spirit and matter have nothing in common, and that mortal man can not take cognizance of immortality. An ignorant man may set himself up as an orator upon such a matter. He says you have a soul--an immortal soul. Take care you don't lose your soul. When you ask him what is my soul, he says he does not know--nobody knows--nobody can tell you. This is really that which they do. What is this doctrine of spirituality? What does it present to the mind? A substance unsubstantial that possesses nothing of which our senses enable us to take cognizance." Theologians urge that each of us has a soul superior to all material conditions, and yet a man who speaks can not communicate by his speaking soul so freely with that man who is deaf and dumb; the conditions cramp that which is said to be uncontrolled by any conditions. If you cut out a man's tongue, the soul no longer speaks. If you put a gag in his mouth, and tie it with a handkerchief, so that he can not get it out, his soul ceases to speak. The immaterial soul is conquered by a gag, it can not utter itself, the gag is in the way. The orthodox say that the soul is made by God; and what do you know about God? Why just as much as we know about the soul. And what do you know about the soul? Nothing whatever. How is it that if the soul is immaterial, having nothing in common with matter, that it is only manifest by material means? and how is it that it is incased and inclosed in my material frame? They affirm that my soul is a spirit--that I receive the same spirit from God. How is it that my spirit is now by myself, and by my mortal body, denying its own existence? Is my mortal soul acting the hypocrite, or is it ignorant of its own existence, and can not help itself to better knowledge? And if it can not help itself, why not, if it is superior to the body? and if you think it a hypocrite, tell me why.

What is meant by the declaration that man is a compound of matter and spirit?--things which the orthodox assert have nothing in common with one another. Of the existence of what you call matter you are certain, because you and I, material beings, are here. Are you equally certain of the existence of mind, as an existence independent and separate from matter? and if you are, tell me why. Have you ever found it apart from matter? If so, when and where? Have you found that the mind has a separate and distinct existence? if so, under what circumstances? and tell me--you who define matter as unintelligent, passive, inert, and motionless--who talk of the _vis inertiæ_ of matter--tell me what you mean when you give these definitions to it? You find the universe, and this small portion of it on which we are, ceaselessly active. Why do you call it passive, except it be that you want courage to search for true knowledge as to the vast capabilities of existence, and, therefore, invent such names as God and Soul to account for all difficulties, and to hide your ignorance? What do you mean by passive and inert matter? You tell me of this world--part of a system--that system part of another--that of another--and point out to me the innumerable planets, the countless millions of worlds, in the universe. You, who tell me of the vast forces of the universe, what do you mean by telling me that that is motionless? What do you mean by yet pointing to the immeasurable universe and its incalculably mighty forces and affirming that they are incapable of every perceptible effect? You, without one fact on which to base your theory, strive to call into existence another existence which must be more vast, and which you allege produces this existence and gives its powers to it. Sir Isaac Newton says: "We are to admit no more causes of things than are sufficient to explain appearances." What effect is there which the forces of existence are incapable of producing?

Why do you come to the conclusion that the forces of the universe are incapable of producing every effect of which I take cognizance? Why do you come to the conclusion that intelligence is not an attribute--why? What is there which enables you to convert it into a separate and distinct existence? Is there anything? Is it spirit? What is spirit? That of which the mortal man can know nothing, you tell me--that it is nothing which his senses can grasp--that is, no man, but one who disregards his senses, can believe in it, and that it is that which no man's senses can take cognizance of. If a man who uses his senses can never by their aid take cognizance of spirit, then as it is through the senses alone man knows that which is around him, you can know nothing about spirit until you go out of your senses. When I speak of the senses, I do not limit myself to what are ordinarily termed man's five senses--I include all man's sensitive faculties, and admit that I do not know the extent of, and am not prepared to set a limit to, the sensitive capabilities of man. I have had personal experience in connection with psycho-magnetic phenomena of faculties in man and woman not ordinarily recognized, and am inclined to the opinion that many men have been made converts to the theories of spiritualism because their previous education had induced them to set certain arbitrary limits to the domains of the natural. When they have been startled by phenomena outside these conventional limitations they at once ascribed them to supernatural influences rather than reverse their previous rules of thinking.

Some urge that the soul is life. What is life? Is it not the word by which we express the aggregate normal functional activity of vegetable and animal organisms necessarily differing in degree, if not in kind, with each different organization? To talk of immortal life and yet to admit the decay and destruction of the organization, is much the same as to talk of a square circle. You link together two words which contradict each other. The solution of the soul problem is not so difficult as many imagine. The greatest difficulty is, that we have been trained to use certain words as "God," "matter," "mind," "spirit," "soul," "intelligence," and we have been further trained to take these words as representatives of realities, which, in fact, they do not represent. We have to unlearn much of our school lore. We have specially to carefully examine the meaning of each word we use. The question, lies in a small compass. Is there one existence or more? Of one existence I am conscious, because I am a mode of it. I know of no other existence. I know of no existence but that existence of which I am a mode. I hold it to be capable of producing every effect. It is for the man who alleges that there is another, to prove it. I know of one existence. I do not endeavor to demonstrate to you my existence, it needs no demonstration--I am My existence is undeniable. I am speaking to you You are conscious of my existence. You and I are not separate entities, but modes of the same existence. We take cognizance of the existence which is around us and in us, and which is the existence of which we are modes. Of the one existence we are certain. It is for those who affirm that the universe is "matter," and who affirm that there also exists "spirit," to remember that they admit the one existence I seek to prove, and that the onus lies on them to demonstrate a second existence--in fact, to prove there is the other existence which they term spiritual. There can not exist two different substances or existences having the same attributes, or qualities. There can not be two existences of the same essence, having different attributes, because it is by the attributes alone that we can distinguish the existences. We can only judge of the substance by its modes. We may find a variety of modes of the same substance, and we shall find points of union which help to identify them, the one with the other--the link which connects them with the great whole. We can only judge of the existence of which we are a part (in consequence of our peculiar organization) under the form of a continuous chain of causes and effects--each effect a cause to the effect it precedes, each cause an effect of the causative influence which heralded its advent. The remote links of that line are concealed by the darkness of the far off past. Nay, more than this, the mightiest effort of mind can never say, _This is the first cause_. Weakness and ignorance have said it--but why? To cloak their weakness, to hide their ignorance. Knaves have said it--but why? To give scope to their cunning, and to enable them to say to the credulous, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." The termination is in the as yet unknowable future; and I ask you, presumptuous men, who dare to tell me of God and soul, of matter and creation--when possessed you the power to sunder links of that great chain and write, "In the beginning?" I deny that by the mightiest effort of the strongest intellect man can ever say of any period, at this point substance began to be--before this existence was not.

