THE OPPRESSION OF INFANTS.

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What do we say to this picture of life now? Whom do we blame for it as we look back upon the past? Were the parents of these infants to blame, or their employers? The two reformers who inspected and exposed the evil, cast no blame on either. Robert Owen never indulged in personal abuse. He wrote to the Earl of Liverpool, It would be clearly unjust to blame manufacturers for practices with which they have been familiar from childhood, or to suppose that they have less humanity than any other class of men." Instead of blaming, he strained every nerve to bring about an alteration in the system. He wrote and spoke and agitated for protection of children by the law, and for compulsory education; and he pointed out and demonstrated all the evils that arise from competition left unshackled by the law, and absolutely free to regulate itself at any cost of human life and health and happiness.

In four years' time the first point he had aimed at was secured; public opinion reached his standpoint, and the oppression of infants was put down by statute. His second point was gained in 1870.* And ever since his noble and unselfish life was lived, minds have been here and there awakening to his third point, viz. the grave and sad drawbacks attached to free competition. Robert Owen proved that if all the branches of the cotton, woollen, flax, and silk manufactures were included, the machine-saved labour in producing English textile fabrics exceeded, in the year 1816, the work which two hundred million of operatives could have turned out previous to the year 1760.† The world was richer by all this enormous producing powera power surely sent down from Heaven, he thought, to assist man in his arduous toil, and set him free from the old curse, that in the sweat of brow alone should he eat bread. But what had actually resulted? No leisure from the toil-no freedom from the curse! Throughout the old world the new, senseless, dull machinery competed with the living sons of toil! A contest, Robert Owen says, goes on "between wood and iron on the one hand, and human thews and sinews on the other; a dreadful contest at which humanity shudders, and reason turns, astonished, away." His reason grappled with the problem, Why does this rapid growth of wealth enrich the few, and leave the many in their misery? Nay, more than that, it presses down to deeper depths of poverty and degradation. *The Government Bill passed for National Education. "Threading my Way," p. 215. Ibid., p. 218.

Are there no means, he asked, by which mankind can work together for the benefit of all, and as the world grows richer, every son of toil be elevated and made happy? He turned to Political Economy to aid him in the search for a true remedy. Its panacea was to lower the taxes, and his common sense rejected that as futile. Himself a manufacturer, he had every opportunity of studying the question. He was in sympathy alike with masters and their men; and, after years of keen inquiry and ardent devotion to the cause, the method he accepted and believed in as the only remedy was a form of Socialism. Free from all personal greed of wealth, and filled with noble wishes for the happiness of man, he tried to give the world a brave example of his method, and embarked his fortune in a bold experiment, which proved a failure. It is not my purpose to enter into any description of the simple communistic settlement of "New Harmony," or to try to discover all the causes of its failure. With Socialism as a remedy I have nothing to do at present. My object is to show how vast and real are the grievances, evils, and miseries on which the argument for Socialism is based, and to reiterate the statement made by Mr. Mill in 1869, that the fundamental questions involved in Socialism, viz. what relates to property and to the best methods of production and distribution of wealth, have sooner or later to be thoroughly investigated.

As regards Socialism itself, Mr. Mill's opinion was, that in some distant future time communistic production might possibly be found a method well adapted to the wants and nature of mankind, but that it would require a high standard of moral and intellectual education; and the passage to that moral and intellectual state must necessarily be slow. Meanwhile, the sorrows of our labouring class that vexed the righteous soul of Robert Owen remain just as before. The problem is unsolved on which he spent his life and wrecked his fortune. We have all the evils that he deplored amongst us still. We have an overwhelming mass of fellow-creatures toiling to the utmost of their strength, tied hand and foot by poverty, and often weighted by a sense of heavy dull despair, in spite of an intervening half-century that has been full of national prosperity and energy of life; in spite of all that science does to lighten manual work; in spite of intellectual power which pushes education to the front; in spite of wide benevolence and boundless human sympathy, ready, if only it were possible, to embrace mankind at large, and give enduring happiness to

POVERTY AND CIVILIZATION.

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all. Recourse to poor-laws has resulted in a failure quite as great as Robert Owen's remedy of Socialism, and individual efforts to ameliorate the condition of the poor have accomplished almost nothing.

In Robert Owen's day the evil was confined to wealthy Britain; now it has extended to that new world, which, with its vast stretch of rich untrodden soil, formed the sheet-anchor of our old world's hopes.

Mr. Henry George's picture of poverty dogging the footsteps of progress in America I need only refer to. Its truth has been frankly acknowledged; and Professor Goldwin Smith speaks in a similar strain. "It is a melancholy fact," he says, "that everywhere in America we are looking forward to the necessity of a public provision for the poor." Nor does he think that general education will mend the matter. On the contrary, he warns the public that "there will in time be an educated proletariat of a very miserable and perhaps dangerous kind; for "nothing can be more wretched and explosive than destitution, with the social humiliation which attends it, in men whose sensibilities have been quickened, and whose ambition has been aroused."

This great problem of poverty in the midst of wealth-and observe, it is a poverty which mars the happiness of the rich, as well as the poor-demands solution. It is forcing itself upon public attention, both in the old world and the new. There is no escape from it; sooner or later this problem must be thoroughly examined by educated reason, grappled with, and solved by the exercise of a cold calculation.

Our civilization moves rapidly; but in what direction it will continuously move is by no means certain. We have reached a stage of civilization in which are to be found "elaborate arts, abstruse knowledge, complex institutions; and these are results of gradual development from an earlier, simpler, and ruder state of life," but the stage is not one of satisfactory life or general happiness.

Nevertheless, to bemoan the past is to betray an illogical mind, or an uncomprehensive state of sentiment or feeling. You or I, my reader, may be moving downwards in the social scale through press of circumstance. It may be true for us to say, that our grandparents had such good old times of ease and comfort, as make our days of mortifying life, of toil and worry and anxiety most painful by the contrast; but these days were full of misery for many. Every age has had its

favoured few, surrounded by its struggling, suffering many. No age can be worthy of the name of good, until the happiness of all human beings becoming the aim and object of each, through combination in well-sustained and well-directed effort, the goal of a state of universal well-being, is steadily approached.

In reference to this future golden age, one vital and certain point is this a high moral standard of adult conduct in industrial and social life, with a high standard of education for the young, form its all-essential, absolutely necessary conditions. Therefore, the smallest advance made by us in the elevation of general and individual morals, is a sure step upon the path that leads to that distant goal.

CHAPTER IV.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORALS.

"There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare."-GEORGE Eliot.

I MUST remind my reader that what we all desire and vaguely seek is happiness, although many of us are unconscious of the fact; and to others who at least suspect it in themselves, it appears meanly selfish; they therefore try to disguise and cover up the truth. But such is human nature; it craves the satisfaction of its whole being, and if the whole being is noble and dignified, its satisfaction cannot be other than an adequate aim.

Were conditions necessarily such that each individual had to live an isolated solitary life, and satisfaction meant the free and spontaneous exercise of all the lower faculties of his animal nature only if to sleep, to eat, to laugh, comprised man's whole happiness-then we who stand upon a wholly different platform, would judge by heart and mind that the game was not worth the candle.

But the actual fact is far otherwise. Man is a social being, demanding for his happiness an infinite variety of tender human bonds. He is linked to his fellow-creatures round and round, not by outward iron chains forged on the anvil of hard necessity alone, but by silken cords of inward sympathy and feeling. If in his keen desire for happiness he overlooks, or selfishly forgets these cords, what happens? Inevitably thisjarring and inward discord arise; the man has done violence to his own nature, and has missed the path that leads to satis