CHAPTER I.

THE PROVISION FOR THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF MAN.

In the form of bread, using the term in a wide generic sense, matter passes into the service of man on the plane of human life. By regular steps it is lifted and refined and adjusted to correspondence with human need and comfort. In its raw and individual state, it is controlled by physical force. From this crude condition it is carried by chemical force to the order of the mineral kingdom. From this plane, it passes up through the agency of vital force to the vegetable kingdom. Through the power of vital force of a higher kind, it is advanced to the animal kingdom. Here it is ready for man, and yields itself to the uses of his life. From the time that vital force enters the realm of nature, a process of assimilation begins. The plant assimilates the mineral, the animal assimilates the plant, and man assimilates the animal. Through regular gradations, matter passes up from the bottom of nature into the service of man, who stands at the top. With each move upward it gets associated with force of a higher kind. With each advance its range gets wider and its movements freer. In the form of bread, it is sufficiently refined and sublimated to be appropriated and utilized for food, for shelter, for raiment, by the immortal spirit of man. The necessity for food, for clothing, for shelter, creates commerce, and commerce accomplishes results far more important than the production and distribution of the temporal necessities of human life. It brings men together; it establishes relations. It is the wonderful institution which, early in the history of the race, began as a loom to catch up the separate threads of individual life, to weave them into that marvelous fabric called humanity. Ends of an infinitely higher order are realized by the production and exchange of the elements of trade, than the satisfying of hunger with bread, or the furnishing man with clothing and shelter. The higher ends are the essential and ordained ends. That we may understand what an important part the necessity for food has played in the progress of man, it will be well to consider the significance of the relations it first helped to establish.

I.

All power whatever, that distinguishes man from the brute, that in any respect contributes to his commercial, mental, moral, or human value, is due to union, relation, action and interaction among individuals. In nature we may find illustrations of this truth. Sound, electricity, heat, and light, are forms of force which owe their existence to action, relation, interaction among material particles. They would never arise in a universe of unrelated elements. Their difference is due, not to the vibration of different elements, but to different rates of vibration among the same elements. Consequent upon certain terms of formal and quiet social intercourse among the molecules, there is sound. When they intermingle more actively and intimately, there is electricity. With a slight change in the method, but no decrease in the velocity with which they move, there is heat. When they go at the top of their speed, waltzing and swinging corners at an unthinkable rate, there is light. From varying relations and actions among material particles, we get the music which charms us, the means of communication which unite us, the power to do work which serves us, and the beauty which refines us. The unceasing play of these simple unseen elements made the fame of Beethoven, who threw their vibrations into symphonies; and of Morse, who utilized their speed to carry the news; and of Watt, who hitched their radiations to the flying train; and of Daguerre, who put their undulations to painting pictures. All forms of physical force may be traced to the union, relation, and vibration of material particles. The distance from atoms to men is well-nigh infinite, but the points of resemblance between the genesis of physical force and the genesis of social force are sufficiently striking to make it permissible to trace the analogy between them. By social force is understood all those forms of energy which men find themselves to possess by virtue of their relations to one another in organized social life.

Commerce insures the union, and brings about the relations that make this force possible. It furnishes the conditions without which it could not be.

A self-contained, self-included, insulated person does carry within the depths of his being the organs of the civilized man, but they are as completely out of sight and out of use as the harvests that sleep within the kernels of the mummy wheat. If it were possible for an individual to come to years of maturity, out of relations with his fellows, he would be more destitute than a brute. Such an one, growing up in the woods or on an island, with no associates but the squirrels and the birds, would not have the personal furnishments of the monkey or the fox.

We can understand, too, by considering what man owes to his relations, how widely and completely he is separated from the lower animals. A thousand blackbirds, living together in relation, are not different from a thousand blackbirds living apart and out of relation. A squirrel gains no element of squirrelhood by companionship, and loses no element of it in isolation. He may be taken from his nest as soon as he is born and never be permitted to see another squirrel, but he will be just as much of a squirrel, and know as well how to get the meat out of a nut, as if free in the forests with others of his kind. A mocking bird comes to the power of song as well in a cage, separated from other birds, as when fed and trained in the orchard by the mother-bird. The chords in his throat were set to music, and without teacher or praise, at a certain period of his growth, his song will ring through the house.