Has man a soul? You who tell me he has a soul, a soul independent of material conditions, I ask you how it is that these immortal souls strive with one another to get mortal benefits? Has man a soul? If man's soul is not subject to material conditions, why do I find knavish souls?--Why slavish souls?--tyrannous souls? Your doctrine that man has a soul prevents him from rising. When you tell him that his soul is not improvable by material conditions, you prevent him from making himself better than he is. Man's intelligence is a consequence of his organization. Organization is improvable, the intelligence becomes more powerful as the organization is fully developed, and the conditions which surround man are made more pure. And the man will become higher, truer, and better when he knows that his intelligence is an attribute, like other attributes, capable of development, susceptible of deterioration, he will strive to effect the first and to guard against the latter.

Look at the number of people putting power into the hands of one man, because he is a lord--surely they have no souls. See the mass cringing to a wretched idol--surely these have no souls. See men forming a pyramid of which the base is a crushed and worn-out people, and the apex a church, a throne, a priest, a king, and the frippery of a creed--have those men souls? Society should not be such a pyramid, it should be one brotherly circle, in which men should be linked together by a consciousness that they are only happy so linked, conscious that when the chain is broken, then the society and her peace is destroyed. What we teach is not that man has a soul apart and independent of the body, but that he has an ability, an intelligence, an attribute of his body, capable of development, improvable, more useful, according as he elevates himself and his fellows. Give up blind adhesion to creeds and priests, strive to think and follow out in action the result of your thoughts. Each mental struggle is an enlargement of your mind, an addition to your brain power, an increase of your soul--the only soul you have.

LABOR'S PRAYER.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is the entreaty addressed by the tiller of the soil to the "Our Father," who has promised to answer prayer. And what answer cometh from heaven to this the bread winner's petition? Walk among the cotton workers of Lancashire, the cloth-weavers of Yorkshire, the Durham pitmen, the Staffordshire puddlers, the Cornish miners, the London dock laborers, go anywhere where hands are roughened with toil, where foreheads are bedewed with sweat of work, and see the Lord's response to the prayer, the father's answer to his children! The only bread they get is the bread they take; in their hard struggle for life-sustenance the loaves come but slowly, and heaven adds not a crust, even though the worker be hungry, when he rises from his toil-won meal. Not even the sight of pale-faced wife, and thin forms of half-starved infants can move to generosity the Ruler of the world. The laborer may pray, but, if work be scant and wages low, he pines to death while praying. His prayer gives no relief, and misery's answer is the mocking echo to his demand.

It is said by many a pious tongue that God helps the poor; the wretchedness of some of their hovel houses, found alas! too often, in the suburbs of our wealthiest cities, grimy black, squalid, and miserable; the threadbare raggedness of their garments; the unwholesomeness of the food they eat; the poisoned air they breathe in their narrow wynds and filthy alleys; all these tell how much God helps the poor. Do you want to see how God helps the poor? go into any police court when some little child-thief is brought up for hearing; see him shoeless, with ragged trousers, threadbare, grimy, vest hardly hanging to his poor body, shirt that seems as though it never could have been white, skin dull brown with dirt, hair innocent of comb or brush, eye ignorantly, sullenly-defiant, yet downcast; born poor, born wretched, born in ignorance, educated among criminals, crime the atmosphere in which he moved; and society his nurse and creator, is now virtuously aghast at the depravity of this its own neglected nursling, and a poor creature whom God alone hath helped. Go where the weakly wife in a narrow room huddles herself and little children day after day; and where the husband crowds in to lie down at night; they are poor and honest, but their honesty bars not the approach of disease, fever, sorrow, death--God helps not the line of health to their poor wan cheeks. Go to the county workhouse in which is temporarily housed the wornout farm laborer, who, while, strength enough remained, starved through weary years with wife and several children on eight shillings per week--it is thus God helps the poor. And the poor are taught to pray for a continuance of this help, and to be thankful and content to pray that to-morrow may be like to-day, thankful that yesterday was no worse than it was, and content that to-day is as good as it is. Are there many repining at their miseries, the preacher, with gracious intonation, answers rebukingly that God, in his wisdom, has sent these troubles upon them as chastisement for their sins. So, says the church, all are sinners, rich its well as poor; but rich sinners feel that the chastising rod is laid more lightly on their backs than it is upon those of their meaner brethren. Weekday and Sunday it is the same contrast; one wears fustian, the other broadcloth; one prepares for heaven in the velvet cushioned pew, the other on the wooden benches of the free seats. In heaven it will be different--all there above are to wear crowns of gold and fine linen, and, therefore, here below the poor man is to be satisfied with the state of life into which it has pleased God to call him. The pastor, who tells him this, looks upon the laborer as an inferior animal, and the laborer by force of habit regards the landowner and peer, who patronizes his endeavors, as a being of a superior order. Is there no new form of prayer that labor might be taught to utter, no other power to which his petition might be addressed? Prayer to the unknown for aid gives no strength to the prayer. In each beseeching he loses dignity and self-reliance, he trusts to he knows not what, for an answer which cometh he knows not when, and mayhap may never come at all. Let labor pray in the future in another fashion and at another altar. Let laborer pray to laborer that each may know labor's rights, and be able to fulfill labor's duties. The size of the loaf of daily bread must depend on the amount of the daily wages, and the laborer must pray for better wages. But his prayer must take the form of earnest, educated endeavor to obtain the result desired. Let workmen, instead of praying to God in their distress, ask one another why are wages low? how can wages be raised? can we raise our own wages? having raised them, can we keep them fixed at the sum desired? What causes produce a rise and fall in wages? are high wages beneficial to the laborer? These are questions the pulpit has no concern with. The reverend pastor will tell you that the "wages of sin is death," and will rail against "filthy lucre;" but he has no inclination for answering the queries here propounded. Why are wages low? Wages are low because the wage-winners crowd too closely. Wages are low because too many seek to share one fund. Wages are lower still because the laborer fights against unfair odds; the laws of the country, overriding the laws of humanity, have been enacted without the laborer's consent, although his obedience to them is enforced. The fund is unfairly distributed as well as too widely divided. Statutes are gradually being modified, and the working man may hope for ampler justice from the employer in the immediate future than was possible in the past, but high and healthy wages depend on the working man himself. Wages can be raised by the work-ing classes exercising a moderate degree of caution in increasing their numbers. Wages must increase when capital increases more rapidly than population, and it is the duty of the working man, therefore, to take every reasonable precaution to check the increase of population and to accelerate the augmentation of capital.

