HN 64 
 .H27 
 Copy 1 
 

 March 1831. 
 
 
 
 FOUNTAINGROVE LIBRARY. 
 
 
 Vol. I. No. 1. 
 
 SOCIAL SERIES. 
 
 Issued Q«art«rlr. 
 
 Entered at the Santa Rosa Post Office as second-class matter. 
 
 HN 64 
 
 
 
 .H27 
 
 
 
 Copy 1 
 
 
 
 THE 
 
 NEW REPUBLIC 
 
 'ROSPECTS, DANGERS, DUTIES AND SAFETIES 
 
 OF THE TIMES. 
 
 THOMAS LAKE HARRIS 
 
 SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA 
 T. L. Harris, Publisher. 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC 
 
 A DISCOURSE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 PROSPECTS, DANGERS, DUTIES AND SAFETIES 
 OF THE TIMES. 
 
 J 
 
 J 
 
 THOMAS LAKE HARRIS 
 
 FOUNTAINGROVE PRESS 
 
 SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA 
 
 1891 
 
 0"3 
 

 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1891, by 
 
 THOMAS LAKE HAKEIS, 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 

 To my Fellow Servants 
 
 in Social Humanity 
 
 i proffer 
 
 in this Chalice of Sacrament 
 
 the new wine 
 
 of the Father's Kingdom, 
 
DISCOURSE 
 
 " Suifer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: 
 for of such is the kingdom of God." Luke xviii, 16. 
 
 Through God, labor and solidarity ; through liberty, 
 equality and fraternity ; the sons and daughters of the 
 People, children of the Divine Parentage, enter into the 
 sympathies of the Christ, and find the political, social, 
 industrial kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Were there five gentlemen in California, fully devoted to 
 the cause of the Social People, and possessed of the brain, fi- 
 nancial shrewdness, tact, concentrated purpose and reliance 
 on each other, by which the magnates of the Central and 
 Southern Pacific Systems conceived and carried out their 
 enterprise, the State might be re-organised on Social-Nation- 
 al lines at least by the close of the century. This result 
 might be achieved with no more friction and far less of 
 monetary expenditure than was required to span the conti- 
 nent with the iron rail. The same result, in the opinion 
 of social-political savants whose learning and experience 
 command high respect, is attainable under similar condi- 
 tions by the Republic, within a period that should not ex- 
 ceed the life-time of a generation. 
 
 X 
 
/ 
 
 i 
 
 I THE NEW HE PUBLIC. 
 
 "History is Philosophy, teaching by example." The pet- 
 ty shop of Huntington and Hopkins ; the combined capital 
 of less than $50,000. has become what we see to-day. Two 
 hundred and fifty millions of dollars of result arc said to be 
 absorbed into the private wealth- of these five citizens, their 
 heirs, attorneys and other trusted agents and beneficiaries. 
 Governors, senators, congressmen, state legislators, judges 
 of all courts to the highest, together with the vast retinue 
 of subordinate state and federal officials, have been turned 
 out from the shops of these master workmen with a rapidi- 
 ty and ease comparable to the facility with which the tin- 
 smith supplies the housewives with their kettles and pans. 
 
 It is the ruler of the steering gear who turns and holds 
 the ship to her course. It is the able and united minority 
 that controls the movement and forms or transforms the 
 environment of the Nation. 
 
 An eminent Politician of New York, whose residence at the 
 time was the most aristocratic mansion on fifth avenue — that 
 too a fruit of his adroit practice of Democracy — remarked. " I 
 went some years ago to Trenton for the fourth of July cele- 
 bration. Invited to a seat in the barouche occupied by the 
 dignitaries who held the place of honor in the procession, 
 
 one of them smilingly said, on my entrance, 'Mr. , allow 
 
 me to introduce ; you are now in the carriage with the 
 Democratic Party of New Jersey.' " It is now a fact of his- 
 tory that the trio thus named w r ere for years, before and 
 after, the practical rulers of that Commonwealth ; the foun- 
 tain of its law and the bestowers of its franchises and offices. 
 
 Supreme tact, adequate jDolitical knowledge, the key of 
 the position and absolute confidence in each other were all- 
 sufficient to the end. Three citizens, Messrs. Weed, Seward 
 and Greeley, after the same fashion somewhat modified, were 
 the Whig Party in New York, till the copartnership was dis- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. O 
 
 solved by the withdrawal of the junior partner. — It was an 
 American enlargement and improvement of "Quirk, Gam- 
 mon and Snap." 
 
 A rising parson, whose name should not be mentioned, 
 as long ago as the forties, once went for a long day's drive 
 with one of the "insiders of the insiders ;" a member of the 
 Democratic State Committee. In a confidential talk the 
 young levite drew from the astute Achitophel the working 
 method and tactics of the organization. These structures 
 of Party and victories of spoil are no more a mystery or a 
 difficulty to the initiated than is the use of the type-writer 
 to one who has a knowledge of the keys. 
 
 Government, if successful and durable, is from a small 
 center to a great circumference. Adapt the centrality to 
 the environment and the huge result follows as a matter of 
 course. It was an axiom, of the Jesuits during the era of 
 religious intolerance, that "if ever persecution failed to sup- 
 press heresy, it was because Persecution did not persecute 
 enough." If ever a Political Party fails, it is from the lack 
 of persistent purpose, courage and unity in its nucleus ; 
 combined with the inability to hold a grip on the wheel of 
 environment and to direct its motion, so that it shall be 
 impelled by the force of evolution, active through the needs 
 of the masses and the spirit of the time. 
 
 First of all must be, among the units of the nucleus, in- 
 violable confidence in each other : firm trust, full honor. 
 The vast Corporation that includes the Southern and Cen- 
 tral Pacific Systems was invulnerable so long as its five 
 originators all lived and maintained relations of personal 
 and mutual fellowship and trust. Since then it is a great 
 whale pursued by sword-fish : it flounders in a sea that be- 
 gins to redden from its blood. 
 
4 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 The Power within evolution operates to the birth and 
 dominance of events by a law which may be designated as 
 "the law of fitnesses in association." An illustration of 
 this may be drawn from that conclave at Sacramento. 
 There was Stanford, genial, warm-hearted, winning and 
 holding men by personal presence ; commanding confidence, 
 constitutionally en rapport with the class from which are 
 drawn judges, law-makers, rulers of the state ; a man with 
 a rich blending of ideal and practical qualities ; with a vi- 
 sion opening to possibilities of the anearing future ; with a 
 faculty of inspiring respect for his conclusions, and with a 
 sure method of organising successes for his processes. 
 There was Hopkins ; calm, cold-blooded, persistent as a 
 sleuth-hound on the hunt ; his greed omnivorous, but gov- 
 erned and guided by a prudence, and structured in a cal- 
 culation that was accurate as mathematics. There was 
 Huntington ; an embryo great man of a narrow specialty ; 
 with an instinctive grasp at large results ; without an atom 
 of the ideal sense ; with a brain set in matter as an iron 
 bar spiked in a granite wall ; but with a tenacity for hold- 
 ing a scheme into its working plan and for enlarging on the 
 plan, that made him a combination at once of engineer, 
 engine, coal, fire and motive power. There was Crocker 
 primus ; eminently a builder ; at once an organiser of con- 
 struction and its thoroughly capable, prudent and indefat- 
 igable executive. There was Crocker secundus; at once 
 evangelically pious, eloquent, skilled in the law and hold- 
 ing to gain with entire singleness of heart. Now the Force 
 behind evolution knit these men together : it was an asso- 
 ciation by fitnesses. 
 
 " There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 
 Rough hew them as we will." 
 
T ll E SfEW REPUBLIC. 5 
 
 Stanford saw the gain and the glory ; his associates eyed 
 the gain pure and simple. The Power in evolution behind 
 the group beheld these men, if combined, as an organised 
 form of service, fitted to prosecute one work in the chain 
 of infinite processes. So the evolution fitted into them ; 
 fought through them for the vast material wealth that is 
 visible to-day. 
 
 They were filled with confidence in the success of that 
 work : hence they inspired confidence in the public, so far 
 as to secure legislation in its favor with immense loans 
 and subsidies. Comparatively insignificant separately, as 
 private individuals ; the combination made one compact, 
 gigantic Character. They built stronger, ampler and wiser 
 than they foresaw or realised. The five pawns were con- 
 solidated to fashion a master-piece upon the chess-board of 
 Destiny. 
 
 Such as this is the inner formation and history of all 
 great works that have altered the aspect of the world and 
 changed or re-organised the institutions that are the envi- 
 ronments of the Peoples. This is the Lesson of the Hour, 
 to be pondered over by the brainy and hearted men who 
 are now being drawn by the sympathy of social humanity 
 to a vital and intelligent interest in the National cause. 
 
 The Press in large degree conceals it ; the Pulpit almost 
 ignores it ; yet the People itself — minus the petty classes 
 that subsist by the exploitage of the industries — is throbb- 
 ing, panting, heaving under the consciousness of an infinite 
 suppression; under thesense of vast inrpending calamity; yet 
 in the strange quivering tingle of a vague but luminous and 
 prophetic hope. The eagerness with which Mr. Bellamy's 
 shrewdly phrased and skilfully adapted romance was seized 
 
6 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 upon ; the avidity with which men and women fed upon 
 its luscious promise ; the flash of resultant Nationalism, 
 leaping up all over the land from fifty thousand fire- 
 sides, — this is but one and the most obvious of many con- 
 current events, all of which go far to prove that Columbia 
 herself, the myriad-bosomed, myriad-bearing Woman Peo- 
 ple, is pregnant and heavy for a new and thrice auspicious 
 birth of Time. 
 
 But evolution has hitherto operated, since the era of re- 
 corded human history, in a law of alternatives. Steam is 
 generated in a boiler : the alternative is, — Shall the steam, 
 rightly governed, be our servant, fulfilling its humane ser- 
 vice ; or, shall it be our master, and rush to explosion with 
 wreckage and death ? 
 
 So again, as Mr. Bellamy has aptly said, "Now we are on 
 the hinge of destiny." That the Competitive System, merg- 
 ing into Capitalistic Combination, by its inherent law whirls 
 rapidly on to the explosion of its forces, threatening in that 
 explosion national chaos, industrial break and political anar- 
 chy, every intelligent student is aware. It is not now "after 
 me the delude." It is now "on me the deluge.'' We stand 
 on the edge of the low, submerging shore ; Ave are confront- 
 ed by the vast, towering, omnipotent, incoming water-wall. 
 
 The wisdom of the disorganised masses, if it ever is a wis- 
 dom, is a wisdom after the event. The good citizens of Paris 
 were wise, after Danton, the very pillar of their safety and 
 bulwark of their liberty, had been butchered on the guillo- 
 tine ; but they were not wise before the event : they looked 
 on, dazed and stivpified, with a dumb animal pity, and saw 
 him led to death by a gang of scoundrels temporarily in lo- 
 cal power : they did not lift a hand or make a murmur. 
 In his fall Freedom for the time was baffled : the rising 
 light was thrust back on the dial of the ages. 
 
 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. / 
 
 Now Social Nationalism is to the United States all 
 and more than was embodied in Danton and the Dan- 
 tonists for the French nation. The Movement exists already 
 in avast diffused atmosphere of public sentiment, passionate 
 hope, deathless divine longing ; pulsing, firing, vibrating in 
 and through the People's common breast. 
 
 Social Nationalism, as a vital and diffusive ether of asso- 
 ciation and environment enveloping and quickening the 
 many, waits thus in them to become organised, concreted, 
 institutional association and environment. In the advanc- 
 ed and energetic few it has passed on to the more organic 
 and active stage : not alone do they feel the flow and vibrate 
 to the passion of the sentiment : they, to a considerable ex- 
 tent, comprehend it in the logic of pure reason, by the 
 principle of its growth and by the form and law of its 
 intelligence. 
 
 If therefore Social Nationalism — which is, so far as it has 
 grown, the saving power in our evolution — is to become 
 embodied and established for the next stage as the Organ- 
 isation of Public Safety, the small minority of fully deter- 
 mined, balanced, practical, socially educated men and women, 
 who know the ground and realise the situation, must follow 
 the impulse of the law of the association of fitnesses and 
 draw together. They who are wise before the event must 
 conform by action to the logical demands of the time. 
 
 But it is not yet clear day : these are the spectral moments 
 that precede the dawn. At best we are but partially awak- 
 ened out of the long slumber and death-dream, in which 
 the torpid mankind holds its atomised, incoherent and ego- 
 istic individualism. It is hard to resist the siren voices 
 that call for a little more folding of the hands in sleep. 
 Yet even now the golden moments, the brief moments that 
 remain for the Organisation of Safety, are slipping past, 
 
8 T II E N E W R E P UBLIC. 
 
 never to return. 
 