The difference between a man brought up in some lone woods, out of all relation with men, and one brought up in a civilized community, is infinite. The lower animals get all they ever get by birth. No new gifts or powers come to them through companionship. They go unerringly to a certain destined end, whether they move in flocks or herds, or alone as individuals. Men, on the other hand, find themselves by coming together. Their organs sleep till waked by relation. By birth they can get nothing but the germs, the mere naked elements of what they are to become. Birth would be no blessing, but a deepening curse, but for what comes to the child through relation. Birthright alone is not worth a mess of pottage. Men often congratulate themselves on what they are pleased to term their individual rights and personal freedom. While men do have individual rights and personal freedom, it is always to be remembered that these belong to them because of the relations woven around them by the institutions of social life. The civilized man differs more from the savage, than the savage differs from the highest animal. Yet the lowest savage is infinitely removed from the highest animal, but solely in the possession of the germs of the attainments and the accomplishments which may be provoked and maintained by relation. Society alone furnishes the soil in which these germs can grow. The savage, alone in the woods, might secure for himself a covering of skins, but the cloth in which the civilized man clothes himself is possible only in social relations.

With the commencement of human relations, the outlines of an absolutely new world come into view. Dim and vague at the outset, as the relations are simple and low. But as these increase in number, range, and degree, not only the outlines, but the far-reaching surface, the mountains, the rivers, the products, the sky, and the climate of a new world stand out clear, definite, and unmistakable. This new realm we name _civilization_. It is super-imposed upon the physical world, but is as distinct from it as thought from the molecules of the brain. Nature furnishes the basis, but social relations furnish the conditions of the human energy that has lifted itself into the mighty edifice we call civilization.

All genera and species and families and individuals are so many forms in which the radiant energy of the sun has deposited itself. Playing with its heat and its light upon soil, sea, and sky, the sun has built the myriad organic forms we see. So all objects, interests, and laws embraced within the range of civilization are the forms in which social force, arising through relations, has deposited itself. Human language itself is an embodiment of social force. The grammars of different languages actually advertise the social status and condition of the peoples who used them. In the Chinese language we have no distinction as to parts of speech, thus showing that the national consciousness was arrested at the stage of paternalism in government. The ancient Romans put enormous stress upon the will. They formulated the laws by which men are still regulated in civilized social life. A hint of this we get in the Latin language, by the small use made of the pronoun. Ideas, too, are expressions of translated social energy. Nothing seems to be more insulated than the human brain, by the aid of which the mind does its thinking. Out of sight and out of touch, within the dark depths of its own mysterious home, it would appear to be shut up to absolute solitude. Here, at least, we would expect to find individual, independent work. But not so. No individual brain can think, only as it uses the brains of others in the process. Homer’s Iliad is a poetic formulation of what all Greece felt. The elements of myth, thought, passion, which it contains, were all in the contemporary Greek mind. In committing this poem to memory, the Greeks were but storing up their own thoughts.

Hegel, in thinking out his remarkable system of philosophy, used the brains of all the men who had preceded him in the difficult work of solving the problems of existence. Darwin saw much in nature, because, through relation, he was able to look through the eyes of all naturalists.

All values, whether in soil, waterfalls, precious stones, or money, are forms of social force. Land in a great city sells for two thousand dollars a front foot, because millions of people, drawn by the powers of commerce, have come into fellowship upon it. Robinson Crusoe would have given all the money he had on the ship for a loaf of bread. The heaps of gold and silver in Wall Street are so valuable, because seventy millions of people are circulating around them.

Moral laws are social products. They are not empirical, but fundamental, eternal, and essential. They inhere in the constitution of man. But it is only through relation that man comes to the recognition of them, as binding for conduct. Light and heat have their laws, definite and unfailing, but if natural particles never vibrated at a rate sufficient to create these forces, the laws would not appear. They arise along with the forces, and the same conditions which give rise to the forces, give rise to the laws. So moral laws accompany a certain degree of attainment and culture, only possible through relation.

Religion itself, the highest and most sacred deposit of human life, is a product of social force. Whether we regard it as “modes of emotion,” as Lecky; or the “recognition of all our duties as divine commands,” as Kant; or as “awe in the presence of the mystery of an inscrutable power in the universe,” as Spencer; or as “the infinite nature of duty,” as Mill; or as “the immediate feeling of the dependence of man on God,” as Schleiermacher, it never arises outside the range of relation. Still, religion is something constitutional, inalienable, divine; but man would never be thrilled by its hopes, or soothed by its peace, did he not stand in vital relation to his fellows. The elements and raw material of religion are eternally present, but relation calls into exercise the susceptibilities and faculties which appropriate these elements and raw material, turning them into hymns, theologies, prayers, sacrifices, liturgies, and ceremonies.