Can working-men, by combination, permanently raise the rate of wages? One gentleman presiding at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science for the discussion of the labor question, very fairly said, "It is not in the power of the men alone, or of the masters alone, or of both combined, to say what shall be the amount of wages at any particular time in any trade or country. The men and the masters are, at most, competitors for the division, at a certain rate, of a certain fund, provided by [themselves and] others--that is, by the consumers. If that fund is small, no device can make the rate of profit or rate of wages higher." This is in theory quite correct, if it means that no device can make the total divisible greater than it is, but not if it refers to the increase of profit or wages by partial distribution. In practice, although it is true that if the fund be small and the seekers to share it be many, the quotient to each must be necessarily very small, yet it is also true that a few of the competitors--_i.e._ the capitalists, may and do absorb for their portions of profits an improper and unfairly large amount, thus still further reducing the wretchedly small pittance in any case receivable by the mass of laborers. It is warmly contended that the capitalist and laborer contend for division of the fund appropriable in fair and open field; that the capitalist has his money to employ, the man his labor to sell; that if workmen are in excess of the capitalist's requirements, so that the laborer has to supplicate for employment, wages can not rise, and will probably fall; but that if, on the contrary, capital has need to invite additional laborers, then wages must rise. That is the law of supply and demand brought prominently forward. In great part this is true, but it is not true that capital and labor compete in fair and open field, any more than it is true that an iron-clad war vessel, with heavy ordnance, would compete in fair field with a wooden frigate, equipped with the material in use thirty years ago. Capital is gold-plated, and carries too many guns for unprotected labor.

The intelligent capitalist makes the laws affecting master and servant, which the uneducated laborer must obey, but has no effective voice to alter. The capitalist forms the government of the country, which in turn protects capital against labor; this government the laborer must sustain, and dares not modify. The capitalist does combine, and has combined, and the result of this combination has been an unfair appropriation of the divisible fund. Why should not the laborer combine also? The answer is truly that no combination of workmen can increase the rate of wages, if at the same time the number of laborers increases more rapidly than the capital out of which their wages must be paid. But the men may combine to instruct one another in the laws of political economy; they may combine to apply their knowledge of those laws to the contracts between employer and employed. They may combine to compel the repeal of unjust enactments under which an unfair distribution of the labor fund is not only possible but certain. Organizations of laborers are, therefore, wise and necessary; the object of such organizations should be the permanent elevation and enfranchisement of the members. No combination of workmen, which merely dictates a temporary cessation from labor, can ultimately and permanently benefit the laborer; while it certainly immediately injures him and deteriorates his condition, making his home wretched, his family paupers. Nor can even co-operative combination, praiseworthy as it certainly is, to procure for the laborer a larger share of the profits of his labor permanently benefit him, except in so far that temporarily alleviating his condition, and giving him leisure for study, it enables him to educate himself; unless, at the same time, the co-operator is conscious that the increase or reduction in the amount of wages depends entirely on the ratio of relation preserved between population and its means of subsistence, the former always having a tendency to increase more rapidly than the latter. It is with the problem of too many mouths for too little bread that the laborer has really to deal: if he must pray, it should be for more bread and for fewer mouths. The answer often given by the workman himself to the advocate of Malthusian views is, that the world is wide enough for all, that there are fields yet unplowed broad enough to bear more corn than man at present could eat, and that there is neither too little food nor are there too many mouths; that there is, in fact, none of that over-population with which it is sought to affright the working man. Over-population in the sense that the whole world is too full to contain its habitants, or that it will ever become too full to contain them, is certainly a fallacy, but overpopulation is a lamentable truth in its relative sense. We find evidences of over-population in every old country of the world. The pest of over-population is the existence of poverty, squalor, wretchedness, disease, ignorance, misery, and crime. Low rate of wages, and food dear, here you have two certain indices of relative over-population. Wages depending on the demand for and supply of laborers, wherever wages are low it is a certain sign that there are too many candidates for employment in that phase of the labor market. The increased cost of production of food, and its consequent higher price, also mark that the cultivation has been forced, by the numbers of the people to descend to less productive soils. Poverty is the test and result of over-population.

It is not against some possible increase of their numbers, which may produce possibly greater affliction, that the working men are entreated to agitate. It is against the existing evils which afflict their ranks, evils alleged by sound students of political economy to have already resulted from inattention to the population question, that the energies of the people are sought to be directed, The operation of the law of population has been for centuries entirely ignored by those who have felt its adverse influence most severely. It is only during the last thirty years that any of the working classes have turned their attention to the question; and only during the last few years that it has to any extent been discussed among them. Yet all the prayers that labor ever uttered since the first breath of human life, have not availed so much for human happiness as will the earnest examination by one generation of this, the greatest of all social questions, the root of all political problems, the foundation of all civil progress. Poor, man must be wretched. Poor, he must be ignorant. Poor, he must be criminal; and poor he must be till the cause of poverty has been ascertained by the poor man himself and its cure planned by the poor man's brain, and effected by the poor man's hand.

Outside his own rank none can save the poor. Others may show him the abyss, but he must avoid its dangerous brink himself. Others may point out to him the chasm, but he must build his own bridge over. Labor's prayer must be to labor's head for help from labor's hand to strike the blow that severs labor's chain, and terminates the too long era of labor's suffering.

During the last few years our daily papers, and various periodicals, magazines, and reviews have been more frequently, and much less partially, devoted than of old to the discussion of questions relating to the laborer's condition, and the means of ameliorating it. In the Legislative Assembly debates have taken place which would have been impossible fifty years since. Works on political economy are now more easily within the reach of the working man than they were some years ago. People's editions are now published of treatises on political economy which half a century back the people were unable to read. It is now possible for the laborer, and it is the laborer's duty, to make himself master of the laws which govern the production and distribution of wealth. Undoubtedly there is much grievous wrong in the mode of distribution of wealth, by which the evils that afflict the poorest stragglers are often specially and tenfold aggravated. The monopoly of land, the serf state of the laborer, are points requiring energetic agitation. The grave and real question is, however, that which lies at the root of all, the increase of wealth as against the increase of those whom it subsists. The leaders of the great trades unions of the country, if they really desire to permanently increase the happiness of the classes among whom they exercise influence, can speedily promote this object by encouraging their members to discuss freely the relations of labor to capital; not moving in one groove, as if labor and capital were necessarily antagonistic, and that therefore labor must always have rough-armed hand to protect itself from the attacks of capital; but, taking new ground, to inquire if labor and capital are bound to each other by any and what ties, ascertaining if the share of the laborer in the capital fund depends, except so far as affected by inequality in distribution, on the proportion between the number of laborers and the amount of the fund. The discussing, examining, and dealing generally with these topics, would necessarily compel the working man to a more correct appreciation of his position.