 The transition-births of Publie Freedom in the past have 
 been effected by so far as the Hour brought forth the men. 
 The Hour '76 found Jefferson, Adams, Franklin. The Hour 
 '93 found Danton, Fabre D'Eglantine, Carnot. The Hour 
 '45 found Garrison, Parker, Phillips. The Hour '61 found 
 Lincoln, Sumner, Stanton. — AVhere shall '91 find her sages 
 of the council, her orators of field and platform, her expo- 
 nents of the press, her organisers of finance, her volunteers 
 of the forlorn hope ? 
 
 The coming Event, — the transition from egoised indivi- 
 dualism to humanised collectivity, — is more than evolutions 
 of the past, because it involves in its body and fulfils in its 
 expansion the divine result whereto all steps and stages of 
 the previous march of Man have led. This hope and pro- 
 mise of the Supreme Benificence can only be received, 
 incorporated and made fulfilment by so much as men, 
 who love it, who know it, who trust in it, shall devote their 
 full being to its demands This and nothing less will call 
 forth that fire of courage and breadth and prudence of wis- 
 dom, and vigor of persistence and heartiness of association 
 and mutuality of confidence, that shall lead Evolution by 
 Living Force to be embodied in their structures, and to 
 make their movement irresistible. 
 
 Such men, such women, must and will be found, adequate 
 to the emergencies and fitting into the necessities of the 
 time. From the five to the fifty, the five hundred, the five 
 thousand, the Hour that is upon us summons the children 
 and servants of her Destiny. She attracts to their nucleating 
 form the vital cell-germs of the Deathless Social People 
 that shall be. — " Ca Ira" : God is with us and within us! 
 
THE NEW TIE PUB LIC. 9 
 
 II. 
 
 Thus far the problem of Social-National niicleation has 
 been considered from one factor of its equation : this by it- 
 self is not truth in full circle, though it may indicate its he- 
 misphere. Another law in evolution is that of association 
 by fitnesses of sociality. It is upon this that we must rely 
 for the structure of the heroic nuclei, that are to serve for 
 the birth of the Peoples to a truly socialised humanity. 
 
 The Socialisation of the People is the work of Titans, and 
 they must rise from the breadth and firmness of the com- 
 mon soil: men matriculated in the university of Labor ; men 
 in whom the Nation stands organised for constitution. A 
 gigantic work, the effort of supreme evolution, it calls for 
 gigantic men. 
 
 Now it is asserted that "Collectivism will destroy indi- 
 viduality and result in a generation of common-place imbe- 
 cilities." So the spread of the bulb may be said to destroy 
 the bulb ; but the bulb that disappears in the growth pro- 
 cess is not destroyed ; it is diffused to a new birth in the 
 breathing, leafy stalk and its crown of constellated flowers. 
 So the raw, primitive nature-wealth of the egoised indivi- 
 dual, as he becomes non-egoised, lives to its last value in 
 the humanised enlargement of the abundant social man. 
 
 The massive man — egoised individualist — always by his 
 growth becomes the anarch, the devourer, the destroyer: 
 the more of him the worse for mankind. He is the spread- 
 ing tree, whose roots suck up and absorb the fertilities of 
 the area measured by its shadow. It is the prospective 
 glory of Collectivity that it will put an end to the generations 
 of the anakim. 
 
 Man is only in his real manhood as he is socialised 
 through all his powers : the more of him the more of hu- 
 
10 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 mane worthfulness in his fellow men : his being becomes 
 the household work-room of organising Deity. 
 
 But evolution through the social passion and its life of 
 humane service, transmutes the individuality from nature- 
 hood into humanhood. It transfigures the private self from 
 the low, base, serpentine thing, crawling on its belly and 
 feeding upon dust, to the majestic creature of God; its 
 attitude upright ; its radiation beauty ; its movement har- 
 mony ; its aspect benignant, intelligent, divine. The mis- 
 sion of Collectivity is "not to destroy but to fulfil." 
 
 The strong men of the world, who effect immense results 
 by means of the associative law, combine upon the princi- 
 ple of a mutual service in the common egoism. "There is 
 honor," of its base sort, " among thieves." This is the asso- 
 ciation of wolves, who hunt in packs because singly they are 
 unable to overcome their larger prey. This is the association 
 of pirates, who choose their officers, select their crew and are 
 amenable to a common discipline, because on this depends 
 the triumph of the black flag and the capture of the peace- 
 ful merchantman : this is the association of the trusts and 
 syndicates. Individual greed, in men of strong organism 
 and trained intelligence, evolves to associative form and 
 force by the fitnesses of concurrent rapacities. 
 
 We see this law and form of association exemplified in 
 such organisations as the old Tammany Ring, of which 
 Win. H. Tweed was the pivotal and master spirit. Genet 
 
 the courtly gentleman ; H the brilliant and versatile man 
 
 of letters ; Conolly the genial, hearty Irish romah catholic 
 squire ; Barnard, with the judicial cunning and rapacity of 
 Jeffries; Watson, with the affable, prudent air and man- 
 ner of New England ; Tweed the arch-boss, coarse, vulgar, 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC, 11 
 
 insolent, brazen-faced, with the bull-dog's conscience and 
 tenacity of grip ; a mass of concreted acuteness of fraud 
 embodied in a corporeity of vulgar ostentation ; — these 
 serve as indices of the average. But, wound into the cen- 
 tral nucleus of never more than ten or a dozen, was a group 
 of a hundred, enlarging to hundreds in its circumference; 
 the master-adepts of a bad school ; inheriting traditions 
 from the lips of its founder, Aaron Burr, and grown to 
 consummate skill in the arts of abstraction, division, con- 
 cealment and silence. 
 
 All were antagonised by mutual disgusts, and yet all 
 united by that fearful law, of fellowship by fitnesses of rapa- 
 cities. They loathed each other ; they despised each other ; 
 they feared each other. Each knew every one of his asso- 
 ciates to be a villain ; but they eulogised each other ; they 
 stood by each other through thick and thin ; they maintain- 
 ed in their intercourse the fiction of a jovial good fellowship ; 
 they confided mutually in the secrets of vast schemes of 
 public plunder ; they shared the booty fairly according to 
 the sense of corporate honesty that obtains among cut- 
 purses. For the time they were borne triumphantly on 
 the swelling bosom of the Democracy of the State. 
 
 This is but the meagre outline of ten thousand other 
 nuclei, large and small, political, financial; — Oil rings, 
 Sugar rings, Lumber rings, Railroad and TelOgraph rings, 
 "their name is Legion, for they are many," — that have 
 grown up since and that flourish now. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that the Cleveland or Hill nuclei 
 in the Democratic, or the Blaine or Allison nuclei in the 
 Republican party, or even the great nodules of trusts and 
 syndicates, represented by men of the high standing of the 
 Lorillards, the Pullmans, the Vanderbilts etc, are implicat- 
 ed in technical or legal felonies. Gentlemen of irreproach- 
 
12 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 able private morals occupy places of eminence in many, if 
 not in all. None are implicated in the criticism, excepting 
 thus far, that these are associations founded and formulated 
 in the same law ; men drawn together by the attraction of 
 passionate pursuits, which are not for the divine well-being 
 and humane association of the People ; which are not in 
 any sense in, of or for the People ; which are in the most vital 
 sense hostile to the objects for which the People exists ; — -in 
 fine, working toward the subversion and destruction of the 
 system of equal laws and equal rights to all, which was the 
 object sought in the constitution of the Republic. . 
 
 It is easy for egoised men of a congenial fitness, and pur- 
 pose to associate thus, because there is no divinity in the 
 association ; because each finds in it a pedestal for the ele- 
 vation of his individual self-interest ; because that private 
 self-interest and instinct of self-preservation and self-ad- 
 vancement forces it upon them. 
 
 Nowthe difficulties in the way of centric and concentric nu- 
 cleation among Social Nationalists are found just here. This 
 movement being in the line of the direct divine tendency, it 
 would therefore attract men to nucleate,— not by the binding 
 of self-love to self-love in the compulsions of a mutual self- 
 greed and self-interest ; but just oppositely, by the attractions 
 of the divine social passions in each, flowing into each other 
 and making, so to say, a marriage of mutual and reciprocative 
 qualities. What said the Arch-Socialist of Nazareth, speak- 
 ing as the organ of the Living Power in evolution ? " Where 
 two or three are gathered together in my name I am with 
 them : abide in me and I in you, so shall ye bring forth fruit." 
 
 Social Nationalism, as the divine opening in man for the 
 evolution of the Creative end, a divinely socialised humanity, 
 must absolutely attract to nucleation, not by the natural 
 law of the fitnesses of rapacities, but by its own law of the 
 
THE XEW REPUBLIC. 13 
 
 attraction of un-rapacities, of anti-rapacities ; by the fire and 
 urgency of the social passion, as opposed to the heat and 
 insistence of the unsocial, of the anti-social. 
 
 It would draw men toward the centre of the movement 
 by the attraction and gravitation of their liberated and 
 energetic social worths ; draw them to the brain of the move- 
 ment, because they are in the brain of its divine thought ; to 
 the heart of the movement, because they are filled and fired 
 with the loverly passion of its service ; to the mailed right 
 arm and decisive hand of the movement, because their ener- 
 gies are becoming executive and forcible for its lead and sway . 
 
 It would draw men, in fine, because they have died out 
 of the range of the private motive passions, which energise 
 for personal dominion and aggrandisement, and are being 
 born again into the range of the public and social passions, 
 which lead them, for Humanity's sake, into a self-effacement ; 
 a yielding up of the individual aim and end into the aim 
 and end of the evolution which seeks to lead to birth an 
 organic Social People. 
 
 Now here is no place for half-way men, those of divided 
 interests, of opposing motives, of contending or halting pur- 
 poses ; no room for waywardness, for doubt or lingerings 
 or trepidations, "No man can serve two masters : " no two 
 or more men can nucleate in the law of a divine social nu- 
 cleation, excepting in so far as each is to a degree self-effaced 
 and so born again from self-service into the service of the 
 evolutionary organic social Man. 
 
 The workers have to find each other on this principle, 
 .and to recognise each other, so to say, "by the Master's 
 word, spoken foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, 
 hand to grip and mouth to ear." In fine, they must meet, 
 touch and recognise each other on that higher ground of 
 self-effacing, socialising personality and experience, which 
 
14 tin-; new retuIilic . 
 
 i s analogous, on a different plane, to the mutual interflow 
 and thrill by which kindred spirits of opposite sexes recog- 
 nise their mutual fitness, relationship and interdependence. 
 
 Old secret, known to Hebrew bards and prophets ; to 
 seers, saints and sages of India and Greece ; imparted by 
 the Nazarene Master to the beloved with whom he clasp- 
 ed hands and broke bread ; known to Christian apostles 
 and martyrs ; known to the heroic souls who fed with their 
 lives the failing oil in the lamp of humanity during the 
 cold, dark middle ages ; known since ; known now, if sought 
 for in the utter devotion and consecration of the life ; — this 
 must be found, this must be realised ; else the incipient Na- 
 tionalism of to-day, however brilliant may be its tempo- 
 rary leafage and flowerage, will rot down, fruitless. 
 
 Such failure of result is not inevitable. The sore expe- 
 riences of the past year have possibly taught the warm- 
 hearted and earnest men and women who constitute the 
 vital and effective body of Social Workers on the Pacific 
 coast, that Social Nationalisation cannot prosper as a move- 
 ment of superficiality. It begins to be seen, that it takes 
 hold of the root principles in our real human nature ; that 
 it is a divine growth ascending in and germinating through 
 human nature, and that from these most vital principles it 
 must ripen to fruitage, if it is to bear fruit at all. 
 
 It is not going to advance as a fourth of July procession. 
 It is not going to be consolidated after the method or in the 
 law of the extant Political Parties . It is not going to 
 achieve the ends of a mere vast Benefit Club. Bread and the 
 circus for everybody was what the Csesars ensured to the 
 populace of Rome. 
 
 It is going to arise in the dignity, honor and self-sacrifice 
 of socialised, of divinised human nature. It is going in the 
 lines of its advance to carry people out of their dead, stu- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 15 
 
 pined immersion and burial in private self and its belligerent 
 interests, and to bear them on the bosom of its generous 
 wave into the warm passions, the heroic aspirations, the 
 courages and virtues of a true and real humanity. 
 
 Its interests are not to be trifled with, nor its honors 
 smirched, nor its confidences abused, nor its triumph post- 
 poned or bartered, by local cliques or subtle demagogues. 
 It will never be shaped into salons de luxe for the coteries of 
 Mrs. Grundy to entertain their scandal parties. It is going to 
 incorporate the elite of manhood, the divine flowerage of 
 womanhood ; to awaken them to a sense of the divinities 
 that thrill within them ; to evolve the repressed nobilities 
 and lovelinesses that strive in their latent potence of hu- 
 manhood, and to lead them forth, full armed, full illumined, 
 into beatific and energised association. 
 