Commerce, by bringing men together under the necessities of finding food, clothing, shelter, enables them to find their intellects and what they can know, their hearts and what they can love, and their wills and what they can do.

Thus we trace the genesis of social force, with the expressions which it makes of itself, in property, literature, law, art, and religion, to mutual human relations, for the establishment of which, among men, Commerce seems to have been ordained. If men could, without trading, have found the means of subsistence, as do the foxes and the lions; then no relations in the high sense of the term would have been established among them; and like the foxes and the lions, they would have remained on the earth without progress and without history.

The sun must be making tremendous drafts upon some unseen sources of power, to be able to make, throughout the solar realm, such ample expenditures of energy without bankruptcy.

The location of the vast depositories of power, upon which he draws so liberally, we are not to inquire here. We do know that the force which builds the forest, flushes the meadows with green, braids the vines into festoons, and peoples the plant-world, comes from the sun. Wherever the materials which keep the sun’s fires burning come from, they must pass up to that center before they are available for service on this globe. The stamp and superscription of the sun must be upon them before they can take the form of grass, or leaf, or bird on the earth. In this sense stand human relations between the force contained in the individual, unrelated life, and the force which takes form in the objects of civilization. The crude and inarticulate force in the individuals of the tribe, or the nomads who only touch for war or passion, must be refined through moral, political, and spiritual relations before it is ready to take the form of poem, anthem, temple, or Plato.

II.

We wish to determine the principle in accordance with which the production and distribution of food, shelter, and clothing are to be regulated. These forms of value are embodiments of social energy, generated through relations formed above nature by intelligence and volition. In nature, then, we are not to find the law that is to regulate them.

Bees build their cells, and birds their nests, and beavers their dams, not by intelligence and will, called into existence after birth through companionship, but by what is in-wrought into the very fibers of their being irrespective of companionship. Birds, bees, and beavers have been in the world thousands of years, yet the first bird, bee, or beaver ever created had as much sense as the last. A single bee has as much sense as all the bees in the world put together. Among all lower animals each individual inherits the sense of the species. Hence the law “of the struggle for existence,” resulting in “the survival of the fittest,” said to be a regulating principle in the plant and animal kingdoms, is not severe, regarded with reference to the individuals which inhabit them. But to regard the operations of this law as beneficent upon the plane of human life, as does Mr. Spencer, is altogether to overlook the obligations men are under to one another, because of their mutual relations. The life of each man, it must be remembered, in so far as it is above that of the unrelated savage, is contained in the life of every other man. In so far as it is comfortable, intelligent, and free, it has been brought to him, and made over to him by his fellow-man. The law which is to determine the regulation of the elements of commerce, which are but expressions of the energy arising through mutual human relations, must be as elevated as the relations which commerce begets, and which in turn make commerce possible.

We must not go down among the tigers and the hyenas, who owe nothing but bare birth to companionship, where the principle of “the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence” does prevail, to get the law which is to regulate the production and distribution of products possible only through companionship. Each individual, be he weak or strong, has contributed something to the social body. The strength of the one may have contributed courage, the weakness of the other may have called forth pity; but both pity and courage are virtues possible only in relation. A regulating principle that kills off the feeble ones, and drives the weak ones to the wall, may do for brutes, who owe nothing to relationships; but not for men, who owe everything to them. The attempt to regulate forms of value in accordance with the law of “the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence” does not have sufficient regard for the contribution each individual has made, by the very fact of his existence, to make these values possible. The leading political economists of the times have come to see that the law of extreme individualism, of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” must be substituted by some more beneficent principle—by some law that pays more respect to the methods by which values have been created.

The province of commerce, as an institution, is to bring men together, not merely that the boundaries of commerce may be extended and its volume increased, but that men may learn the mutual obligations they are under to one another, that their sympathy for one another may be enlarged, and that respect for one another may be engendered.

It is only in an atmosphere of mutual trust, sympathy, and respect that men can grow.

The need for bread, for protection, for raiment, prompts men to the exchange of products, that each may share into the work of all. But in the process of exchanging products, relations are established, through the influence and power of which an order of man comes the mere material comforts of life cannot supply. The significance of commerce, then, is not understood, if it is considered simply with reference to its immediate ends. These ends are met when men are supplied with the material comforts of life. Ends, however, are mediated through it of a kind different in order and degree. These we consider the essential and ultimate ends of the relations which are established through the exchange of products. What, then, is the ultimate end and object of human relations? It is man. Man come to himself, conscious of himself, in possession of himself. It is human life, enriched, perfected, completed. It is man, strong, free, holy. It is man, not lost in the social texture, nor swamped in the social organism; but, finding his individuality and his peculiar, natural, simple self through them. The marvelous fabric the social loom was set to weaving is man. The highest end of social relations is a self-conscious, self-determining man, thinking the true, willing the right, loving the good. These relations constitute the organism out of which alone he can be born into symmetrical, well rounded life.

