sentiment of European society from the seventh century, resting on the principle, doctrine or dogma, I care not what it is called, of common brotherhood with the Lord Christ—that well being was the right of every child of Adam.
The fact is that all these difficulties are really economic. I do not mean that bread and the circus would satisfy all the restless spirits of Europe and America, but if they were within the reach of all, there would be no problems to be solved. What is the meaning of social progress as the best interpreters of the phrase expound it but an effort to secure more points of contact with the earth by enlarging the social environment? That, in a nutshell, is the story of every social struggle from the earliest recorded time. It is immaterial whether the pressure sprang from the operation of class privileges or trade privileges, or monopolies of natural agents, or the excessive growth of population with respect to the land, or in other words, whether it was due to advantages founded in violence, or policy, or law, every difficulty since Hesiod's soul was wrung with the evil of the "later days" upon which he had fallen, resulted from the undue advantages possessed by a small number in the state. It is simply an arbitrary changing of the meaning of words to say such difficulties are other than economic.
The general features of social struggle in the societies of different times are the same. There is evidence of dissatisfaction in Hesiod writing eight centuries before our Lord, which has its echo in the latest pessimism. The time is out of joint, is a cry that has gone out from tired and finely-touched spirits thinking of the evils around them in every age we know of and must have expressed itself in times of which we have no record, but I cannot fancy the sound going up from the heavy-burdened heart of that last anthropoid which, as we are told, turned his "sad, dumb eyes" to heaven and became a man. I take the poets of antiquity as witnesses for facts of society whether in relations of courtesy, or of duty, of friendship or emnity, whether in the picturing of private life or public solemnity, or in the expression of orderly life in customs, laws, police, and I find that I can con-