Any such doctrine as that "the poor shall never cease out of the land;" or that we are to be content with the station in life into which it has pleased God to call us; or that we are to ask and we shall receive, must no longer avail. Schiller most effectively answers the advocates of prayer:

"Help, Lord, help! Look with pity down! A paternoster pray; What God does, that is justly done, His grace endures for aye."

"Oh, mother! empty mockery, God hath not justly dealt by me: Have I not begged and prayed in vain; What boots it now to pray again?"

Labor's only and effective prayer must be in life action for its own redemption; action founded on thought, crude thought, and sometimes erring at first, but ultimately developed into useful thinking, by much patient experimenting for the right and true.

POVERTY: ITS EFFECTS ON THE POLITICAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.

"Political Economy does not itself instruct how to make a nation rich, but whoever would be qualified to judge of the means of making a nation rich must first be a political economist."--John Stuart Mill.

"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence of all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which might render this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying the wants of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make the interests accord with their supplying each other's wants."--Sir James Stewart.

On one occasion in the world's history, a people rose searching for upright life, who had previously, for several generations, depressed by poverty and its attendant hand-maidens of misery, prowled hunger-striken and disconsolate, stooping and stumbling through the byways of existence. A mighty revolution resulted in much rough justice and some brutal vengeance, much rude right, and some terrific wrong. Among the writers who have since narrated the history of this people's struggle, some penmen have been assiduous and hasty to search for, and chronicle the errors, and have even not hesitated to magnify the crimes of the rebels; while they have been slow to recognize the previous demoralizing tendency of the system rebelled against. In this pamphlet it is proposed to very briefly deal with the state of the people in France immediately prior to the grand convulsion which destroyed the Bastile Monarchy, and set a glorious example of the vindication of the rights of man against opposition the most formidable that can be conceived; believing that even in this slight illustration of the condition of the masses in France who sought to erect on the ruins of arbitrary power the glorious edifice of civil and religious liberty, an answer may be found to the question: "What is the effect of poverty on the political condition of the people."

In taking the instance of France, it is not that the writer for one moment imagines that poverty is a word without meaning in our own lands. The clamming factory hands in the Lancanshire valleys, the distressed ribbon weavers of Conventry, and the impoverished laborers in various parts of Ireland and Scotland would be able to give us a definition of the word fearful in its distinctness. But in England poverty is happily partial, while in France in the eighteenth century poverty was universal outside the palaces of the nobles and the mansions of the church, where luxury, voluptuousness, and effeminacy were regnant. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travelers in France could learn from "the sadness, the solitude, the miserable poverty, the dismal nakedness of the empty cottages, and the starving, ragged population, how much men could endure without dying." On the one side a discontented, wretched, hungry mass of tax-providing slaves, and on the other a rapacious, pampered, licentious, spendthrift monarchy. This culminated in the refusal of the laborers to cultivate the fertile soil because, the tax-gatherer's rapacity left an insufficient remnant to provide the cultivator with the merest necessaries of life. Then followed "uncultivated fields, unpeopled villages, and houses dropping to decay;" the great cities--as Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux--crowded with begging skeletons, frightful in their squallid disease and loathsome aspect.

Even after the National Assembly had passed some measures of temporary alleviation, the distress in Paris itself was so great that at the gratuitious distributions of bread "old people have been seen to expire with their hand stretched out to receive the loaf, and women waiting in their turn in front of the baker's shop were prematurely delivered of dead children in the open streets." The great mass of the people were as ignorant as they were poor; were ignorant indeed because they were poor. Ignorance is the pauper's inalienable heritage. When the struggle is for the means of subsistence, and these are only partially obtained, there is little hope for the luxury of a leisure hour in which other emotions can be cultivated than those of the mere desires for food and rest--sole results of the laborious monotonousness of machine work; a round of toil and sleep closing in death--the only certain refuge for the worn out laborer. Without the opportunity afforded by the possession of more than will satisfy the immediate wants, there can be little or no culture of the mental faculties. The toiler badly paid and ill-fed, is separated from the thinker. Nobly-gifted, highly-cultured though the poet may be, his poesy has no charms for the father to whom one hour's leisure means short food for his hungry children clamoring for bread. The picture gallery, replete with the finest works of our greatest masters, is forbidden ground to the pitman, the plowman, the poor pariahs to whom the conceptions of the highest art-treasures are impossible. The beauties of nature are almost equally inaccessible to the dwellers in the narrow lanes of great cities. Out of your narrow wynds in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and on to the moor and mountain-side, ye poor, and breathe the pure life-renewing breezes. Not so; the moors are for the sportsmen and peers, not peasants; and a Scotch Duke--emblem of the worst vices of a corrupt and selfish, but fast-decaying House of Lords--closes miles of heather against the pedestrian's foot. But even this paltry oppression is unneeded. Duke Despicable is in unholy alliance with King Poverty, who mocks at the poor mother and her wretched, ragged family, when from the garret or cellar in a great Babylon wilderness they set out to find green fields and new life. Work days are sacred to bread, and clothes, and rent; hunger, inclement weather, and pressing landlord forbid the study of nature 'twixt Monday morn and Saturday night, and on Sunday God's ministers require to teach a weary people how to die, as if the lesson were not unceasingly inculcated in their incessant toil. Oh! horrid mockery; men need teaching how to live. According to religionists, this world's bitter misery is a dark and certain preface, "just published," to a volume of eternal happiness, which for 2,000 years has been advertised as in the press and ready for publication, but which after all may never appear. And notwithstanding that every-day misery is so very potent, mankind seem to heed it but very little. The second edition of a paper containing the account of a battle in which some 5,000 were killed and 10,000 wounded, is eagerly perused, but the battle in which poverty kills and maims hundreds of thousands, is allowed to rage without the uplifting of a weapon against the common enemy.

The poor in France were awakened by Rousseau's startling declaration that property was spoliation, they knew they had been spoiled, the logic of the stomach was conclusive, empty bellies and aching brains were the predecessors of a revolution which sought vengeance when justice was denied, but which full-stomached and empty-headed Tories of later days have calumniated and denounced.