The lower animals come from natural birth into the world entire and complete. The young eaglet is correlated to the sky before he leaves the egg. But man moves on a plane lower than the brutes, if he is not caught at birth and carried by relation to his proper place. As man is the highest product of social relations, it follows that the highest product is the ultimate product.

An apple tree may be used for fire wood, or sawn into planks, but apples are the ultimate reasons for the existence of the apple tree. Toward an apple the germ started when it burst the sod and stood a little sprig above the ground. Beyond the apple, the tree goes no further. It throws its roots into the earth and its branches into the atmosphere, and perpetually acts and reacts upon its environment, but all for the purpose of turning soil, and sunshine, and rain into apples.

As we have seen, a part of the social energy arising through mutual human relations is to be converted into language, values, literature, morality, and religion, as a part of the capital invested in a sewing machine factory goes into tools. But man is greater than language, values, literature, morality, or religion; as the sewing machine is greater than the tools by which it is made. Human relations create language, values, art, morality, and religion, that they may be used to advance and perfect the main work they were ordained to perform, “the making of a man.”

When the people of a nation come to regard the elements of wealth, literature, art, or even religion, as ends to be enjoyed rather than as means to make man, they have missed the purpose of creation, and wander amid the mazes of stupidity and blindness.

As far as outward splendor and wealth were concerned, Babylon had no rival among the nations of ancient times. She was a vast and rich empire. She embraced the most fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed all others in magnificence. Her hanging gardens were the wonder of the world; but her people stood not upon their terraces to observe the stars, or to reach a higher civilization through the realization of the nobler ends of their being. These were used as places of revelry and sensual enjoyment. Thus the only work of art that made them famous was used to make them stupid and depraved. Of her wealth she made an end. Putting no estimate upon men, through the relations of whom her wealth was created, she found at last that among all her people she had produced no man amply endowed enough to give permanent mental setting to her civilization and her faith. Her heart throbs, whatever they were, got explained in no history, interpreted in no philosophy, and lived in no life. For knowledge of her, we are dependent upon her ruins, her pottery, her broken columns. Into oblivion has fallen all that bejeweled and pampered life that reveled in her palaces and amid her far-famed hanging gardens. Among none of her luxurious inhabitants did she develop a man to commit the keeping of her secrets and the record of her progress. Over her history has settled the stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night.

On the other hand, how secure is the Greece, that flowered in her great men! It was in the two centuries between 500 and 300 B. C., when she emphasized men more than the things they created, that she produced the men who have been the teachers of the human race. She has been despoiled of her art treasures, her temples have fallen, her Parthenon is in ruins; but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in her great men, are immortal.

No tooth of time, no war’s bloody hand, no devastation of the years, can take from her the glory which she lifted and locked in the genius of her generals, her statesmen, her orators, and her philosophers. Epaminondas and Pericles still fight for her, and guard with sleepless vigilance her fair name. Plato and Aristotle still interpret her problems of destiny. Sophocles and Pindar still sing her glory. Herodotus and Thucydides still keep the record of her victories. Demosthenes and Æschines still give imperishable expression to her conceptions of form and symmetry. She deposited her riches in the spirits of her great men, and they are forever secure. No thief can steal them, no rust can corrupt them. The unfolding centuries may look in upon them and enjoy them, but they cannot arrest them. The spirits of great men, like immortal ships, sail the ocean of time, bearing the treasures of the civilizations which gave them birth. They outride the fury of all the storms, and will sail on, till

The stars grow old, The sun grows cold, And the leaves of the Judgment book unfold.

But when Greece came to think more of the results than of the living men, she lost not only the power to produce the men, but the capacity to appreciate the results which had been created by them. Thinking more of the temple than the builder, she soon had no architect to conceive, and no son to understand the temple. Turning her national power into the spirits of her living men, she utilized the mountains and the mines in the service of beauty. But when life got cheaper than art, she no longer had power to create new art, or to protect from vandalism the old. By removing the emphasis from men to things, she descended from the Crœsus to the pauper of civilization.

