purses of men wno chose to deal with him or his agents on the stock exchange or to buy the chromos he printed and sold as bonds. In the railway field a number of "Napoleons" have cut a large figure, nearly all of them at the expense of other sinall and great capitalists. In coal, ores, and oil the same speculative spirit has produced like results-a large aggregate of losses of small capitals in exchange gambling. In anthracite coal the "combine" has for the time levied a tax on consumption; but the present writer has not been able to find another case in which speculation has clearly and plainly raided the public; and the reason here is that this kind of coal is easily cornered and converted into a quasi monopoly. But the consumers' side is not herein discussed. If workmen receive less wages than they ought in these anthracite mines the cause is not speculation, but an oversupply of miners. As a rule, the quasi monopolies with speculative attachments pay high wages and get the best quality of service. This is notoriously true of the Standard Oil Company, which is reputed to be the best served corporation in America. It is worth an exclamation point that, with all the talk and printing about "greedy corporations," workmen and workwomen prefer to work for corporations! The fact is worth more than all the canting about greed by people whose greed is probably as keen as that of their neighbors.

"The conflict of capital and labor" is a false, though popular, expression. Capital, as such, has its relations and contracts, not with labor, but with invention and management ; and labor has its relations with management. The half century has developed, under the influence of our amazing progress, a more complex organization of production; but popular language adheres to the simplicity of a former age. Our immense production is made possible by the inventor. The success of industry is wrought out by the manager. The three old partners-labor, capital, and land-depend absolutely on the two new partners. The genius of invention and the services of management have created our industrial world, and they drive all its wheels. Put in their place some committee of saloonbred socialists, and the wheels will cease to revolve. It is true that the laborer meets land, invention, capital, and management welded into one, and is not practically at fault in speaking of them as one, since he must treat with them as one. But many

of the advisers of workmen are in fault because they claim the entire product for labor. Why are they not honest enough to attack the patent laws? Why do they ignore managerial skill? For the simple reason that inventor and manager command the general esteem and that capital is an historical Shylock. But neither the socialist nor his dupes have stopped to reflect that he is claiming for mill hands all the fruits of invention and. management; and they do not seem to know that Shylock must hire out his ducats in an open, competitive market. The outrageous doctrine is that only one kind of laborer is worthy of his hire, and that a cunning theft, which strips the merchant of Venice of all claim to his ships, can be dignified with the name of a just reform by calling Antonio Shylock.

The sound economic view is that the tendencies of our whole system are healthful, and that, if they are directed and maintained by moral education of the whole people, our progress must effect a steady improvement of the moralized toilers. They will work fewer hours, receive an increasing share of the annual product, and continue to furnish in an increasing measure the ability and the capital of the country. For the demoralized part of the toilers there cannot be much hope. Their drink bill of seven hundred millions a year and their saloonized morality fatally handicap them. The political demagogue and "worker," who manages and directs them through the saloon, is their enemy and ours; and his lurid eloquence and frantic advice make trouble and tumult, but cannot produce revolution. The sober toilers are far more numerous, and their alliance with the other sober people will be fully competent to suppress insurrection. Meanwhile, education, religion, and thrift are making capitalists of a vast multitude of laborers. On the other hand, the increase of capital must constantly cheapen it in the hands of industrial ability; and the gain will mean cheaper products, and that will mean chicaper living, and that will mean an increase of real wages. Those who vehemently complain of falling prices do not realize that they are fighting against the stars in their courses, and that this inevitable fall enriches the vast majority of the people and widens the demand for the labor of the millions. That a dollar in wages to-day will buy twice as much as it would in 1875 is a fact of wide-reaching beneficence. If, which may be doubted,

the debtor is under a hardship through this fall in price, this debtor is not a workman dependent upon wages. If the capitalist-debtor is losing, the wage-earner is surely gaining, through the inevitable fall in prices.

