The influences which, wherever there is personal relation between master and slave, slip in to modify chattel slavery, and to prevent the master from exerting to its fullest extent his power over the slave, also showed themselves in the ruder forms of serfdom that characterized the earlier periods of European development, and aided by religion, and, perhaps, as in chattel slavery, by the more enlightened but still selfish interests of the lord, and hardening into custom, universally fixed a limit to what the owner of the land could extort from the serf or peasant, so that the competition of men without means of existence bidding against each other for access to the means of existence was nowhere suffered to go to its full length and exert its full power of deprivation and degradation. The helots of Greece, the metayers of Italy, the serfs of Russia and Poland, the peasants of feudal Europe, rendered to their landlords a fixed proportion either of their produce or their labor, and were not generally squeezed past that point. But the influences which thus stepped in to modify the extortive power of land ownership, and which may still be seen on English estates where the landlord and his family deem it their duty to send medicines and comforts to the sick and infirm, and to look after the well-being of their cottagers, just as the Southern planter was accustomed to look after his negroes, are lost in the more refined and less obvious form which serfdom assumes in the more complicated processes of modern production, which separates so widely and by so many intermediate. gradations the individual whose labor is appropriated from him who appropriates it, and makes the relations between the members of the two classes not direct and particular, but indirect and general. In modern society, competition has free play to force from the laborer the very utmost he can give, and with what terrific force it is acting may be seen in the condition of the lowest class in the centres of wealth and industry. That the condition of this lowest class is not yet more general, is to be attributed to the great extent of fertile land which has hitherto been open on this continent, and which has not merely afforded an escape for the increasing population of the older sections of the Union, but has greatly relieved the pressure in Europe in one country, Ireland, the emigration having been so great as actually to reduce the population. This avenue of relief cannot last forever. It is already fast closing up, and as it closes, the pressure must become harder and harder.

It is not without reason that the wise crow in the Ramayana, the crow Bushanda, "who has lived in every part of the universe and knows all events from the beginnings of time," declares that, though contempt of worldly advantages is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keenest pain possible is inflicted by extreme poverty. The poverty to which in advancing civilization great masses of men are condemned, is not the freedom from distraction and temptation which sages have sought and philosophers have praised; it is a degrading and embruting slavery, that cramps the higher nature, dulls the finer feelings, and drives men by its pain to acts which the brutes would refuse. It is into this helpless, hopeless poverty, that crushes manhood and destroys womanhood, that robs even childhood of its innocence and joy, that the working classes are being driven by a force which acts upon them like a resistless and unpitying machine. The Boston collar manufacturer who pays his girls two cents an hour may commiserate their condition, but he, as they, is governed by the law of competition, and cannot pay more and carry on his business, for exchange is not governed by sentiment. And so, through all intermediate gradations, up to those who receive the earnings of labor without return, in the rent of land, it is the inexorable laws of supply and demand, a power with which the individual can no more quarrel or dispute than with the winds and the tides, that seem to press down the lower classes into the slavery of want.

But in reality the cause is that which always has and always must result in slavery - the monopolization by some of what nature has designed for all.

Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain. So long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership of the land from which other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material progress goes on, must grow and deepen!

This and in previous chapters of this book we have traced the process, step by step-is what is going on in the civilized world to-day. Private ownership of land is the nether millstone. Material progress is the upper millstone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.

W YORK LIBRARY

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EDWARD GIBBON.

EDWARD GIBBON, a great English historian, born at Putney, Surrey, April 27, 1737; died in London, Jan. 15, 1794. In 1752 he entered Magdalen College, Oxford. In the summer of 1753 he "privately abjured the heresies of his childhood" before a Roman Catholic priest, and announced the fact to his father in a long letter. The indignant father made public the defection of his son from Protestantism, and he was expelled from the college after a residence of fourteen months.

Gibbon was now sent by his father to Lausanne, in Switzerland, and placed under the charge of M. Pavillard, a Calvinistic minister. His residence at Lausanne lasted five years.

Gibbon returned to England in 1758, and spent the ensuing two years at his father's family seat. About this time Gibbon made his first appearance in print in an "Essai sur l' Étude de la Littérature."

In 1763 Gibbon went again to Switzerland, stopping on the way three months at Paris, where he became acquainted with Diderot, d'Alembert, and other philosophers. He remained at Lausanne for nearly a year, and then proceeded to Italy.

Gibbon returned to his father's house in June, 1765. In 1770 Gibbon put forth anonymously "Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid," being a sharp attack upon Bishop Warburton's "Divine Legation of Moses."

Gibbon's father died, and he settled in London with a considerable, though somewhat encumbered, estate. In the autumn of 1770 he began to labor directly upon the "Decline and Fall," for which he had for several years been storing up materials. In 1774 he was returned to Parliament for the borough of Liskeard. He held the seat for eight years. After this Gibbon went back to Lausanne, where the concluding volumes of the "Decline and Fall" were written. They were published in London on the anniversary of his fifty-first birthday, April 27, 1788. Gibbon remained in England. until July, 1788, when he returned to Lausanne, where he wrote his "Memoirs," which, however, were not published until after his death, six years later. The French Revolution had now broken out; and in the spring of 1793 Gibbon set out for England. had long been suffering from hydrocele. A surgical operation was

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