As long as Israel expended her national energy in the production of men, she had Moses, greater than the Tabernacle; David, greater than his harp; and Isaiah, greater than his song. But when the forms of her worship were emphasized beyond the spirits of her people she lost the devotion which created her church and the manhood that guided it. The men who formulated the laws that made Rome the mistress of the world, grew at a period when a Roman was the center of interest in the empire. But when her laws were stressed to the obliteration of her men, she had them still, without the ability to make more laws, or to execute the ones she had. Religion in India is emphasized more than character; hence her men are lost in a wanton and luxurious surrender to a modeless, transcendental, pure being, and she is practically without a history.

III.

The ultimate reasons, then, for the existence of social relations, brought about among human beings by exchange of products, is not the satisfaction of hunger, or the enrichment of individuals in material wealth, but the making of men. This being so, we are able to determine the law by which the production and distribution of commercial products are to be regulated. It must be a law that does not put the emphasis on the products, but upon the men who are to be elevated through their exchange. It must not be a law leaning to extreme individualism on the one side, or to extreme socialism on the other. It must have proper respect to the individual, and to the social organism to which he is indebted for whatever of power he possesses. That law has already been formulated for us. It is this: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is the coordination of self-love and good-will. As has been well said, this saves for us the strength of private enterprise, and individual initiative, the vigor of the self-regarding motives; yet enthrones by their side as co-equal and co-regent powers, the principle of benevolence, the obligation to promote the common weal. Self-support, self-help, self-reliance, are still cardinal virtues, but philanthropy is given co-ordinate authority with them in the commercial world. This is the law most favorable to the growth of men.

Under its benign reign, men can come to themselves. Through the operation of this law, there will be no curtailment of the volume or the extent of commerce; but the emphasis will be kept in the right place, and men will not be lost in the process of securing the elements of food and shelter. Commerce will be the means of mediating to men their higher nature. Surrounded by conditions engendered by the operation of a law like this, life will reach through relation higher and higher ranges of hope and insight. The elements of poems, symphonies, philosophies, temples, and pictures will flow in the blood.

The fierce competition we see in the commercial world to-day is the attempt to re-enact, in business life, the principle of natural selection, or “the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.” This is the law of the jungle, but not of the social realm. This is doubtless the law among trees, determining their number, variety, and structure; for one tree gains nothing from association with other trees. This law doubtless operates in the sea, among the fish, and in the sky among the birds, for fish and birds are what they are by birth and not by association. Mr. Spencer regards the operation of this law as beneficent. It kills off the unsuccessful members of society, it drives the weak ones to the wall. Those who survive in the struggle are the fittest. The Greeks, who put Socrates to death, were, according to this so-called beneficent principle, the fittest to survive. This law is regarded as beneficent as it operates among men to control their products, upon the supposition that man is an animal and a part and parcel of nature, as are the bears and the wolves. The things which elevate men and civilize them, however, do not come from nature, but are engendered through companionship and association. Hence, from the sense of obligation men are under to one another for the best and highest things of life, the law is to be deduced which is to regulate their commerce and to determine the character of their actions. This law is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Thus business looks to character. The discipline it insures is worth more than the money it brings. The highest product of trade is man himself. If in business such methods are practiced, if such aims are followed as destroy the man, however great the returns in money, it is a thousand fold worse than a failure. The man it was designed to make, it has destroyed.

IV.

The disposition to accumulate, which is right and praiseworthy, should always be modified by right knowledge of the uses of property, and the methods by which it is amassed. Nothing is more pitiable than for a person to have more property than he has manhood. This indicates that the stress has been on the wrong side of the wealth. Such a man is under the sad necessity of taking his significance from the money he has accumulated, rather than the noble elements of life he should have secured in the process of obtaining it. With such a man, the end of business has been lost. He has consumed the end in the means. Instead of turning the elements of trade into manhood, manhood has been lost amid the maze and chaos of things. The order of progress has been violated, and the man, instead of moving on through business cares to immortal character, turns back to the earth, and seeks to substitute the tendency to move from it, by the disposition to settle permanently upon it. The desire to get rich has grown so abnormal and perverted, that it seeks to satisfy itself by the abundance of mere things. There are a great number of mowers and reapers, engines and cotton-gins, hats and shoes, pins and buttons; but a man has been lost in the making of them. This is more than all the mowers and reapers, cotton-gins and steam engines, pins and buttons ever made are worth. It is not mete that men should be sacrificed to the beauty and perfection of machinery, or to things machinery turns out. It is not necessary either. What we gain is not worth what we give. The machinery should be so manipulated as to get the things, and at the same time secure the perfection of men through the process. It is not necessary for the painter to lose himself in his art, and sacrifice his manhood to make his vision glow on the canvas. A proper regard for the methods and uses of art will result in leaving in the living spirit a picture more perfect than any painted by the brush. John Bunyan did not lose his manhood in portraying the history of a human soul in its attempts to get from earth to heaven. While conducting his pilgrim safely through the sorrow and temptations of life, to a home in a better world, he opened the pearly gates to his own soul. His work transfigured his life, and was the means of sanctifying it. All business and all work should lift up, and not hold down; it should make free, and not enslave; it should ennoble and not degrade. It is as honorable to make shoes or anchors as to paint pictures or write books. The shoemaker should learn the secret through his work of finding the sandals of manhood for his own feet. The blacksmith should learn, through the making of anchors for the great ships, to find the anchor that is to hold his own soul to the truth, amid the storms of life.

