tions, in order that our plan for the future may not topple over because its base is not sufficiently broad.
Every schoolboy knows that nations apparently have a childhood, a strong youth and a gradual coming of age and decay. In the youthful period, caste and wealth are not prominent. The fighting man of a Saxon horde or a Daniel Boone is respected and self-sufficient. A man is rated as a man. After a tribe has been settled for a hundred years, we find that a few seem to be in the lead, having land, wealth and power, while others seem to be gradually drifting downward in the scale. Finally, a few hundred years later, we find conditions such as exist in Russia, with concentrated wealth, caste and power on one hand and extreme poverty on the other. As John Boyle O'Reilly once said:—
"A small class in every country has taken possession of property and government, and makes laws for its own safety and the security of its plunder, educating the masses, generation after generation into the belief that this condition is the natural order and the law of God. By long training and submission the people everywhere have come to regard the assumption of the rulers and owners as the law of right and common sense, and their own blind instincts, which tell them that all men ought to have a plenteous living on this rich earth, as the promptings of evil and disorder."
If this has been the course of history, are there not lessons to be learned? Is there not some way of keeping history from repeating itself? Is there not some means by which