 Neither is it to be aristocratic, in any sense by which that 
 term is used in the parlance of the time. It is to fuse its 
 might and worthiness into the Common People ; leading them 
 into a common faith, a common hope, a common energy, 
 for the common uprise. It will be only accessible — by the 
 inexorable law of divinity in fitnesses — to those who are in 
 heartful sympathy and alliance with its central principle of 
 Common Good. Its hand must lift every man above his ac- 
 cidents and its bosom upbear every woman from her 
 misfortunes. 
 
 Never yet, since the birth of History, has there ever been 
 on Earth a genuinely human public opinion. On the other 
 hand, public opinion as the times have known it, has been 
 dominated by the inhuman pharisaic sentiment, clad with 
 hypocrisies ; fed to felonies ; armed and exercised in mur- 
 ders and generated in odious and self-exalted lusts. 
 
 There is to be — it is rising now — a public opinion, born 
 out of the generous-hearted considerateness of our common 
 
16 
 
 THE NEW REPUBLIC 
 
 and infinite humanhood. We are to rely on this, infilled 
 and organised in the divineness and potence of the social 
 passion, as the motive power, as the vast, revolving, irresist- 
 ible wheel, that shall effect the revolution, the evolution, 
 the re-creation of laws, customs and institutions. 
 
 It is but childish folly to under-estimate the holding-and 
 aggressive power of Capitalised Egoism. No rich man of' 
 the type is ever satisfied, whatever may be the bulk of his 
 possessions ; for the egoistic passion in its very essence is 
 insatiable : it shapes in the man who is ruled by it an open 
 grave, yawning ever for its spoil. Mr. John A. Rockafeller, 
 when thirty years ago he enjoyed the salary of a poor clerk, 
 probably looked up to $100,000. as a vast sum, which to pos- 
 sess would fill the measure of his content. Well, he gain- 
 ed — pious communicant as he was — the $100,000. He has 
 since urged on the warfare of Standard Oil till the $100,000. 
 has passed the $100,000,000. and is swiftly climbing to the 
 $200^000,000. And is he satisfied ? To-day, with one hand, 
 he clutches the Senate of the United States, and with the 
 other he reaches out to the control of the entire system of 
 public traffic and inter-communication from the Atlantic to 
 the Pacific. 
 
 200,000 men now are the legal owners of more than half 
 of all the properties and resources of this nation of more 
 than 60,000,000. Are they satisfied? Never was their grasp, 
 their greed, their eager and remorseless pursuit of every 
 remaining franchise and freedom of the People, as it is at 
 this hour. Capitalised Egoism, by the law and spirit of 
 its nature, can never stop in its inroad whilst any value re- 
 mains to be possessed that it has not already appropriated, 
 unless meanwhile it is mastered and abolished. Yet this is 
 
THE XE W B E P U B L I C ■. 17 
 
 the Power which Social Nationalism has to meet. 
 
 If the cumulative force of Capitalised Egoism extended 
 thus far and no farther, it might possibly be encountered 
 and overborne bv its natural enemies. But the Foe does 
 not live solely in its shielded and solitary magnificence. 
 It sits down by all but a small minority of hearths; it pro- 
 mulgates its treasons against mankind from nearly every 
 fire side. 
 
 How is this? Simply because the average of the People, 
 man and woman, young and old, are born and nurtured in- 
 to the practical creed of the 19th Century. That creed is 
 this : that men are individual, isolated monads, and that 
 their first and last duty, pursuit and interest in life is, with 
 whatever power they possess and facility they enjoy, to 
 acquire and maintain private material possessions ; in com- 
 petition with the neighbor ; irrespective of any misfortune 
 or ruin that may occur to the neighbor, or to the general 
 well-being, as the result of their successes in the competi- 
 tive strife. The prayer of the self-seekers, young and old is, 
 "0 that I might be rich, even as this Rockafeller !" 
 
 Now, till the unhuman appetite for private egoistic wealth 
 is swallowed up and abolished in the passion for the public 
 wealth, the public welfare, this massed Plutocratic Egoism 
 has its moral ally, its mental attorney, its vital support, its 
 religious countenance, everywhere throughout this vast na- 
 tional area of middle-class struggle and proletary anguish 
 and destitution. 
 
 We have to contend, as Social Nationalists, not only with 
 a plutocratic opinion and sentiment, but also with a pluto- 
 cratic passion that diffuses its virus through the flesh and 
 blood of the People ; that feeds and strengthens in their 
 food, that rests and re-energises in their repose, that whirls 
 their thought from the logic of its reason to the notions of 
 3 
 
1 8 T II E X E W 1 1 E PUliL I C . 
 
 the unreason ; that organises feeling, desire, motive, effort, 
 life itself, in the cruel and constrictive lines of bitter and 
 relentless neighborhood war. The great body of the Public 
 si augers mentally and morally; dazed, hypnotised, intoxi- 
 cated, deluded, under the operation of this deadly spell. 
 
 So the Nation maunders on ; sick in its religion ; impo- 
 tent and improvident in its philanthropies ; lost to the 
 consciousness of its own vital and inseparable humanhood, 
 and of its most urgent and extreme necessities ; feeding the 
 flower of its youth, exploiting the ripe worth of its man- 
 hood, to the service of a foreign and malign oppression. 
 It is not only that the People is defrauded of its bread ; it 
 is poisoned almost to its core. Only the sweetest and most 
 humanely heroic constitutions are enabled to hold a remains 
 of the social will and consciousness ; overswept as they are, 
 deluged as they are continually, by the floods of malignant 
 and profane delusions. 
 
 It is true that the Competitive System is inherently mor- 
 tal ; by its own inexorable law the hour of supreme triumph 
 must^also be the hour of ruin. It is true also that this ruin 
 — unless a System of Public Safety is found ready for its 
 place — will be fulfilled in the crash and explosion of all civ- 
 il institutions. But it is also true that such wreckage and 
 obliteration of moral and material results would still leave 
 the Plutocratic Passion itself intact; organised in the pri- 
 vate self of the multitude; entrenched there; defiant there 
 as the master force and ruling instinct of the land. If there 
 istobeno Socialist People evolving to dominion through 
 the visible disaster, Civilisation must pass into a death-agon}', 
 and must rise again — if it ever shall rise — through inco- 
 herent, warlike barbarisms; the woes and inhumanities of 
 unknown ages. 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 19 
 
 [II. 
 
 Evolution advances to its end by a process of ideas. This 
 process leads on by two parallel and inter-related streams, 
 each holding and operating by its own quality to its own 
 differentiated specialty ; passions wed to thoughts and gene- 
 rating forces. Each may be said to have innumerable eyes 
 and arms ; methods, systems, manifold and comprehensive. 
 Now these two currents of evolution have been growing up 
 to their present special prominence from a period dating 
 back to the last quarter of the preceding century. The 
 first stream may be phrased as the inventive, the scien- 
 tific, the mechanical-material. It leads by results to the 
 dominion of man in the productive energies of Nature. It 
 organises steam, it makes a workman of the lightning ; it 
 harnesses the solar forces to planetary service. Last and 
 most significant, it lays hand upon the secrets whereby the 
 etheric forces that entwine in gravitation can be diseiit win- 
 ed and led by rhythmical motion to evolve for human service 
 the power of the powers. 
 
 Man, who was heretofore the servant of these natural lares 
 and genii, has at least begun to command the spells by 
 which the genii shall be his subjects and fellow-workmen. 
 Hence the labor-saving inventions, which, organised in 
 their mechanical structures, are now equivalent to the dai- 
 ly manual labor of millions of men in the United States 
 alone, and which are capable of being increased easily to 
 hundreds of millions : there being no limit but the necessi- 
 ties of mankind. 
 
 Now, more than a thousand years ago Evolution, urging 
 toward result, found a pacific, frugal, industrious and intel- 
 ligent pupil in the receptive reason of the Chinese nation. 
 The tree of industrial invention rose to leaf, blossom and 
 
20 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 fruitage there. All of the sciences, all of the inventions fol- 
 low in a law of series, of sequences. Chemistry was grasped 
 as to the initiative ; printing was discovered ; gunpowder ; 
 the ship-building art led up to the construction of ocean 
 fleets. 
 
 Then came the apprehension of the fact, that labor-saving 
 inventions, largely substituting machine labor for toil of 
 hand, would result in the withdrawal of employment from 
 the masses, dependent on the sale of their lives in manual ser- 
 vice for subsistence; with consequent want; the creation of 
 pauperised hordes; the dissolution and ruin of families; the 
 threatened disturbance of the equilibrium on which de- 
 pends the institutions of public order. 
 
 The government of China, with a firm hand and with 
 no paltering or delay, encountered the apprehended danger. 
 It put an entire stop to the progress of invention ; it arrest- 
 ed the evolution. This benevolent Oriental Herod slew 
 the young child in its cradle. Nevertheless, though the 
 national form and system of China survived, the genius of 
 its gift was excluded; the virility of its intellect was emas- 
 culated; the promise of its social humanity was abolished. 
 Its history from that time became stagnation. 
 
 We are now confronted in America, with the recurrence 
 of the cycle of evolution in science and scientific invention, 
 by the consequences that daunted the governmental autho- 
 rities of the Chinese People. 
 
 There is a second current in the stream of evolution, 
 which, were it to find free and abundant course, would ulti- 
 mate to results in mankind, correspondential to the trium- 
 phant conquests over Nature that ensue in the movement 
 of its kindred flow. China did not win or grasp to the 
 key-note of this dynamic current. It was bound in the 
 superstition of the non-progressive, as applicable to human 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 21 
 
 life. Its new youth was buried in the womb of a dead 
 and sealed Antiquity. Its eyes were held to the pole of the 
 frozen Past : they were not attracted to the fertile bosom 
 and zone of the tropic Future. 
 
 With us it is different : the light by which the sage 
 Franklin saw to flash lightning from the clouds for the 
 scientific evolution of electricity ; that light, transmuted to 
 fiery human heat, generated in twain-bosomed America and 
 France the surer flame that was the illumination of Liberty. 
 The divine potence was enfranchised in the soul and flesh 
 of man. Liberty generated for pregnant end fateful hours 
 to a human atmosphere : men breathed it ; they breathed 
 in it. 
 
 Always before a revolution men feel its presence in the 
 air : always before the vast uprising of a people, it so pal- 
 pitates about them that the common bosom rises to the 
 rhythms of its atmosphere. The fact is indisputable, what- 
 ever may be the scientific or moral interpretation. And the 
 form in which the Liberty of evolution clothes and displays 
 its spirit is inevitably Law. Where Anarchy is welcomed 
 Liberty recedes : where Anarchy thrives Liberty perishes. 
 
 And Liberty means this : first of all, the awakening and 
 disenthralment of those divine attributes ingenerated in 
 man, which constitute the divinity of his manhood, from 
 their bondage of repression. It does not mean the degrada- 
 tion of man to the licence of his low-born animal origin : 
 it means the uprise of the man, through round after round 
 of wise and virtuous social service, till he breasts full to 
 Deity, and finds home again within the precincts and pavil- 
 ions of the God. 
 
 Liberty means the effacement of the barriers that inter- 
 pose between the common man and the achievement of the 
 common destiny. There is no possibility for the achieve- 
 
 4 
 
•J 2 T II E X E w k E P u b Lid. 
 
 ment of the liberty of the individual, excepting as it is 
 found in the pursuance of the service of the law that ensures 
 the common freedom and well-being of the all. 
 
 Leo XIII is bondsman under his papacy : Jay Gould is 
 a serf under his plutocracy : Alexander III is a slave under 
 his imperially. Each is in licence, but neither is in liberty, 
 and neither can be in liberty till his licence perishes. No 
 Opp.ressor is in liberty : all are in licence, and by so much 
 as that licence empowers and authorises them to abridge 
 and repress that liberty of others which exists only in the 
 common right, they are themselves repressed from their 
 own humanity. They drain the better blood from their 
 own veins, when they make their hearts the goblets from 
 which they quaff the life-flow of their fellowmen. 
 
 Licence to make war upon the rights of others, upon the 
 common rights of all, is but the licence to beget Crime and 
 dandle Anarchy upon the knees. Who then are the Anar- 
 chists by pre-eminence ? those w ho uprear their dominance 
 in the suppression and exploitage of man, and hence in the 
 anarchy of human powers. They may not apply the spark 
 to the mine that threatens to explode Society ; but they 
 generate a fluid of vital dynamite that is diffused, that 
 flows in currents throughout the bodily form and corporate 
 atmosphere of Society ; a fluid that is inherently explosive 
 and that explodes in universal conflagration when full and 
 ripe. 
 
 The American Revolution was an evolution of Liberty : 
 but the Mother Goddess, like the awful Isis, was vailed 
 from even the most sage and devoted of her worshipers. 
 None of them — notwithstanding the clause incorporated 
 by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence — seem 
 practically to have conceived that the recognition of the 
 inherent right of man to liberty involved, by logical inipli- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 23 
 
 cation, the doctrine of the common equality as well. 
 