V.

If through trade only the material result is sought, the ends it were intended to subserve are missed. Its bulk may be large, the machinery through which it is carried on manifold and complicated, but with the emphasis on the money side of it, no manhood will be reached through it. The man side of a button machine is infinitely more important than the button side. The buttons which fall on one side may conform precisely to an approved and an exquisite pattern, but if the person who stands on the other side does not, through the process of making buttons, get a man out of himself, the whole thing is a disastrous failure. Human spirits are too valuable to be used up in making buttons. More respect is to be had to the human side of the loom than to the cloth side. The most beautiful pattern of silk ever woven loses its power to please the eye when it is remembered that the soul of a woman has been drawn into its threads and colors. The sacrifice of individual life is impressive and noble, if the object for which it is made is worthy. This kind of sacrifice is not the means of losing life, but of gaining it. But no material result to be used up in the passing season of fashion is worth such costly sacrifice.

Through forces we name capillarity, cohesion, and gravitation, matter accomplishes the purposes of thought. They are but manifestations of the power of mind working through them, to build up the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. They look beyond themselves. They work for higher ends. Thus all the industries we see in nature look to lifting and refining matter, and force high enough to serve the uses of human life. So the industries established on the plane of human life are to elevate man another step in the scale of being. Through sowing and reaping, through grinding and sawing, through spinning and weaving, through buying and selling, through building and furnishing, he is to be carried on in the march of progress.

The history of the physical universe culminates in man, finds its interpreter and its interpretation in him. Never was the thought of him absent from her movements through Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Cambrian ages. In all her awful cosmic emotion to reach order and form, it was the anticipation of man that moved her, for he it is at last that comes of it. So, through all the course of her tumultuous history, nature was pregnant with man. The stars which sang together in the early morning of the world, caught the inspiration which gave melody to their song from the thought of him.

Commerce, if it is to be permanent and healthy and progressive, must fall into line with the purpose nature was put upon its perilous course to subserve. Her countless forms of industry established by the law of supply and demand; her cars, rushing hither and thither all round the world; her great steamships on every sea; her great furnaces, whose chimneys lift themselves against the sky, must get their meaning and the reason for their existence from the fact that they are putting in their contribution to the making of a man. Her wheels are to fly, her spindles are to whirl, her paddles are to splash, and her hammers are to ring, making music amid it all, in anticipation of his increasing worth, his growing thought, his enlarging hope. Her countless wheels of industry will be throwing out axes, wagons, plow-stocks, hand-saws, and reapers as they fly; but these will be only so many means used to discipline the precious life committed for a while to her training. What chemical affinity did in lifting the original elements to the mineral kingdom, and what the animal did to lift the plant to the animal kingdom, so the trades and industries of commerce are to do in lifting human life from its individual, unrelated state to its social and fraternal state. The elements of commerce are to be the means to help human character out of human nature. Two kinds of raw material are to be refined. The iron in the mountain is to be turned into razor blades and caligraphs; the reeds in the swamps and the woods in the forests are to be turned into the notes of organ and piano; and in the process of refining these, man is to be disciplined in the use of himself, in the possession of himself, and in the command of himself.

_POWER._

“Excessive devotion to the material is the evil of our epoch; hence a certain sluggishness.

“The great problem is to restore to the human mind something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw the ideal? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers, are its urns.

“The ideal is in Æschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in Shakspere. Throw Æschylus, throw Isaiah, throw Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakspere into the deep soul of the human race.

“Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catulus, Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal, Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, André Chenier, Kant, Schiller—pour all these souls into man.”