Warned by the past, ought we not to-day to give battle to that curse of all old countries--poverty? The fearful miseries of the want of food and leisure which the poor have to endure are such as to seriously hinder their political enfranchisement. Those who desire that men and women shall have their rights of citizens, should be conscious how low the poor are trampled down, and how incapable poverty renders them for the performance of the duties of citizenship. So that the question of political freedom is really determined by the wealth or poverty of the masses; to this extent, at any rate, that a poverty-stricken people must necessarily, after that state of pauperism has existed for several generations, be an ignorant and enslaved people.

The problem is, how to remove poverty, as it is only by the removal of poverty that the political emancipation of the nation can be rendered possible. It has been ascertained that the average food of the agricultural laborer in England is about half that alloted by the jail dietary to sustain criminal life. So that the peasant who builds and guards his master's haystack gets worse fed and worse lodged than the incendiary convicted for burning it down.

How can this poverty be removed and prevented?

I quote the reply from one who has written most elaborately in elucidation of the views of Malthus and Mill: "There is but one possible mode of preventing any evil--namely, to seek for and remove its cause. The cause of low wages, or in other words of Poverty, is overpopulation; that is, the existence of too many people in proportion to the food, of too many laborers in proportion to the capital. It is of the very first importance that the attention of all who seek to remove poverty should never be diverted from this great truth. The disproportion between the numbers and the food is the _only real cause_ of social poverty. Individual cases of poverty may be produced by individual misconduct, such as drunknness, ignorance, laziness, or disease; but these and all other accidental influences must be wholly thrown out of the question in considering the permanent cause, and aiming at the prevention of poverty. Drunknness and ignorance, moreover, are far more frequently the _effect_ than the cause of poverty. Population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side; but the ratio of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter, that it is necessarily greatly _checked_; and the checks are of course either more deaths or fewer births--that is, either positive or preventive."

Unless the _necessity_ of the preventive or positive checks to population be perceived; unless it be clearly seen, that they must operate in one form, if not in another; and that _though individuals may escape them, the race can not_; human society is a hopeless and insoluble riddle.

Quoting John Stuart Mill, the writer from whom the foregoing extracts have been made, proceeds:

"The great object of statesmanship should be to raise the habitual standard of comfort among the working classes, and to bring them into such a position as shows them most clearly that their welfare depends upon themselves. For this purpose he advises that there should be, first, an extended scheme of national emigration, so as to produce a striking and sudden improvement in the condition of the laborers left at home, and raise their standard of comfort; also that the population truths should be disseminated as widely as possible, so that a powerful public feeling should be awakened among the working classes against undue procreation on the part of any individual among them--a feeling which could not fail greatly to influence individual conduct; and also that we should use every endeavor to get rid of the present system of labor--namely, that of employers, and employed, and adopt to a great extent that of independent or associated industry. His reason for this is, that a hired laborer, who has no personal interest in the work he is engaged in, is generally reckless and without foresight, living from hand to mouth, and exerting little control over his powers of procreation; whereas the laborer who has a personal stake in his work, and the feeling of independence and self-reliance which the possession of property gives, as, for instance, the peasant proprietor, or member of a copartnership, has far stronger motives for self-restraint, and can see much more clearly the evil effects of having a large family."

The end in view in all this is the attainment of a greater amount of happiness for humankind. The rendering life more worth the living, by distributing more equally than at present its love, its beauties, and its charms. In one of his most recent publications, Mr. John Stuart Mill observes:

"In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, every one who has a moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find tins enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering, such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection. Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration, can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education and proper control of noxious influences, while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe."

In a former pamphlet, "Jesus, Shelly, and Malthus," the reader's attention was entreated to this grave question. In a few pages it is impossible to do more than erect a fingerpost to point out a possible road to a given end. To attempt in a narrow compass to give complete details, would be as unwise as it would be unavailing. My desire is rather to provoke discussion among the masses than to obtain willing auditors among the few, and I affirm it, therefore, as a proposition which I am prepared to support, "That the political conditions of the people can never be permanently reformed until the cause of poverty has been discovered and the evil itself prevented and removed."

WHY DO MEN STARVE?

Why is it that human beings are starved to death, in a wealthy country like England, with its palaces, its cathedrals, and its abbeys; with its grand mansions, and luxurious dwellings, with its fine inclosed parks, and strictly guarded preserves; with its mills, mines, and factories; with its enormous profits to the capitalist; and with its broad acres and great rent rolls to the landholder? The feet that men, old, young, and in the prime of life; that women, and that children, do so die, is indisputable. The paragraph in the daily journals, headed "Death from Starvation," or "Another Death from Destitution," is no uncommon one to the eyes of the careful reader.

In a newspaper of one day, December 24, 1864, may be read the verdict of a London jury that "the deceased, Robert Bloom, died from the mortal effects of effusion on the brain and disease of the lungs, arising from natural causes, but the said death was accelerated by destitution, and by living in an ill-ventilated room, and in a court wanting in sanitary requirements;" and the verdict of another jury, presided over by the very Coroner who sat on the last case, "that the deceased, Mary Hale, was found dead in a certain room from the mortal effects of cold and starvation;" as also the history of a poor wanderer from the Glasgow City Poor House found dead in the snow.

In London, the hive of the world, with its merchant millionaires, even under the shadow of the wealth pile, starvation is as busy as if in the most wretched and impoverished village; busy, indeed, not always striking the victim so obtrusively that the coroner's inquest shall preserve a record of the fact, but more often busy quietly, in the wretched court and narrow lane, up in the garret, and down in the cellar, stealing by slow degrees the life of the poor.

Why does it happen that Christian London, with its magnificent houses for God, has so many squalid holes for the poor? Christianity from its thousand pulpits teaches, "Ask and it shall be given to you," "who if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" yet with much prayer the bread is too frequently not enough, and it is, alas! not seldom that the prayer for bread gets the answer in the stone of the paved street, where he lays him down to die. The prayer of the poor outcast is answered by hunger, misery, disease, crime and death, and yet the Bible says, "Blessed be ye poor."' Ask the orthodox clergyman why men starve, why men are poor and miserable; he will tell you that it is God's will; that it is a punishment for man's sins. And so long as men are content to believe that it is God's will that the majority of humankind should have too little happiness, so long will it be impossible effectually to get them to listen to the answer to this great question.

Men starve because the great bulk of them are ignorant of the great law of population, the operation of which controls their existence and determines its happiness or misery. They starve because pulpit teachers have taught them for centuries to be content with the state of life in which it has pleased God to call them, instead of teaching them how to extricate themselves from the misery, degradation, and ignorance which a continuance of poverty entails.