 Indeed, on mere natural grounds, the ground of finites, 
 nothing can be more obvious than the fact, that men front 
 to each other by universal inequalities. The Dantonists of 
 France grasped at the concept of human equality, not so 
 much by a process of conscious reasoning as by a logic of 
 divination. If the Infinite Divine Humanity inhabits and is 
 energetic in man, then it follows that, by this immanence 
 of the Infinite, all are equally grouped, co-ordinated in the 
 laws of that Infinitude, for the evolution through the each 
 to the all and through the all to the each, of the divine so- 
 cial corporeal humanity, which shall bear witness to the en- 
 thronement and beatification of the Supreme Excellence 
 in the social righteousness and holiness of the incorporate 
 manhood and womanhood of the globe. 
 
 Men can only associate and intermingle fully and freely 
 with each other, as they are able to recognise the absolute 
 sense in which they stand by one interdependent life, for 
 one comprehensive function of life, upon one common 
 ground of equality, in God and before God. It was worth 
 all the agonies of the French Revolution, if it shall have 
 brought Equality to its regal prominence and set it forth 
 as a fact to be incorporated in the thought and action of 
 mankind. 
 
 All men free and equal by reason of the Divine imma- 
 nence within them ! Add to this, all men. fraternal by virtue 
 of the Divine Father-Motherhood, educing the divine- 
 human sonship and daughterhood throughout the free, co- 
 equal, interdependent all; — then we have the logical trinity 
 of the divine factors in evolution ; the creed of the Social 
 Christ ; the ethic of the new and social creation. 
 
 For man, if he came forth from God, holds to his human- 
 ity solely as he abides in God ; racial unity thus exists ; social 
 
24 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 unity becomes his destiny. Hence it is that the working 
 masses, the only body that as such is in sympathy with the 
 logic of humane causes and events, tends by the gravita- 
 tion of qualities, the attraction of the passions, to the idea || 
 of social, national and international incorporation and its f 
 fruitions. 
 
 Thus the secret of the world is found ; the problems of 
 human life and destiny are solved; the eras of agony, of 
 dissention and disunion terminate : for strife, concord! for 
 disease, health! for disaster, security! for poverties, riches! 
 for the blank misery and destitution of the creature, the 
 Social People, wise, benignant, exalted; spontaneously 
 fulfilling the common round of joyous activities in the com- 
 mon consciousness and sentience of God ! 
 
 The Social Christ, embodied and active in the latent 
 passion and force, the potency and promise of the Working 
 Man, stands now bound and in captivity before the tribunal 
 of Pilate, represented in organised Plutocracy. The suc- 
 cesses of evolution, on the lines of mechanical invention, 
 have^armed and empowered that Plutocracy, by means of 
 its absorption of the unearned increment, which represents 
 the increase of wealth upon the planet by the toil of its 
 myriads of productive laborers, ever since the century of 
 inventions began. 
 
 The appropriation of the unearned increment has armed 
 Plutocracy as well with the power of that riches ; so invest- 
 ed in the public, interest bearing securities of the civilised 
 nations that the ruling dynasties are bound in its fortunes, 
 pledged to its decisions and committed to its fate. 
 
 Plutocracy also is armed, fortressed and massed, by means 
 of such modicum of the unearned increment as is held as 
 an investment in the mechanism of production and transit ; 
 — a force equivalent at least to ten times the daily work- 
 
T H E X E W REP L" B L J C . 20 
 
 ing power of the entire proletariat. 
 
 Christ before Pilate! — yet Pilate trembles; for, though 
 conscience may be extinct within him, there is a secret 
 sense of insecurity; an awful foreboding of the judgment 
 to come, when the Pilate of the age shall stand arraigned 
 before the Industrial Christ of nations, helpless to escape 
 from the decisions of the supreme tribunal. 
 
 Tzars of the thrones, Plutotzars of the marts and ex- 
 changes, — whatever there is upon the planet of extreme 
 greed ; plus extreme wealth ; plus extreme sagacity and 
 adroitness ; plus extreme force of the sanhedrim, the press, 
 the bench and bar, the army and police ; plus the vast body 
 of the parasitical classes that are fed from the offals of the 
 tables of luxury, and that minister to its vast magnificence 
 and voluptuousness, — all of these, by one consolidated 
 power of antichrist, declare that the Christ of Labor shall 
 die the death. — "Crucify him, crucify him!'' 
 
 Labor has always been stripped, always scourged, always 
 mocked, always brow-beaten ; always driven as a criminal 
 on the via dolorosa, the bleeding pathway to the hill of 
 agony. But Labor never, till as now, has made it evident 
 by clear light, that the immanent God. abode within its 
 form, was out-breathing through its social passion, enuncia- 
 ting the truth of universal order through its quickening 
 intelligence and knitting its members together into one 
 compact' corporeal structure; a solidarity of social life. 
 
 Thus it is seen, that Plutocracy has built up to this 
 enormous power of dominion by means of its control of 
 the productive machinery and political organisations of 
 the world. It has grasped the resultant force that is the 
 outgrowth of the evolution on its material plane.- — It is con- 
 fronted, on the part of the People, by the luminous ideas 
 that have been generated in the public mind by the evolu- 
 4. 
 
2(3 T H E N J<: W R E PUBLIC. 
 
 tion, advancing on the lines of its human and humanising 
 plane. 
 
 It is a realisation of that sublime prophetic vision of the 
 Apocalypse. The Woman clothed with the sun is bringing 
 forth the Man-Child, born to the rule of nations. The dra- 
 gon, coiled, intent, is waiting to devour the infant in the 
 hour of its birth. — We are drawing toward the supreme cri- 
 sis in the history of the globe. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The horror and heart-break of the present miserable situa- 
 tion is, that it is a war of members in the one inseparable body 
 of mankind. Plutocracy and Proletariat, the parasite and 
 the producer, are essentially one heart, one life, one flesh. 
 There is but one interest that is vital and real, and this 
 interest human and common to all. 
 
 The one question, underlying, inherent to and pervading 
 all issues that are raised or that can be raised is this : shall 
 Mankind struggle and wrangle on, involved in the univer- 
 sal warfare and murder of its private selfism, the squalor 
 and contemptibility of its base naturehood ; or, shall it trans- 
 form that naturehood, enlarging through it into the social 
 passion, the social institutions, the sweetness, culture and 
 opulence of its divine-natural humanity? 
 
 It may be possible to conceive of new. environments, 
 brought about by compromises and mutual concessions of 
 the private self, that shall ensue in a partial restoration of 
 the equilibrium of riches. Yet such arrangements in the 
 nature of things can be but tentative and temporary. They 
 can only be brought about, moreover, through bitter con- 
 troversies, heart-burnings, lacerations of the Body Sensitive 
 and strain and peril of the Body Politic. 
 
T 1 1 E X E W R E P tf S Li C . 2? 
 
 The Avar of strikes and boycotts threatens always to become 
 a war of public insurrection. Pinkerton's police, State Mili- 
 tia, the Sheriff's posse are powerful ; but so are the massed 
 Toilers ; their roused and maddened wifehood and mother- 
 hood : so is dynamite. 
 
 A mortgaged agricultural State, ruined by failing crops, 
 ten per cent interest, onerous rates of railway transportation, 
 tariff-taxes, prices of farm products reduced below the cost 
 of production by the system of cornerage, — what is it but a 
 State on the edge of revolution or secession ? 
 
 It is easy to conceive of a possible situation, in which the 
 Farming States, as Independent Sovereignties in the Union, 
 may array their governing authorities, legislature, courts, 
 citizen soldiery, against the Federal powers. It is easy to 
 look on to the birth of a new Confederacy : our Union is not 
 a band of invulnerable steel ; it is a glass globe : we feel 
 already the jar of the concussions : its atoms may fly apart ; 
 it may shiver into fragments. 
 
 The Yeomanry of the Nation is plodding, patient, conser- 
 vative, non-aggressive ; the last of the land to be aroused to 
 social-political innovation. Yet its fire when aroused is not 
 the flame of the stubble : it is the fierce heat of enduring- 
 anthracite. 
 
 The Bucolic Issachar may be "an ass bowing between two 
 burdens," and Plutocracy may be a "lion of Judah, ravening 
 for the prey." But rouse Issachar too far, urge him till he 
 meets the opportune, and the dumb creature trumpets in 
 tones as authoritative as when the ass spoke to Balaam : — nay, 
 "he is transformed ; he is ass no more ; his aspect is that of the 
 war-angel with sword of flame. How was it at Lexington, 
 when the Yeomanry of Massachusetts Bay rose from their 
 invaded homes on Lord Percy's red coats ? How was it 
 when they made of their breasts a shield and rampart for 
 
28 THE XE W K E PUBLI C . 
 
 Liberty on Bunker Hill ? 
 
 It was the torpor of the Yeomanry of France that led to the 
 failure of the Commune in '71. It was the wakening and 
 arming of the Yeomanry of England that overthrew the 
 monarchy and resulted in the temporary establishment of 
 the Commonwealth : they were the Ironsides. 
 
 The Yeomanry of the United States is stirring and moving 
 now. Its methods may for the time be incoherent and re- 
 sult in failures : its present leaders may prove inefficient, as 
 not being possessed of the genius of the occasion. But let 
 the occasion last, let it ripen, and the fated leaders are sure 
 to arrive. So Cromwell was found for Britain ; so Gari- 
 baldi found Italy. The Hour when pregnant always brings 
 forth her men. But men of what sort ? Shall this be 
 sword-time, or shall it be God-in-People's time ? 
 
 Issachar is slow, painfully ruminating; not at all con- 
 scious that the man-angel of Sociality is growing through his 
 flesh to possess and transform his earthy and pauperised 
 naturehood. Yet the heredities of Naseby fight, and Bunker 
 Hill contest, move by evolutionary lines toward his social re- 
 organisation. The persistences that were in Washington 
 and John Brown penetrate to possess him : they are 
 marching on. 
 
 The Bucolic Intellect as we have seen is slow : it is the 
 contact of minds that evolves intelligence ; that generates 
 the passion of intelligence. Yet if slow, it is retentive. If 
 the man of eighty still votes for Jackson, it is that he 
 cherishes the patriotic memories of 1815. If the man of six- 
 ty casts his ballot in the pathetic remembrance of Lincoln, 
 it is that he recalls the imperilled Union and the great up- 
 rising of the People. If he holds to his ecclesiastical tra- 
 ditions, it is because he or his fathers found God in the 
 traditions. He is not yet aware that Divinity, felt from of 
 
T H E N E W R E PUBLIC. T-J 
 
 old through the frozen mists of antiquity, throbs now, heaves 
 now, leads movement now in the infinitude of evolution. 
 He is hardly able yet to "catch on;" his habits are con- 
 stant and they operate to the constancy of his prejudices. 
 His Eden is localised and bounded in the far, dim Past ; 
 but this is only till his humane passions are fired and his 
 brain illumined and fed by the on-coming lights of the 
 Social Future. 
 
 Yet meanwhile the environments, in which our Yeoman- 
 ry found if not opulence yet comfort and security, have 
 insensibly changed, becoming oppressive and ruinous. They 
 narrowed and still narrow ; they upgrow to floors of spikes 
 and walls of thorns, and roofs that exclude the high, broad 
 azure, and fashion the fetid ceilings of the closed and fatal 
 prison room. The Yeomanry sleep in the tradition of Liber- 
 ty, whilst round them weave and fasten the ligatures of the 
 slave. The politician duped them by deceptive promises ; 
 they. served the purposes of his Party; they believed in it 
 as the lover in his mistress, and the devotee in his God. 
 They are only cured of the infatuation as they awake to 
 find the franchises of their existence lost ; their inheritance 
 divided between the middle-man, the railway-man, the cor- 
 nerer and the mortgagee. If our Yeomanry wakes now, it 
 is because Plutocracy has thrust in the knife ; the deeper 
 the knife is thrust in, the more they will awaken. When 
 the vitals are pierced they will emerge ; gaunt, ghastly, but 
 terrible and inexorable. 
 
 The life of the individual monads of the race, when left to 
 the sluggish motion of the rural solitude, is too brief for the 
 serious maturities of Wisdom. Courting time, mating time, 
 brooding time ; then care time, ponderous, anxious, with 
 recurrent troubles of disease and bereavement ; then wast- 
 ing, withering, decay ; — it is all too brief. We are birds 
 
30 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 that hatch and warble and circle round our tree for the 
 short leafy season. Never till the nests begin to be broken 
 up, and the food to fail, and the shots of the slaughterers to 
 penetrate, and the trees to tremble for the blows of the axe- 
 man will the flights commence to apprehend that the dooms 
 have overtaken them. 
 