Whatever evils may accompany the growth of fortunes through invention and speculation are in the way of removal by means of progressive taxation. We have already begun to levy upon large incomes and to take a share of the dead man's millions. These methods of redistribution are sure to be extended. They are capable of such extension as will remove all the dangers from large accumulations; and the proceeds of such taxation may be so applied as to reduce materially the public burdens now falling upon the poor. But a single large

obstacle lies across this path. That obstacle is the grossness, mendacity, corruption, and thieving of our municipal politics. But whenever our workmen join the ranks of municipal reformers the reform will move swiftly to victory, and the proceeds of taxes upon large fortunes will be so used as directly to benefit all the people. To free streets, light, libraries, schools, and parks may be added free water, free heat, and, perhaps, free homes-all this on the assumption that the very rich are likely to go on owning more than half the wealth of the nation. If the evil of large fortunes is half as great as it is proclaimed to be we shall not be slow in applying the effective cure. The cure is as yet applied hesitatingly and tentatively, only because the extent of the evil is doubted by the sober and thoughtful leaders of the people. Nine tenths of our wealth having been produced in a half century, a large proportion of the producers of it being yet among us, and statistical tables of wealth being largely untrustworthy, it is not strange that sober persons refuse to believe that we have amassed sixty thousand millions in half a century. The large fortunes are grossly overestimated, and half the national wealth may be, like Antonio's, "in supposition."

For some time now the general public has regarded the speculative capitalist with growing suspicion; and this distrust has taken the form of law in restraint of trusts and, more effectively, in decisions of the courts of a distinctly unfriendly nature. The trusts have a "running mate" in the field of labor organization. A trust seeks to obtain a monopoly of some product, as refined

sugar or oil. A new order of labor leaders comes forward with a scheme to gather all workmen into one organization, and thus create a monopoly of labor. During the last year these new monopolists have done much mischief, caused much loss to workmen, created a profound distrust toward themselves and a vague apprehension of calamities they may bring upon us. Judicious people need not fear that a trust will control any necessary product in such a way as to enhance its cost to the consumer, or that any organization of workmen will ever be able to stop all labor at some appointed signal. The labor leader will be less hindered by law and the courts than the speculative capitalist; but this monopolist of labor will encounter a greater obstacle than laws, in human nature itself. Recent strikes have revealed the unwillingness of what may be called the aristocracy of labor-engineers, for example-to risk their fortunes in a crowd composed of the untrained masses of workmen. This is but one of a vast number of restraints on monopoly and of obstacles to the creation of a stupendous army obedient to a single will and in possession of every railroad, boat, mill, and mine. And not the least important group of these restraints is found in the bosoms of nonunion men-who are four fifths, at least, of all workmen-in the feelings and motives which keep them outside of unions. The alert and careful citizen does not propose to have his fortune disposed of in either of two places-the lodge room of a union or the pri vate office of a trust. Whatever temporary victories either kind of monopoly may gain will be dearly paid for in a final and crushing defeat. The progressive conservative is still in the saddle. He is trusted by a vast majority of the people. This kind of leadership makes progress by inches and feet, not by leaps and bounds. But in half a century we have moved a vast distance upward, and we are still on the march. The radical has his uses; his way is the way not to go, and his clamor stirs us up to improve the old roads to material well-being.

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ART. VIII. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

SLOWLY but surely is the human race rising and advancing. It is steadily swinging up into God's sunlight. A great moral revolution is progressing. We believe it will not cease until God's beneficent purposes for humanity shall have been fulfilled. The wicked, usurping prince must be dethroned. The diadem must be removed from the wrong head. The crown unworthily worn must be taken off. The low must be exalted. The high must be abased, until the prophecy is fulfilled, “I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him." And then shall all the kingdoms of this world "become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ: and he shall reign forever and ever."

Of this final consummation the harbingers are abundant. Civil governments are becoming leavened with the principles of righteousness, as they are contained in Christian ethics. In the recent past the sword was the chief, almost the only, solvent of international disputes and difficulties. Arbitration, statesmanship, and diplomacy are the methods now preferred and adopted for adjusting all such differences. A measure, originating in the British Parliament, is at this time nearly ready for submission to the United States government, as the basis of a treaty to be concluded between the British government and ours—a proposition that hereafter all disputes arising between Great Britain and the United States shall be settled. by peaceful negotiations, and never by force of arms. All the leading reforms of the age, social, political, municipal, industrial, and monetary, are being vigorously and persistently pressed. All of these have as their basis and animus the morality of the Gospel. The drink habit and the drink traffic are enlisting the attention and opposition of Christians and philanthropists in many different countries. The World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union has prepared a monster petition, signed or attested by over seven millions of persons, against the liquor traffic, to be presented to all the civil ments of the world. Crimes against society which hitherto have been unnoticed and unpunished are now placed under

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