Men starve because the teachers have taught heaven instead of earth, the next world instead of this. It is now generally admitted by those who have investigated the subject that there is a tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment nature produces. In the human race, there is a constant endeavor on the part of its members to increase beyond the means of subsistence within their reach. The want of food to support this increase operates, in the end, as a positive obstacle to the further spread of population, and men are starved because the great mass of them have neglected to listen to one of nature's clearest teachings. The unchecked increase of population is in a geometrical ratio, the increase of food for their subsistence is in an arithmetical ratio. That is, while humankind would increase in proportion as 1, 2, 4, 8,16, 32, 64, 128, 256, food would only increase as 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The more the mouths the less the proportion of food. While the restraint to an increase of population is thus a want of food, and starvation is the successful antagonist of struggling human life, it is seldom that this obstacle operates immediately--its dealing is more often indirectly against its victims. Those who die of actual famine are few indeed compared with those who die from various forms of disease, induced by scarcity of the means of subsistence. If any of my readers doubt this, their doubts may be removed by a very short series of visits to the wretched homes of the paupers of our great cities. Suicide is the refuge mainly of those who are worn out in a bitter, and, to them, a hopeless struggle against accumulated ills. Disease, suffering, and misery are the chief causes of the prevalence of suicide in our country, and suicide is therefore one form, although comparatively minute, in which the operation of the law of population may be traced.

From dread of the pangs of poverty, men, women, and children are driven to unwholesome occupations, which destroy not only the health of the man and woman actually employed, but implant the germs of physical disease in their offspring. A starving woman seeking food mixes white lead with oil and turpentine for a paltry pittance, which provides bare existence for her and those who share it; in a few weeks, she is so diseased she can work no longer, and the hospital and grave in turn receive her. Men and women are driven to procure bread by work in lead mines; they rapidly dig their own graves, and not alone themselves, but their wretched offspring, are death-stricken as the penalty; the lead poisons the blood of parent and child alike. Young women and children work at artificial flower-making, and soon their occupation teaches that Scheele's and Schweenfurth green, bright and pleasing colors to the eye, are death's darts too often fatally aimed.

The occupation may be objected to as unhealthy; but the need for food is great, and the woman's or child's wages, wretchedly little though they are, yet help to fill the mouths at home: so the wage is taken till the worker dies. Here, again, the checks to an increase of population all stop short of starvation--the victims are poisoned instead of starved. So where some forty or fifty young girls are crowded into a badly ventilated work-room, not large enough for half the number, from early in the morning till even near midnight, when orders press; or in some work-room where slop clothes are made, and twenty-five tailors are huddled together in a little parlor scarce wide enough for three--they work to live, and die slowly while they work. They are not starved, but is this sort of asphyxiation much better? The poor, are not only driven to unhealthy, but also to noisome, dwellings. There are in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, and other large cities, fearful alleys, with wretched houses, and small ill-ventilated rooms, each room containing a family, the individuals of which are crowded together under conditions so wretched that disease, and often speedy death, is the only possible result. In the East of London, ten, eleven, and, in some cases, fourteen persons have been found sleeping in one wretched little room. Is it wonderful that some of these misery-stricken ones die before they have time to starve? From poverty the mother, obliged to constantly work that the miserable pittance she gets may yield enough to sustain bare life, is unable properly to nurse and care for baby-child, and often quick death, or slow but certain disease, ending ultimately in the grave, is the result.

The poor live by wages. Wages popularly signify the amount of money earned by the laborer in a given time; but the real value of the money-wages is the amount in quantity and quality of the means of subsistence which the laborer can purchase with that money. Wages may be nominally high, but really low, if the food and commodities to be purchased are, at the same time, dear in price. An undue increase of population reduces wages in more than one way; it reduces them in effect, if not in nominal amount, by increasing the price of the food to be purchased; and it also reduces the nominal amount, because the nominal amount depends on the amount of capital at disposal for employ, and the number of laborers seeking employment. No remedies for low wages, no scheme for the prevention and removal of poverty, can ever be efficacious until they operate on and through the minds and habits of the masses.

It is not from rich men that the poor must hope for deliverance from starvation. It is not to charitable associations the wretched must appeal. Temporary alleviation of the permanent evil is the best that can be hoped for from such aids. It is by the people that the people must be saved. Measures which increase the dependence of the poor on charitable aid can only temporarily benefit one portion of the laboring class while injuring another in the same proportion; and charity, if carried far, must inevitably involve the recipients in ultimate ruin and degradation by destroying their mutual self-reliance. The true way to improve the worker, in all cases short of actual want of the necessaries of life, is to throw him entirely on his own resources, but at the same time to teach him how he may augment those resources to the utmost. It is only by educating the ignorant poor to a consciousness of the happiness possible to them, as a result of their own exertions, that you can induce them effectually to strive for it. But, alas! as Mr. Mill justly observes, "Education is not compatible with extreme poverty. It is impossible effectually to teach an indigent population." The time occupied in the bare struggle to exist leaves but few moments and fewer opportunities for mental cultivation to the very poor.

The question of wages and their relation to capital and population, a question which interests a poor man so much, is one on which he formerly hardly ever thought at all, and on which even now he thinks much too seldom. It is necessary to impress on the laborer that the rate of wages depends on the proportion between population and capital. If population increases without an increase of capital, wages fall; the number or competitors in the labor market being greater, and the fund to provide for them not having increased proportionately, and, if capital increases without an increase of population, wages rise. Many efforts have been made to increase wages, but none of them can be permanently successful which do not include some plan for preventing a too rapid increase of laborers. Population has a tendency to increase, and has increased faster than capital; this is evidenced by the poor and miserable condition of the great body of the people in most of the old countries of the world, a condition which can only be accounted for upon one of two suppositions, either that there is a natural tendency in population to increase faster than capital, or that capital has, by some means, been prevented from increasing as rapidly as it might have done. That population has such a tendency to increase that, unchecked, it would double itself in a small number of years--say twenty-five--is a proposition which most writers of any merit concur in, and which may be easily proven. In some instances, the increase has been even still more rapid. That capital has not increased sufficiently is evident from the existing state of society. But that it could increase under any circumstances with the same rapidity as is possible to population is denied. The increase of capital is retarded by an obstacle which does not exist in the case of population.. The augmentation of capital is painful. It can only be effected by abstaining from immediate enjoyment. In the case of augmentation of population precisely the reverse obtains. There the temporary and immediate pleasure is succeeded by the permanent pain. The only possible mode of raising wages permanently, and effectually benefiting the poor, is by so educating them that they shall be conscious that their welfare depends upon the exercise of a greater control over their passions.