 When all is said in its favor that can be said, the life of 
 the solitar} r farm homestead is still the survival of a barba-_ 
 rism: its decline and end is a necessary process in the evo- 
 lution of man from his petty and stolid naturehood. But 
 the transition, that might be made heroic and exhilirating, is 
 embittered, protracted and imperilled by the refusal of the 
 Yeomanry to recognise and become adapted to the new con- 
 ditions; — the refusal of the germ to grow; of the buried bulb 
 to cleave the soil and meet the morning and lift the stalk 
 and enlarge to its transfiguration in the solar flower. 
 
 If men only knew ! — but they do not know. Those who 
 know and who bear witness must bear the penalty of this 
 refusal to be instructed. Yet those who witness will not be 
 alone in-the sufferings. In times of denial it is not Jesus on- 
 ly who must endure the cross : it is also the sons and sires, 
 the mothers and daughters of Jerusalem; toward whose walls 
 the legions are marching, for whose temple and whose homes 
 the torches bicker, for whose honors awaits ruin, for whose 
 limbs the chain. Education is through agonies. 
 
 Our Nation, identified as it is with the larger form of Civil- 
 isation, is a mere thought bubble, custom bubble, propriety 
 bubble, suspended in the general atmosphere of the egoised 
 barbaric passions ; the latent, repressed, resultant persist- 
 ences of the old cruel ages when lust and violence held an 
 unrestrained dominion. Old Napoleon said of the cultured 
 
T II E N E W K EPUBLIC. 31 
 
 Russ, "prick his skin and you find the barbarian." So of 
 the decorous, moralised, conventional naturehood of the 
 American Civilizee ; parasite, producer, plutocrat, — prick 
 the skin and we touch the savage still. 
 
 But this is not the savage of the stone age ; it is the sci- 
 entific savage of the age of steel, of dynamite, of electricity, to 
 whom the exploitage of his fellow-man is a fine art, organ- 
 ised in his religions of enmity, glozed and defended in his 
 literatures of hypocrisy and subterfuge. And his empire 
 is built up as great Babylon, with hanging gardens on the 
 mountain chains, from the belts of ice to the zones of end-* 
 less summer, prouding gaily to the faces of the outside 
 oceans and inland seas ; and with palaces and pleasances, 
 and ways of swiftness and magnificence that touch from cir- 
 cle to circle over a dominion such as from of old the world 
 has never seen. And to the vision of the ancient seer all 
 the glory of great Babylon that he beheld, in one hour came 
 to nought. And in another hour of unfeared and sudden 
 doom this too may perish ! 
 
 For the life and duration of all this is suspended on that 
 which to the natural touch is absolutely nothing. It rests 
 on an opinion, a stupor, an acquiescence, a consensus 
 of repression among its quivering masses. The persist- 
 ences of the heredities of all savage and barbaric ages, all 
 appetences of murders, all lusts of acquisition or revenge, 
 all greeds of spoliation and rapine exist, partially dormant, 
 chained in by superficial opinion, custom and policy : they 
 exist as latent forces in the human naturehood : the divine- 
 hood that exists and operates through common man has 
 thus long and partially held them in coercion. 
 
 Now it is the advantage of the great body of the toiling 
 Yeomanry and of the working Proletariat, born to the cot- 
 tage and the manger as it is, that it escapes the curse that 
 
SZ THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 issues through the loins of the Oppressor, the cruel birth- 
 right of ill-gotten hereditary riches. It was spoken by 
 the Wisdom that was of old, "how hardly shall they that 
 have riches enter into the kingdom of God : " even so, how 
 hardly shall those who are the children of the ill-gotten riches, 
 and who inherit into the inhumanities of their acquisition, 
 enter into that holy home and paradise of social man. They 
 are born into the kingdom of unjust Mammon ; their 
 structural lines are fashioned, their instincts are organised, 
 not in the sympathies of humanity ; but in the antipathies, 
 the animosities, the inversions of humanity. They are born 
 into the vortex of the inhumanities ; born to float gaily in 
 the gilded barges that ride upon the death-stream of the 
 martyred, toiling race. 
 
 It is a wonder of God in evolution that the offspring of 
 the human tiger and tigress should, nevertheless, inherit in- 
 to so much of the surviving qualities of the truly human 
 infant. A wonderful thing that they so retain a survival 
 of the divinity in their tender flesh, that they may still hold 
 to a thread or thrill of connection that makes it possible for 
 them to be over-watched by "the angels of the Father, who 
 is in heaven. " 
 
 "Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own : 
 Yearning she hath in her own natural kind, 
 And, even with something of a mother's mind 
 
 And no unworthy aim, 
 The homely nurse doth all she can, 
 To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man, 
 
 Forget the glories he hath known, 
 And that imperial palace whence he came." 
 Thus Wordsworth in his immortal ode. But it is as the 
 private self, nature born, nature fashioned, nature filled, 
 naturally insatiate, closes in upon the tender essence of the 
 
 1 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 33 
 
 inmost and real humanhood, that the glories of the divine 
 origin are obliterated, and the lamps of the imperial palace 
 vailed from sight. 
 
 Nevertheless the child, in a large natural sense, is father 
 to the man. Oppressors beget minions and representatives 
 of oppression, till the line of the exalted and exclusive rich, 
 marrying and inter-marrying with its own kind, becomes 
 impotent ; wasting and failing in scrofula and idiocy. Wher- 
 ever a strong great man is found, in whom the social pas- 
 sion makes its assertion by thoughts and works that serve 
 to the liberation and enrichment of the People, it will be 
 discovered that a glowing and opulent stream of People's 
 life mingled with kindred streams for the due uplifting of 
 structures into fitting lines of personality. What wealth of 
 unexplored riches, what latent heroisms and nobilities await 
 the happier times, for issuance from the People's womb ! 
 
 It is claimed that the ordinary man of toil is ignorant; 
 that he has much to learn. Granted ; and this is to his 
 disadvantage. But he has not so much to unlearn as the 
 heir of Opulence, cultured in the egoised ethics and science 
 and philosophy of the universities, in the history that is 
 misinterpreted, and in the literatures that are diseased and 
 deceitful. "As the twig is bent the tree is inclined." It 
 is only those stout twigs of patrician birth that were so root- 
 ed and strengthened in the nobler heredity of the People 
 that they would not bend, and indeed could not be made to 
 bend, that hold to the upright aspect ; that rise gold-flow- 
 ered and fruited, to ripen the generous wisdoms of man's 
 inner and real nature. 
 
 There is more profound, accurate, incisive social thought 
 to-day among the French, the Belgian, the Swiss, the Ger- 
 man, the British, the Australian, the American groups of 
 artizans ; more, ten-fold, an hundred-fold, than in all the 
 5 
 
34 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 pulpits, the counting houses, the editorial sanctums or uni- 
 versities ; more grasp of the humane principles ; more knowl- 
 edge of the actual trend of events. 
 
 Let miracle be denied ; still this evolution of the divine 
 qualities through man is by the law of the common and uni- 
 versal miracle. The hereditary bondsmen of Toil, having 
 comparatively none of the false knowledge to unlearn, are 
 proving themselves wise in the culture that includes aH 
 cultures, the ethics of Sociality. The groups of the Labor 
 Unions are far in advance of the average groups of Congress 
 men. Seat this young child of the People in the federal 
 temple of the Nation, and the rabbis of the Senate will be 
 astonished and confounded by his doctrine, for he will speak 
 with the authority of scientific knowledge and experience, 
 "and not as the scribes.'' 
 
 And the reason why the millions of the artizans have al- 
 most as a body abandoned the ministrations of ceremonial 
 religion, is because they have a deeper and richer knowledge 
 of the social ethics of Jesus of Nazareth ; a vaster and more 
 penetrative comprehension of his mission and purpose, so 
 far at least as this world is concerned, than is even dream- 
 ed of by all but a few of the readers from the lectern or the 
 celebrants of the altar. Even those of the German school, 
 most agnostical in sentiment, possess an apprehension of 
 the working methods of salvation which has almost become 
 obliterated from the ecclesiastical consciousness. 
 
 These dis-churched artizans are working right in the di- 
 rection of Christ's work of public and organic righteousness : 
 they are in the stream of Christ's sympathies ; they are fol- 
 lowing on in the toil of Christ to institute the uplift from 
 below; to base the opulence and magnificence of Earth, not 
 as it is now based on desolations, robberies, destitutions, 
 shames and miseries, but on the common fellowship and 
 
 t 
 
T li E N E W BE PUBLIC, o 5 
 
 sympathy and right dealing and honor between man and 
 man. 
 
 The uplift from below! consider this for a moment. There 
 is no doubt that the uplift of general mankind, sought to 
 be effected by ministrations through a class, distinct and 
 working from above, is a failure. Nearly an hundred thou- 
 sand of the elite of the youth of the nation, with liberal cul- 
 ture, with the ethic and dogmatic of theology superadded, 
 with exquisite moralities and social refinements, are set 
 apart from each generation to preach "Christ crucified." 
 
 They cannot agree as to who or what Christ was, or as to 
 what constituted the seed-germs and working powers of his 
 thought. As to his social ethics they for the most part ig- 
 nore them : as to his social aims they agree that they are 
 impracticable. They keep alive the traditions ; they per- 
 petuate the visible form and service of the sacraments ; 
 they minister to the luxuriousness of the religious senti- 
 ment ; they assist to soothe the consciences and feed the spi- 
 ritual hopes of the complaisant Plutocracy ; they serve to 
 drill the morals and to throw a decent vail of saintly con- 
 formity over the ebullient passions of the bourgeoisie. 
 
 Their gospel reaches clean down, through the middle-men 
 to the retainers and lackeys of Wealth's upper realm : it 
 serves a public end for the consecration of the nuptial feast 
 and for the obsequies of the departed. — It does more ; it 
 serves to roll up the stone, to seal the doors of the sepulcher 
 where sleeps the Martyred Man of Social Toil : it stands as 
 sentinel at the gates, lest he should come forth in resurrec- 
 tion 
 
 We all know the valiant and worthful exceptions to this 
 indictment. God will bless them ; and He hath blest. Yet 
 the indictment we but repeat : it has been pronounced from 
 their lips already. Bliss, Webster, Herron ; — the roll-call 
 
36 t H E if E W R EPl'BLIC. 
 
 may be led to hundreds like unto them. Yea and amen ! but 
 where stand the others of the hundred thousand? So stood 
 Parker and May and William Channing and hundreds 
 with them, whilst the great American Church justified or 
 extenuated the offence of chattel slavery. 
 
 If American domestic servitude was, as Garrison declared 
 it to be, "the sum of all villanies," what shall be said of 
 the system of Wage Slaveries that has grown up to conti- 
 nental enormity since its abolition. "Runaways hunted by 
 dogs in the cane-brakes of the Mississippi!" — Yes, but how 
 about the troops of white girls, in those logging camps of 
 Michigan, hunted by blood-hounds when they rush to escape 
 from the nightly outrage of their persons that is perpe- 
 trated there ? 
 
 What shall be said of the tens of thousands of educated 
 and virtuous young ladies, who perish annually from con- 
 sumptive diseases, passing to their poor pallets from at- 
 tendance on such opulent sales rooms as those of conspic- 
 uous millionaires, but too well known ? They are used up 
 and worn out with less consideration than is afforded to 
 the beasts of carriage. They perish from excess of toil and 
 insufficient nourishment. 
 
 Again how about this " right of seigniorage" ? How about 
 these tens and hundreds of thousands of young women of 
 our own complexion, who to retain their places in sales room 
 or work room and to escape being cast out to unemployed 
 destitution, are compelled to "stand in with the boss," with 
 all the personal defilement and degradation that the vile 
 phrase implies ? 
 
 A wealthy clothing merchant, the supporter of a popular 
 church in one of the important cities of Ohio, privately told 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. .'17 
 
 his story, having previously reformed his habits. It was 
 to the effect that in the years of his business during which 
 he had "lived up to his opportunities," nearly one thousand 
 of virgins and widows to whom he supplied work had found 
 it necessary to "stand in" with him. 
 
 We talk religiously of free will, but the Manufacturing 
 and Employing Plutocrat knows how to coerce free will ; to 
 hurl down free will beneath the grinding wheels of orga- 
 nised and imperious necessity. The "great city Babylon" 
 stamps whoso would buy or sell within her gates by "the 
 mark of the beast in the forehead." Wearing that mark, 
 in the full front and power of his authority, the man of the 
 mark burns it in again on the brow and breast of the 
 helpless daughters of the People. Yet the purities are mur- 
 dered in the pure, the innocences stolen from the innocent, 
 and "no man lays it to heart." 
 
 The church of the Plutocracy is dumb : its womanhood 
 is dumb : its subsidised and universal public press is dumb. 
 These are things that Society will not tolerate to be spoken 
 of, and which when spoken of are commonly denied. 
 
 How again about the tens or hundreds of thousands of 
 needle women, hand workers, machine workers ; the never- 
 ending ghastly procession that empties its wasted annual 
 surplusage into the streets, into the dives, into the hospi- 
 tal and the pauper's grave? Is this America, a continent 
 of the earthly planet, open through clear azure to sun and 
 stars ; or has it sunken down — its dwellers unaw r are — and 
 become re-incorporated in the seemings of a world for a 
 new and thrice infernalised Pandemonium? 
 
 Every hour so many of these, our sisters, drop through 
 spoil and outrage into ruin, yet we are comparatively at the 
 beginning ; for with every hour the multitude of helpless, 
 impoverished, unprotected womanhood increases, through- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 out the length and breadth of the land. With every hour 
 the mighty host of the Despoiler adds to its ranks by fit and 
 chosen neophytes and associates, eager and fired and pant- 
 ing for the prey. 
 
 A luminous thinker of the middle years of the 18th cen- 
 tury wrote, " All things stand prepared and ready, and await 
 the light." The light dawned : it led the evolution by twin 
 streams of scientific invention and humane culture and 
 assertion. Unhasting, unresting, it brings all obsolete, 
 outworn, impedimental customs, opinions, institutions ; 
 all environments of mankind, into judgment before the 
 tribunal of the divinehood that shapes to fashion in the 
 humanity of man. But now it may be written again, 
 "All things stand prepared and ready, and await the fire :" 
 not the torch of the Insurrectionist, but the ardors of Liv- 
 ing Evolution, led to their enkindling wisdom in the social 
 passion of the Peoples. 
 
 It has been claimed by one school of liberal thinkers, 
 that the evils of the Present are not so much more than 
 those of the Past, but that we see them more. — Even so ; 
 and we see them more because they are being led up to 
 confront the Divine Tribunal in the formative social hu- 
 manhood, and to receive the sentence, "Depart!" We too, 
 who ponder together in this strange hour of the fate-time, 
 are involved, from living flesh to living soul, in the full 
 round of its tremendous issues : Ave too feel the momentum 
 of the massive forms that wheel on, on to judgment : we 
 too, as we survive, must incorporate our futures in the bliss 
 or woe. 
 
THE NEW HE PUBLIC. 39 
 
 V. 
 
 There is at present, throughout the human area of our 
 Nation, a movement which for lack of some better term may 
 be designated as an " incipient evolutionary whirl ;" a current 
 of vital force, energised in the flowing stream of the out-work- 
 ing social passion. This may be traced through three dis- 
 tinct channels of operation. 
 
 The first whirl-current operates for the diffusion of the im- 
 pulse of collectivity, for its method, firmness, sympathy and 
 influence, through the vast body of artizans and common 
 laborers. It is impregnating the Trades Unions with the 
 socialistic fire, but embodies its more virile force, its more 
 effective motion of intelligence, in the distinctive State So- 
 cialists, whose organ of service is the Socialistic Labor Party. 
 
 The visible fount of this movement was originally from 
 abroad. Germany, the focus of the world's philosophic 
 culture, was the first, more than a quarter of a century ago, 
 to evolve the formulas of a strictly logical and scientific evo- 
 lution of organised industry, that should merge individual- 
 ism in collectivity. 
 
 The distinguished Karl Marx was the first of thinkers to 
 work out the problem in the logic of inductive reason : he 
 announced beforehand the main features of the march of 
 the competitive system through trusts and syndicates to the 
 huge capitalistic monopolisation that exists to-day. More, 
 he clearly defined the law whereby competition whirls on 
 into a final result of combination, and hence the crash, the 
 chaos of our present industrial fabric as the ensuing conse- 
 quence. State Socialism must not be confounded with the 
 imported Anarchism : they are as opposite in spirit, method 
 and result as order is opposed to anarchy. 
 
 The second whirl of evolution circulates mainly through 
 
40 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 the professional, artistic, literary classes, the exceptionally 
 humane of the bourgeoisie and thence to the isolated yeo- 
 manry. This movement was begotten in the old Socialism 
 of cultured New England, surviving still from the labors of 
 William Henry Channing, George Ripley and the band of 
 exceptionally gifted men and women who were comprised 
 in the "American Union of Associationists" 45 years ago : 
 it is ideal, reverent, cultured, sympathetic and humanitarw. 
 These old associationists were brim full of patriotic faith 
 and courage ; possessed of the modern spirit. Their one 
 deficiency was in the lack of apprehension of the laws of 
 industrial organisation and environment, which Avere after- 
 wards formulated in the German school. 
 
 To Mr. Laurence Gronlund must be given the honor by 
 his treatise, "the Co-operative Commonwealth," published 
 some seven or eight years since, of being the first to intro- 
 duce to the general American thought this missing factor, 
 necessary for the evolutionary advance. "Written from full 
 knowledge of the logical ground and mastery of the facts 
 of the material situation; written with the naive honesty of 
 the child yet with the ripe wisdom of the scholar in his 
 specialty, this and his subsequent productions, though of 
 comparatively limited circulation, served as the Euclid of 
 social mathematics. 
 
 This and kindred literature supplied the base on which 
 Mr. Edward Bellamy reared his popular and far-appreciated 
 structure. In that now almost world-famous prevision it 
 seemed to many that "Golden Jerusalem"— always luminous 
 above the clouds of the mental firmament — was seen de- 
 scending to a solid foundation established for it upon ma- 
 terial soil. Yet "Looking Backward" would have fallen 
 dead upon an apathetic Public had not the vital whirl of 
 evolution opened channels for its reception in the Popular 
 
THE NEW R.EPU BLIC. 41 
 
 brain and bosom. 
 
 The Arabian prophet affirmed that, "God sends to every na- 
 tion a prophet in its own tongue." He sent to Germany Karl 
 Marx and Lassalle, and to America the accurate, thorough 
 Gronlund, and our own genial and hopeful Bellamy. But 
 more, to these last annunciators he sent audiences as well. 
 They translated the unapparent to the evident : so men 
 found bread in the dry sand where before they but tasted 
 stones ; they met water-springs where before they had parch- 
 ed in the hot dust of the desert. So the whirl of evolution 
 found access and Social Nationalism rose to a swift and 
 auspicious prominence. 
 
 But there is in evolution a third whirl ; a mighty one. 
 though hidden as a river of the night. It is in the class 
 raised by mental and industrial prowess, by extreme 
 wealth — often hereditary wealth — to dignity, power, exclu- 
 •siveness, sumptuosity and luxury ; the centre and crown of 
 existing Society. 
 
 The same heart beats in the bosom of the man of a dol- 
 lar a day and the man whose dollar is born anew to him 
 every minute. There is the same hereditary private self 
 grasping to the egoised interest, and within him the same 
 latent social passion, pregnant with the riches of the Infinite 
 and yearning to the birth, that it may pour abundance into 
 the bosom of the Peoj)le. 
 
 Poverties are burdens that heap care and agony upon 
 the man of cruel and lonely toil : riches are burdens that 
 lead to their humane possessor anxieties, sore misgivings, 
 crises of conscience, questionings as to what is the right 
 and wrong between rich and poor, employer and employee, 
 the public treasury and the private purse ; — yea, what is the 
 final right between opulence and God ? Here is a vast, 
 deep-burdened heart that waits to be relieved : a vast brain 
 6 
 
42 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 that begins to apprehend that infinite benignities may be 
 dispensed from the halls and treasuries that have been 
 made the shrines of Mammon. 
 
 Humane Socialism is breathing on, feeling its way through 
 the topmost class, and its movement there is in the strict 
 order of evolution : it has taken up, all unobtrusively, a 
 permanent abode. It has come, gloriously to demonstrate 
 at no distant period that God's heartbeats full circle through, 
 all classes and conditions of men. It is by no means im- 
 probable that gentlemen of such types as Wm. and Corne- 
 lius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Robert Garrett, Abram 
 Hewitt, Charles Francis Adams, may yet stand full bold in 
 the logic of Karl Marx, and the fruitful suggestions of 
 Gronlund and Bellamy. There is an host of working men 
 of combined skill and capital, employers of labor, but kind 
 and considerate employers, men of conscience up to the 
 measure of their light, who are ripening up to become the 
 apostles and organisers of solidarity. 
 
 " Of honorable women not a few !" — The cultured heiresses 
 of Rome and Alexandria in the earlier Christian centuries 
 exchanged jewels and purple and the service of slaves for 
 the plain robes and sisterly avocations of the daughters of 
 the People. We have yet to see full openings of the riches 
 of social wisdom, devotedness and courage in the exclusive 
 circles of our American Womanhood. It is simply igno- 
 rance or misinformation as to the social ethic, and its infi- 
 nite possibility of uplift and reconciliation and cleansing 
 and nourishing, that holds them in quiescence now. 
 
 This third stream of evolution throbs with a profound 
 and even awful passion : eminently it is the Woman's whirl. 
 It forms to the impulse that leads to the Episcopal Sister- 
 hoods ; to nurse-service in the hospitals and among the 
 lowly poor ; to the zeal and devotion of the "King's Daugh- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 43 
 
 ters" and kindred societies of help and succor. It stirs 
 like the approach of Advent in the bosom of the church 
 that is sometimes described as "the aristocratic and capi- 
 talistic porch of Zion :" it finds recent and warm access of 
 partial utterance in the voice of prelates of that episcopate. 
 It sets already two of its priesthood before the Public as 
 founders or conductors of socialistic, nationalistic periodic- 
 als, and their utterances are both sweet and considerate, 
 both wise and brave. 
 
 Let a preacher like Phillips Brooks fully comprehend 
 and receive the God whom he adores and loves, as seeking 
 to reach mankind again in this crisis-hour of its destiny 
 through social evolution, and his utterance would rock the 
 "Wealth Church" of the continent as if it were an infant's 
 cradle : it would lead forth the land's proudest and most 
 glorious daughters by tens of thousands. Where woman 
 leads man is sure to follow : the path of this brave advance 
 would be the Social Commonwealth. 
 
 The Nation possesses an untitled but hereditary noblesse 
 that is not to be confounded with rail-sharps, oil-thieves, 
 coal-robbers and trade-pirates or their progeny. These are 
 aristo, the best ; inheritors of the cultures, amenities and 
 honors of families that greatened from old centuries by al- 
 liances and assimilations of fiery-passioned heroic qualities of 
 mind and heart. Adamses, Winthrops, Jays, Scburylers, 
 Lees, Fitz-Hughs, Hugers, Desaussures ; blood of the May- 
 flower, blood of '76, blood of Coligni's Huguenots, and Wil- 
 liam the Silent's Netherlands, and Cromwell's and Milton's 
 England tingles now in the veins of the Republic's fair and 
 wise and brave. 
 
 In these the worthier evolutions of the Past have sown 
 and reproduced their seed : they hold in living structures the 
 wealth of the grand achievements of the forefathers. It 
 
44 T H E N E W R E P U B L I ( ' . 
 
 is through such that the evolutionary whirl, condensed, 
 compressed, awaits to marshal forth by sword and lyre, by 
 breasting, battling, organising symphonies. 
 
 When the period of incubation is fulfilled the chick must 
 pick the shell, or die. The Republic has accomplished its 
 century of incubation : fashioned within this rigid shell of 
 plutocratic environment, the system of a living People has 
 grown to such completeness that the shell rocks and quivers 
 with its agitation. The question is now, not whether the 
 egg shall be gently eased to a posture in the nest that shall 
 soothe the chick to a little longer period of quiescent repose, 
 as the advocates of palliative and partial reforms, measures 
 of political easement would enforce ; but whether the incu- 
 bation shall fail and the dead egg explode from the degen- 
 eration of vitalities into corruptions ? 
 
 Previous and mighty civilisations have been abolished in 
 the advance of decrepid age and the invasion of inherent, 
 accumulative, catastrophic death. The civilisation of which 
 this Nation is a part holds in its members, by means of the 
 parasitical, retrogressive and venal classes, the age, the rot- 
 tenness, the decline, the dissolution that shed forth to ruin 
 for the proud empires of antiquity. The rot of Rome diffuses 
 through our parties and the rot of Egypt prostitutes in our 
 palaces and on our streets. We hold, in a suppression that 
 rapidly becomes insuppressable, the consequence of every 
 old catastrophe. 
 
 So the dead call to us, "come down, come down ! " Babylon 
 calls from its sand-wastes upon the Euphrates ; Carthage 
 and Tyre call from stony sepulchres beside the seas ; but 
 within all this body of corruption the Young Nation stands, 
 opulent with energies of evolution throughout its industrious 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 45 
 
 masses, whether their toil be of heart or brain or hand. 
 
 Essentially there are but two Parties, the Party of stag- 
 nation and that of quickening ; the Party of corruption and 
 that of purifying ; the Party of absolutism and that of lib- 
 eration ; the Party of entombment and that of resurrection. 
 And Evolution will advance ! though the orb lifted hand 
 against the sun the motions of the heavens will not abate, 
 even if the orb shall perish. Though our Nation lift hand 
 against evolution, the evolution will ride on from conquer- 
 ing to conquer; if not through us, with us and for us, then 
 through us still, but against us : "whosoever falls upon that 
 stone shall be broken ; but on whomsoever it shall fall it 
 will grind him to powder." 
 