In penning this brief paper, my desire has been to provoke among the working classes a discussion and careful examination of the teachings of political economy, as propounded by Mr. J. S. Mill and those other able men who, of late, have devoted themselves to elaborating and popularizing the doctrines enunciated by Malthus. While I am glad to find that there are some among the masses who are inclined to preach and put in practice the teachings of the Malthusian School of political economists, I know that they are yet few in comparison with the great body of the working classes who have been taught to look upon the political economist as the poor man's foe. It is nevertheless among the working men alone, and, in the very ranks of the starvers, that the effort must be made to check starvation. The question is again before us: How are men to be prevented from starving? Not by strikes, during the continuance of which food is scarcer than before. No combinations of workmen can obtain high wages if the number of workers is too great. It is not by a mere struggle of class against class that the poor man's ills can be cured. The working classes can alleviate their own sufferings. They can, by co-operative schemes, which have the advantage of being educational in their operation, temporarily and partially remedy some of the evils, if not by increasing the means of subsistence, at any rate by securing a larger portion of the result of labor to the proper sustenance of the laborer. Systems of associated industry are of immense benefit to the working classes, not alone or so much from the pecuniary improvement they result in, but because they develop in each individual a sense of dignity and independence which he lacks as a mere hired laborer. They can permanently improve their condition by taking such steps as shall prevent too rapid an increase of their numbers, and, by thus checking the supply of laborers, they will, as capital augments, increase the rate of wages paid to the laborer. The steady object of each working man should be to impress on his fellow-worker the importance of this subject. Let each point out to his neighbor not only the frightful struggle in which a poor man must engage who brings up a large family, but also that the result is to place in the labor market more claimants tor a share of the fund which has hitherto been found insufficient to keep the working classes from death by starvation.

The object of this pamphlet will be amply attained if it serve as the means of inducing some of the working classes to examine for themselves the teachings of Political Economy. All that is at present needed is that laboring men and women should be accustomed, both publicly and at home, to the consideration and discussion of the views and principles first openly propounded by Mr. Malthus, and since elaborated by Mr. Mill and other writers. The mere investigation of the subject will of itself serve to bring to the notice of the masses many facts hitherto entirely ignored by them. All must acknowledge the terrible ills resulting from poverty, and all therefore are bound to use their faculties to discover if possible its cause and cure. It is more than folly for the working man to permit himself to be turned away from the subject by the cry that the Political Economists have no sympathy with the poor. If the allegation were true, which it is not, it would only afford an additional reason why this important science should find students among those who most need aid from its teachings.

THE LAND QUESTION.

LARGE ESTATES INIMICAL TO THE WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE

Property in land differs from ordinary property. Wealth, which is the accumulated result of labor, is sometimes, but not often, accumulated in the hands of the laborer, and is more frequently accumulated in the hands of some person who has purchased the result of the laborers toil. Such personal wealth is capable of indefinite increase; and the exclusive right to its disposal is protected in the hands of its possessor, so long as he does not avail himself of this legal protection to use the wealth mischievously to his fellows. There would be no incentive in the laborer to economy, or to increased exertion, unless the State gave him reasonable protection in the enjoyment of his savings. Unfortunately, to obtain the protection of the authorities, he has in this country to give up an unreasonably large portion of his earnings to defray the cost of local and imperial Government. During the reign of her present Majesty, imperial taxation alone has increased from about £48,000,000 to £73,833,000. The State has no right to interfere with a man's daily disposition of his personal wealth, merely on the ground that he might have used it more advantageously for his fellows. With land it is quite different; it is limited in extent, and the portions of it capable of producing food with ease to the cultivator are still more limited. Every individual member of the commonwealth has an indefeasible interest in the totality of the land, and no man ought to assert an absolute freehold in land hostile to the interest of his fellow. The land is part of the general soil of the State, and should be held subject to the general welfare of the citizens. No man has a right so to hold land that his tenure is detrimental to the happiness of the dwellers upon it or around it. This principle is already recognized in much of our legislation. A man can not say to a railway company--which has obtained the usual compulsory powers of taking land--"You shall not cross my private estate;" the law would answer, if he did, by saying, "The railway is for the good of the State; you as an individual must give way to the general good, and must lose your land, receiving a fair and reasonable money value for it." This principle should be applied more widely: and if it be for the good of the commonwealth that some of the enormous land monopolies of this country should be broken up, no statesman ought to be deterred by the mere dread of interfering with the so-called rights of private property.

Mr. Mill says: "When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient it is unjust." The possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land, and, in fact, individual proprietorship of soil is only defensible so long as the possessor can show improvement and cultivation of the land he holds. To quote again from Mr. John Stuart Mill: "The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labor, and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle can not apply to that which is not the produce of labor, the raw material of the earth." Mr. Mill urges that property in land "is only valid in so far as the proprietor of the land is its improver." "In no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered upon it." Yet, in England and Wales alone, the landlords who received for rent, in the year 1800, £22,500,000, now receive about £67,000,000, and for this have no obligation on them to cultivate. The holding cultivable land in an uncultivated condition in this overcrowded country ought to be made a statutory misdemeanor, the penalty for which should be the forfeiture to the State of the land so left uncultivated, at, say, a twenty years' purchase of its annual return in the neglected or misapplied state in which it was found at the time of conviction. The true theory of landholding should be that the State should be the only freeholder, all other tenures being limited in character; and cultivation ought to be a special condition of tenancy.... The holder of land should either cultivate it with his own hands, or, as would be most frequently the case, by the hands of others; but in the latter case, the landed proprietor is bound to allow the agricultural laborer to live by his labor. By living I mean that the laborer should have healthy food, shelter, and clothing, and sufficient leisure in which to educate himself and his family, besides the necessary leisure for rest from his labors. At present agricultural laborers do not live; they only drag wearily through a career but little higher in any respect than--and often not half so comfortable as--that of many of the other animals on the estate....

Little boys and girls, in the Midland, Eastern, Southern, and Southwestern counties of England, go into the fields to work, in some instances, soon after six years of age; in very many cases before they are seven years old, and in nearly all cases before they have attained eight. It is true, that the work at first may be the comparatively idle work of scaring birds or tending sheep, but it involves exposure of the child's yet delicate frame in the cold and damp of spring, and then to the heat of the summer sun, from day-dawn to evening. This too often results in the stunted growth and diseased frame found so frequently among the English poor. I say nothing of the demoralization of children consequent on their employment, without regard to sex, in the field gangs. I pass by the fact that work at this early age utterly incapacitates them, as a body, for mental effort. It is enough to declare that no child ought to have to work on the land until he is ten years of age, and if I am told that the fathers--only earning, in the majority of instances, from nine to thirteen shillings per week--need the additional petty wage these wretched babes may bring home, then again I answer, that it is to the landholder's enormous income that the State ought to look for the means of educating the too often worse than savages who are reared on his estate, and who by their labors swell his rent-roll.

That a few landed proprietors should have gigantic incomes, while the mass of the people are so poor--that in Gloucester, the Rev. Mr. Frazer describes "type after type of social life almost degraded to the level of barbarism"--that near Lavenham, "the cottages are unfit for human habitation"--that in Norfolk the Parliamentary returns speak of their dwellings in one as "miserable," in a second as "deplorable," in a third as "detestable," in a fourth as "a disgrace to a Christian community;" while near Docking, we are told, in consequence of the overcrowding of the wretched poor, "the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine." This is a state of things that if the landholders will not redress willingly they must be made to remedy before it is too late.

A few men have vast estates and excessive incomes; the millions have seldom an inch of land until they inherit the grave, and have a starvation wage out of which a proportion is taken back for rent. Take the vast property of the Marquis of Westminster, whose income is credibly stated at something near a million a year; or that of the Duke of Devonshire, amounting to 96,000 acres in the county of Derby alone, without regarding his Irish or other estates; or that of the Duke of Norfolk, whose Sussex estate is fifteen miles in circuit; or that of the Duke of Sutherland, which stretches across and contains the whole of Sutherlandshire from sea to sea; or that of the Marquis of Bute, on which £2,000,-000 sterling were spent by his trustees during his minority; or that of the Marquis of Breadalbane, who is said to be able to ride from his own door one hundred miles straight to the sea on his own freehold land; or those of the Duke of Richmond and Lord Leconfield, who between them own nearly the whole of the eastern portion of the county of Sussex, containing nearly 800 square miles. And such estates have a tendency to increase rather than to diminish. In Northumberland, the Ducal proprietor, whose titular rank is derived from the county, is a constant purchaser of any lands put up for sale. Mr. Bright, in 1864, spoke of one nobleman who devoted £80,000 a year of his income to the purchase of additional land.

These large properties must all be broken up; they paralyze the people, and they corrupt their possessors. We prefer that the breaking up shall be voluntary and gradual, but it must begin at once, for hungry bellies are multiplying daily.

The State ought to put the peasantry in possession of the land, and this might be done in several ways at the same time.

1. There is the Prussian Land System, a modification of which might be made to work well here, and which since 1850 has enabled the smallest occupiers of peasants' land to acquire the proprietorship at twenty years' purchase; the amount of which is paid to the landlord, not in money, but in rent debentures issued by authority of the State, and bearing four per cent, interest, and gradually redeemable by means of the one per cent, difference, which at compound interest extinguishes the principal in a little over forty-one years. The Prussian peasant has, however, two other options: he may pay less by one-tenth to the State bank than the rent he formerly paid to his landlord, in which case the purchase debentures take fifty-six years to redeem; or he may, if he can raise the cash, compel his landlord to accept eighteen years' purchase money of the annual rent. By this means nearly 100,000 peasant proprietors have been created in Prussia. Kent debentures to the extent of many millions have been issued to the landholders, and in less than nineteen years more than one-eighth of the debentures issued have been entirely redeemed and extinguished.

2. The Legislature should declare that leaving cultivable land uncultivated gave the Government the right to take possession of such land, assessing it by its actual return for the last live years, and not by its real value, and handing to the proprietor the amount of, say, twenty years' purchase in Consolidated Stock, redeemable in a limited term of years. The land so taken should not be sold at all, but should be let out to persons willing to become cultivators, on sufficiently long terms of tenancy to fairly recoup his labor and capital to the cultivator, who should yearly pay into the National Treasury, in lieu of all other imperial taxes, a certain proportion of the value of the annual produce.

3. The game laws should be abolished. Game preserving in England is not only injurious, in that it diverts land capable of corn-bearing from the purpose it should fulfill, of growing corn to feed the starving, but it is injurious in that it prevents proper cultivation of surrounding farms, and demoralizes and makes criminals of the neighboring agriculturial laborers, creating for them a kind and degree of crime which would be otherwise unknown. Poaching, which is so severely punished, is actually fostered and encouraged by the very landholders who punish it. Pheasants and partridges' eggs are bought to stock preserves; the gamekeepers who buy these eggs shut their eyes to the mode in which they have been procured. The lad who was encouraged to procure the eggs finds himself in jail when he learns that shooting or trapping pheasants gains a higher pecuniary reward than leading the plow horse, or trimming the hedge, or grubbing the plantation. Poaching is the natural consequence of rearing a large number of rabbits, hares, partridges, and pheasants, in the midst of an underpaid, underfed, badly-housed, and deplorably ignorant body of people. The brutal outrages of gamekeepers of which we read so much are the regretable but easily-traceable measure of retaliation for a system which takes a baby child to work in the fields soon after six years of age, which trains all his worst propensities and deadens and degrades his better faculties, which keeps him in constant wretchedness, and tantalizes him with the sight of hundreds of acres on which game runs and flies well-fed, under his very nose, while he limps ill-fed along the muddy lane which skirts the preserve--game, which is at liberty to come out of its covert and eat and destroy the farmer's crop, but which is even then made sacred by the law, and fenced round by covenants, as in a Leitrim lease. The game laws must go; they starve our population by using land which might be golden to the autumn sun with the waving crop of wheat, barley, and rye; they feed our prisons, and rear a criminal class in our midst, who have to be prosecuted and guarded at great cost, and all because hares and pheasants are higher in the landowners' eyes than human beings.

5. Any person holding more than, say, 5,000 acres of land, should be taxed at a far heavier rate than those having smaller holdings. That is, presuming, in order to take a figure as basis, the land-tax on 5,000 acres to be at the rate of 1s. per acre, then on every acre above that quantity it should be 2s. per acre up to 10,000 acres, and from thence 5s. per acre up to 15,000 acres, and from thence 10s. per acre up to 20,000 acres, so as to discourage all extravagantly large holdings.

6. The law of primogeniture should be repealed; the settlement of property, except for a widow and her children, be entirely prohibited and some limitation should be put on the power of devise, so as to prevent, say, the Marquis of Westminster from leaving the bulk of his property to his eldest son, while the younger ones are left as noble paupers, to be provided with places and pensions by the nation. Land should be made as easily and as cheaply transferable as any personal chattel.

The present land monopoly must be broken by legislation, or it will be destroyed by revolution.