 But we shall not fall. The embodiment of divine hu- 
 man principle fashioned in the vital constituents of this 
 American People ; however tried, however tortured, is not 
 thus to perish. " In Hoc Signo Vinces." 
 
 VI. 
 
 So far as they conform to the style of naturehood and 
 reject the law of humanhood, the Plutocratic Combina- 
 tions and the associations of the Artizans and the Yeomanry 
 possess an identity : motive, effort and end are the same ; 
 a larger share of material wealth than can be secured by 
 solitary action. Lacking the spirit of Collectivity, the best 
 of them are partial, fragmentary and tentative. They or- 
 ganise to fight, not to love ; organise in the principle of 
 fight, not in the principle of love ; organise in the method 
 of fight, not in the method of love. 
 
 If the roll of membership is scanned, all tiie way from 
 Syndicates to Trades Unions, three distinct types of charac- 
 ter are apparent. The best type consists of men in whom 
 
46 THE NEW REPUBLIC). 
 
 the genuine social humanhood is firm and assertive, on the 
 uprise to birth. The worst type consists of egoised indi- 
 vidualities, shells of aboriginal naturality ; creatures who 
 " are on the make ;" to whom the affiliation serves for their 
 purpose of make, present or prospective. Between is a 
 middle type ; those who fluctuate, who drift, who are in- 
 stabilities, impressibles ; who take on surfacely the alternate 
 aspects of thought, the social and egoistical. Hence, not- 
 withstanding appearances, there is in such associations no 
 solidarity, for that implies a vital sympathy of passion and 
 motive, flowing through all the members, each of whom 
 serves as a factor and motor for the one organic end. 
 
 It was the contention of Lassalle, whose thought has per- 
 meated the mass of European socialists, that the populace 
 of hand toilers constitutes the vital body of the People, to 
 the exclusion of the classes. This may easily be shown to 
 be a fallacy, that whilst it operates renders nugatory for 
 final good the vast schemes of the Proletariat. The vital 
 body of a Nation consists of those of its inhabitants who 
 are vitalised into the passion, thought and action of their 
 real humanhood. The drifts, the natural ignobles are, till 
 born over, mere parasites upon that living body politic. 
 
 It is not 's millions but his inhuman rapacity 
 
 that excludes him from the living body of the People : it 
 is not Jacques Miner's handling of coal ; it is his holding 
 into God for the possession and out-work of the humanly 
 divine, that makes him a member of the People's corporate 
 structure : for the Living Nation is the corporate body of 
 God, and those are its members who are nourished and who 
 nourish their fellow members in the flesh and blood of the 
 divine humanity. 
 
 Another and equally prejudicial fallacy is, that the meas- 
 ure of a man's service is the sum of his product of material 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 47 
 
 values. Now the law of naturehood is as Wordsworth phras- 
 ed it for Rob Roy ; 
 
 "For why? because the good old rule 
 Sufficeth them ; the simple plan. 
 
 That they should take who have the power, 
 And they should keep who can." 
 Each natural creature subsists by the appropriation of 
 nutritive substance from other lives, though those perish ; 
 but the law of Humanhood is gift. The man who from 
 core to skin is warmly alive in the passions of his human- 
 hood is a factor of forces to his fellows. As one of a group 
 the sum of his productive toil is not to be measured by the 
 chaldrons of coal that stand to his credit when the day's 
 labor is complete. All the days he is a cordial ministrant 
 to his fellows, and they have partaken of the essence and 
 the substance of his powers by an unconscious but actual 
 sacrament. He has given himself into them for strength 
 of toil or skill of hand, for hope of heart and persistence of 
 virtue. Illustrations of this law may be found everywhere 
 if sought by the single eye. Hence there are men whose 
 energies for productive wealth are multiplied ten-fold, an 
 hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, yet the visible result of 
 whose material toil may be less than that of the inferior 
 members of the groups in whom they consociate. 
 
 Again, there are working men who boast of an ability to 
 compete with or excel the most handy of their mates, yet 
 who to a large degree are parasites, feeding for the sub- 
 stance of energy upon generous, humane lives that are thus 
 exploited. For the man of gift to toil where he is exposed 
 to bodily rapport with the absorbtive man of greed is for 
 him to be abated in force and length of days. There is an 
 exploitage of the masses that proceeds by their own para- 
 sites, and Toil can never be liberal and free till delivered 
 
48 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 from its incubi. Any system of association that provides 
 for the equality and contact of the incubi in the Industrial 
 Commonwealth involves the perpetuation of the more vital 
 theft, 
 
 The vital body of the Nation consists thus of its human- 
 ly productives : as the tree so the fruit ; as men lift into the 
 ripe wealth of humanhood they will bear fruit, each after 
 his specialty, more and more abundantly. And the toil of 
 the man is as his days are : he is not to be an exempt when 
 his clays have reached or passed the meridian : this to him 
 would be slavery, suppression, misery. "My Father work- 
 eth hitherto, and I work." Service is made divine as man 
 enters into it by the motive and in the steps of God : no 
 brand of serfdom can mar that calm, high brow or efface 
 the kingliness that crowns thereon. 
 
 Doubtless, according to the law and purpose of their as- 
 sociation, it Avas reasonable for the Labor Unions to esta- 
 blish such rules as that no workman should take a double 
 step on the ladder, or carry more than the regulation num- 
 ber of bricks in the hod, or make the hours of labor a min- 
 ute more than the order, or put in more strokes, or turn 
 out better value of work in the day than his less qualified 
 mates. Yet, for all this, it was degrading : it fettered the 
 liberties of the free and prompt intelligence ; it set the 
 rank and file of Labor in a come chain : it sought to bind 
 the Spirit of evolution in man. There is a better way : 
 it is not too late to seek it now. 
 
 It may be well for the great Oil Magnate to say, "this 
 
 sentiment has no place in business ; if I get a rival in a hole 
 I mean to keep him there ; " but it will not do for one to 
 say it who esteems the virtue and honor of his manhood, 
 whatever may be the pursuit: for "sentiment," if by this 
 we understand the flow of the divine sympathies of human- 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 49 
 
 ity, has place in every business, unless that business is 
 meant to be degraded through the bestial into the diaboli- 
 cal. We are here to abolish the diabolism of rivalry ; to 
 lift rivalry into the swift step and daring march and kindly 
 supporting touch of kindred excellences. It is not when 
 he receives the day's wage that the man is degraded ; it is 
 when he serves for the purpose of pay : man honors and 
 nourishes his manhood as he serves for love. 
 
 After all that can be said, the man who is solidified into 
 the egoistic instinct and its private greeds, feels within him- 
 self a stronger, though delusive motive for the perpetuation 
 of environments that suppress the social passion, and that 
 give full licence within law for the enormous satisfaction 
 and aggrandisement of the naturehood, than can be com- 
 pensated for in any form of really humanised institutions. 
 Man's life is in his desires, and his delights are by the 
 measure of their satisfactions. 
 
 The delights of gratified pride to the self whose life is in 
 pride ; of gain to the self whose life is in gain ; of conten- 
 tion and triumph and the out-witting and over-po'tt-ering 
 of rivals to the self whose life is in battle against competi- 
 tors ; the delight of a wicked ruler in his rule ; of the satan of 
 the press in his power to extort homage and inflict pain and 
 enforce fear ; of the party boss in the intrigue, the adroit 
 wheedling of the public, the massing of the simple, honest 
 commonalty in the service of his fraud ; the satisfaction of 
 the glorying, the perpetual oblations to his inhuman self- 
 praise and self-conceit, — these make to such the chief things 
 that life is worth living for. Now, Society in its present 
 form is a wisely calculated and prudently guarded system for 
 the outlet and satisfaction of the egoistic lusts. Those in 
 whom the lusts rule, and who rule by the lusts, would rather 
 see the Republic bathed in blood and the People rent to 
 7 
 
50 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 fragments, than that this huge Corporeal Lusthood of en- 
 vironments should be pierced by the knife, or constricted 
 by the chain. 
 
 "Lay not this nattering unction to thy soul, Horatio! " 
 No ruling majority in the school of Mr. Bellamy can draw 
 out this leviathan by the hook. The voting conies may 
 combine, but they have not yet done with the tiger. For 
 this would be, by one master-stroke, to upset the constitu- 
 tion of human affairs as History has written it, and to estab- 
 lish a result, which the clearest eyes that ever shone in man 
 could only glimpse as possible through the separation of 
 the social sheep from the egoised and savage wolves. Yes, 
 our Brother, whom we reverence as "the Light of the World," 
 saw order realised in the associative life of the human mul- 
 titude ; but this effected by a clean cutting through : those 
 of the gift-service led by the attractions to the awaiting 
 destinies ; those of the greed-service left to their congenial 
 anti-social combination . What may be the processes through 
 which the evolution will operate for the Events that hasten 
 on we may not fore-know. One thing we do know : the 
 Master who foretold beheld the race cleaving apart ; its liv- 
 ing humankind emergent from its deadly and corrupting 
 inhumanities. 
 
 Yet again, if our humanhood is thus to burst the shell 
 of its naturality, it is "not to destroy but to fulfil," and to 
 infill. The scaffolding drops that the temple may stand forth 
 in its sublime proportions. Cast through what fierce heat, 
 uplifted by Avhat supreme endeavor, the matrix opens to 
 disclose the statue of the god. Have we not a logical as- 
 surance for the faith, that all things serve the purpose of an 
 infinite economy ; that there is no final waste or loss in man ? 
 
 May not this mass of incipient manhood, closed in the 
 constrictive ego, fettered to the bondage of self-generated 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 5] 
 
 lusts, incapable of submission to the superior passion 
 whilst that was dulled from its flame, chilled from its heat, 
 restrained from its operation by the oppression of the General 
 Ego, rampant in the lusthood of malign environments ; — 
 may not even this find a new impulse of generation through 
 the generous, genial potence of the Uplifted Social Man? 
 May not the birth-crisis of the New Republic precede and 
 lead on to the fulness and freedom of a new mankind? 
 May not the evolution be fulfilled in the reign of universal 
 harmony; "the restitution of all things, spoken of by all 
 God's holy prophets since the world began?" — The closed 
 ages are behind us : the open ages are before. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The stronghold of Plutocratic Egoism is in the egoised 
 Church, which proffers to its adherents an egoised and pri- 
 vate salvation. Yet the religion of the church was formu- 
 lated by the Socialist of socialists, as a means of grace for 
 the uplifting of mankind into its vital and corporate hu- 
 manhoocl. In origin, essence, method and purpose it was 
 pure socialism ; its every sacrament a sociality. It was 
 organised in the laAV of gift, antagonistic at every point 
 to the anti-force of greed. Its message to every man, to 
 every woman was, "Open inly to receive the social Christ 
 of God : open outward for the diffusion of the social christ- 
 hood throughout the race." 
 
 Let us not condemn without discrimination. The with- 
 ered beldame, standing on table-rock, stooping over Niagara, 
 tea-spoon in hand ! see, she pities the poor drops whirling- 
 down to their doom of "wrath to come :"she reaches out if 
 haply some may be saved : she dips up spoonful after spoon- 
 ful, drips them carefully into her row of tiny labelled vials 
 
02 'IVHE NEW republic!. 
 
 and corks them in. — "For this and to this," they say, "God 
 took on flesh, and was crucified, and burst the grave." 
 
 State and Church ! the one is organised in the competi- 
 tions of individualism for this world's gain : the other in 
 the self-strife of egoised anti-social believers for the gains 
 and guerdons of the other world. The one tends to the 
 complete exploitage of the productive masses and is based 
 upon their bonded service : the other tends to its own mag- 
 nificent exclusiveness, as the private domain of enriched 
 non-producers, middle class competitors and unreasoning 
 superstitionists. Such is the two-fold structure of the Pub- 
 lic environment. 
 
 Now Socialism inhabits the Church as a nascent Hu- 
 manhoocl, buried in an environment of naturality and 
 struggling to expression. Therefore the visible ecclesiasti- 
 cism has, notably for the last three centuries, evinced the 
 process of a dissolution ; as a structure of mere naturehood 
 evincing more and more of a divorce from the living body 
 of the People ; depending as a vesture of superficialhvy upon 
 its limbs ; clinging constrictively upon the popular thought 
 and custom. 
 
 We behold it at last invaded decisively by the evolution- 
 ary whirl. First, the scientific doctrine of evolution has 
 shattered the faith of the wise among its doctors in their 
 historical and dogmatic cult. Second, the progress of re- 
 search has weakened or overthrown their trust in the col- 
 lective accuracy and authority of its sacred oracles. Third 
 the truth of the Divine immanence in mankind is supplant- 
 ing the creed of Deus ex machina ; the high, outside God, 
 throned above the universe, and a stranger to the vitalised 
 interiors of human heart and flesh. Hence the latent force- 
 currents of the divine evolution are loosening its massed 
 and pent-up multitudes, through differentiation toward so- 
 
T HE NEW REPUBLl C . 51 1 
 
 cial personality. 
 
 So the Ecclesiastical System which whilst it represents re- 
 ligion, now in the main misrepresents religion, is struggling 
 for existence, and yet for transformation. The few of its 
 strong authorities are feeling their way to the Social Christ, 
 in the rise of the social passion, and by the hope and labor 
 of the social good : the many are holding as did the rabbis 
 of the Jewish cult against the advance of the Nazarene. 
 Yet again, Religion, so long in thrall of ceremonial but ig- 
 noble naturehood, is taking heart and finding breath anew 
 in the body of the vital People. Priest and Levite pass by on 
 the other side, but Religion re-affirms her healing potence, 
 instituting her new priesthood of the Good Samaritan. 
 
 Throughout the vast labyrinth of the sacerdotal and com- 
 mercial Babylon the voice of Evolution in warning is trum- 
 peting, "Come out of her, my People, that ye receive not 
 of her plagues ! " Fifty years ago the name of " Come-outer " 
 was a term of derision, applied to lonely protestants against 
 the defiant and popular iniquity: now the come-outers are 
 becoming the People, and the stay-in ners are beleagured in 
 their strong city by assembling hosts. Gage and his red 
 coats still hold the Boston of our hope, but the Continen- 
 tal Army is assembling and entrenching from hill-side to 
 hill-side, the farmer from his plow, the artizan from the 
 shop and smithy: Revolution becomes organic. 
 
 As evolution still advances we see fhe Sects dividing into 
 thinking, worshiping personalities. Men stood only as they 
 were held together in close grip of tribal and churchly fam- 
 ilisms: they fell to weakness as they held apart. Now they 
 find strengths rise with the assertion of liberty ; strengths 
 intensify with the assertion of equality ; strengths multi- 
 ply with the assertion of fraternity : from this grand emi- 
 nence they look on to the supreme might in organised 
 
54 THE NEW RE PUB LIC. 
 
 divine society. The cry is everywhere, "more room, more 
 room !" the old habit stifles. It would be impossible to 
 compress men into the limits that held them half a century 
 ago ; or if forced to that compression it would be to them 
 as the black hole of Calcutta. 
 
 The egoised individual mind clings, by the love of life, 
 to Nature as a ground of surface-hold and delight, and this 
 appetency is denounced by the religionist as a profane world- 
 liness. When Garrick exhibited to Dr. Johnson his superb 
 gallery of art, the grim moralist exclaimed, "Ah, Davy, Davy ! 
 these are the things that make a death-bed terrible." The 
 young birds love their sheltering tree, and though the sum- 
 mer is ended and the leaves fallen they shrink from the 
 unknown flightways through the far, dim azure. But man 
 is a creature of enduring hope ; so the ego knowing that the 
 cling here must fail, mounts aloft by a self-longing for pri- 
 vate possession and pastime, in an other-worldliness, that it 
 deems religious yet which is still profane. 
 
 Hence comes the delusion of the Pharisee : transferring 
 the self-grip of the ego to that other world, he "thanks God 
 that he is not as other men, or even as this Publican," who 
 delights in creature good and makes his holding-j)lace and 
 joy-realm here. The pharisee thinks to be wise in his gen- 
 eration : he will not "carry all his eggs in one basket;" so 
 that, when the lower basket drops and its eggs are broken, 
 he may float high, bearing the other basket, with eternal 
 prospect of chicks and omelets in store. He "is not as this 
 publican." 
 
 Now the religion of the social passion translates the hope 
 and trust of man from self-righteousness to the divine right- 
 eousness, made social righteousness in the accordant human 
 race. To the man of real religion the assumptions of self- 
 righteousness are horrible. He conceives of God as im- 
 
THE N E W REPUBLIC. 55 
 
 manent in mankind, condescendent to its extremest needs ; 
 lifting in mankind, and hence lifting him personally, not as 
 one selected out by an especial favoritism, but lifting him, 
 in the accordance of the universal law and purpose, by just 
 so much as he is divested of all self-striving ; abolishing that 
 private strife that he may become a factor and function in 
 the general and social uplift of man. 
 
 No man was ever saved by means of a private and exclusive 
 striving to save himself: no man was ever lost who merged 
 his being, with all its interests and efforts, in the organisa- 
 tion of the Public Safety. There is and can be no religion 
 in individualism pure and simple : the private monad can 
 hold no religion : absolute religion is absolute socialism. 
 As religions grow into reality and fruitfulness, they become 
 more social : as they deaden and become sterile the} r grow 
 egoistic, and egotistic, and time-serving, and persecuting, and 
 mendacious, and fraudulent, and parasitical, and infernal. 
 
 It is not the priest and levite who embody and show 
 forth Religion, though each is in full succession from Mosaic 
 orthodoxy, and though each "thanks God that he is not as 
 other men ;" — it is the "Good Samaritan, " who thanks God 
 that he is as other men; that, sinner as he is, he can yet 
 feel in the common sympathy, and assist in the common 
 helpfulness, and so serve to bind up the wounds of the 
 fallen kinsman, whom priest and levite have left to perish 
 in the wilderness. 
 
 Never before so much of the Gift Spirit, yet never such 
 aggrandised and insistent greed ! the more the man who has 
 found his humanhood differentiates and enlarges, so much 
 the more the fervid social passion takes grandeur and op- 
 ulence in his heart. Yet the more the individual has fired 
 
Ot> THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 and fixed his appetences in the constitution of naturehood, 
 the more the harsh, constrictive determinations of the pri- 
 vate self clutch his faculties into inhumanity, ravage and 
 destroy the generous sensibilities and set the mark of the 
 beast upon his brow. 
 
 Now the charm that modern life has for strong characters 
 of this inhuman type, consists in the fact that the planet 
 has been thrown open, that wherever spoil is to be found 
 they are free to venture ; and that the men of push and dar- 
 ing were never so armed and equipped for the spoilage as 
 is now. Depend upon it, our Csesarsare not to be disarmed 
 by any Senate or impeded by any Rubicon. How great 
 has Bismarck grown by his mastery of the opportune, yet 
 how contemptible ! an empire of savants, philosophers, 
 scientists, men of charming culture and illustrious art, held 
 by him of less account than household lackeys, and scribes 
 of his reptile press. And we too have our petty Bismarcks, 
 great in all but in that which remains to him of a faded, 
 tarnished luster. Nay, Plutocracy, in its thousand mil- 
 lionaires, knit to one ever-hardening, ever-solidifying, ever- 
 concentrating Gold-Colossus, master-piece upon the board 
 of Evil Destiny, holds more than Bismarckian dare and 
 dash ; more command of press and legislature ; more abso- 
 lute knowledge of what to do, and how and wherefore and 
 to what end the doing must serve, than he. The modern 
 opportune leads strong men of greed to unknown bulk and 
 bight of evil greatness : then the zeit geist enforces their 
 consolidation, and mankind is their spoil : it is broken at 
 their feet. 
 
 Yet if there is on earth a new race of giants, their path 
 is disputed by "offspring of the gods." Men heard the call, 
 "be oriented!" and lifted brow and bosom to the morn's in- 
 telligence. Again the call, "be orbed!" so they round 
 
T HE N E W R E P U B LI C . 57 
 
 to englobed, irradiated spheres of living reason. Now at 
 last the summons, "be constellated!" orb after orb they 
 swing to find their place and function in the ascending so- 
 cial solidarity. Are the human heavens silent still ? So- 
 cialism shall yet lead mankind into her march of harmony 
 by the music of the spheres. 
 
 But as men thus orb and constellate they brighten : the 
 mind becomes more mental ; the senses more sensitive ; the 
 passions more passionate ; the endurances more enduring 
 and persistent. The attractions attract and the repulsions 
 repulse, by chords that rise in the rhythm of evolution. 
 
 If our pseudo "civilisation was nothing if not artificial," 
 yet its nothingness becomes apparent as it is found to be 
 artificial : its doom is written, in that it is not humanly but 
 artificial. The firmest of artificial alliances are proving un- 
 able to withstand the evolutionary currents that wheel the 
 quickening and orbing lives into the association of their fit- 
 nesses by the attraction of concurrent sympathies. 
 
 The great, free Social Manhood is yet to come. The la- 
 tent potence of our humanhood is evidenced in the fact that 
 the intuitive sympathies of the race are in accord with real 
 greatness. Social Nationalism, notwithstanding its material 
 promise, is distrusted, because of the apprehension that its 
 establishment may lead to the creation of a race of compla- 
 cent and fatted mediocrities : it is always the level that is 
 wearisome and monotonous. 
 
 The race cannot survive, lighten or enjoy in the default 
 of its brilliant characters : however clear the lamp-light 
 still the heart hungers for the stars. Yet man by his hu- 
 manhood is a being of infinite variety : the characteristic 
 of real genius is that it is instinctively socialistic. All the 
 dramatists are in Shakspere : all the humanists are in Christ : 
 it is the social passion that liberates the special genius in 
 8 
 
58 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 eacli demonstrative and creative man. Those mighty Bre- 
 thren of the Past, who wrought forth the idea of their life 
 into splendor and fruitfulness because the social passion 
 was energetic within.them, — they stand before us, they beck- 
 on on, as if to say, "The social passion of the race made its 
 tabernacle within us : this was the foundation and this the 
 greatness of our labors. Ripening through growths of lat- 
 ter ages, the social passion waits to tabernacle and achieve 
 in you." 
 
 Yet Humanity is only for the human ; its socialism only 
 for the social. Our Nation is dominated and overcrowded 
 by its dwarfs : the misfortune is, that the dwarfed heart, 
 mind, sensation, imagination, faith and trust are made the 
 measure beyond which, whoever transcends is made a mark 
 for distrust, denial ; almost an outcast among men. 
 
 Still, if the age greatens and men do not greaten with it. 
 this is because they egoise against the greatness. If the age 
 deepens and men do not deepen with it, it is because they 
 shallow themselves that they may hide away in their petti- 
 nesses from the tides of the on-coming deep. So, if men 
 egoise whilst the age seeks to socialise, it is because the pri- 
 vate self shrinks from the heroic pursuits, the disciplines, 
 the darings that make for the vast human good. The more 
 vital part of the human faculties are in perpetual eclipse. 
 Egoism holds but at most the lunar light : the richer worths 
 of the solar ray are lost to us because it is only by means 
 of the social passion that the bosom attracts and absorbs 
 the human aura of the sun. 
 
 The great men of the Egoists are but brazen and pillared 
 mediocrities. Egoism severs the tap-root of the human tree. 
 Observe any coterie of Club-men or Turf-men, or Bank or 
 Railway magnates, or Cabinet Ministers ; on the whole they 
 are miserable. Their enjoyments are coarse and feverish : 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 50 
 
 they inhabit an atmosphere of suspicions. They journey 
 at a swinging gait, hut this is because they ride the croco- 
 dile : they see their ruined rivals trodden beneath the feet 
 of the beast, and they know that the rivals rode once where 
 they ride now : they know too that a twist, of the reins, a 
 slip of the foot, a careless motion may hurl them down to 
 be as the rivals are. 
 
 Paradise is in the air : the atmosphere of our social hope 
 is impregnated by diffused elysium. This utterance pro- 
 ceeds in that promise ; but there is also an air of terror. 
 The toiling masses of the People can be led through miser- 
 ies, disappointments, ruinous calamities : on, to a certain 
 point, they may be driven by their task-masters like cattle 
 toward the shambles. Starvation of the body, starvation 
 of mind, heart and hope ; starvation that with spectral 
 shadowing extinguishes the fire of the 'hearth and slays the 
 comfort of the bed ; that smites the babe upon its mother's 
 bosom and shrouds at last that mother for the grave ; — this 
 in its long approaches is endured, but in the last extreme it 
 loosens the passion of revenge, the desperation of ruin that 
 is latent in the naturality of man : it leads forth a storm of 
 mania that is the opposite of the evolutionary whirl. 
 
 When the cry is heard, " Bread or blood !" the Plutocratic 
 Rulers may well tremble. This is not so far off, by the law 
 of the alternative, but that quickening senses may now feel 
 it tingling toward them. If all the promise of the past is 
 latent in our Nation for the evolution of its social human- 
 hood, the savagisms, the barbarisms of all that past lie latent 
 in its animalised cupidities. Coiled like gigantic serpents, 
 they wait, if roused and unfettered, to whirl forth upon the 
 land in all the power and deadliness of wrath that is im- 
 
60 T H E If E W R E P tJ B L I C . 
 
 plied in such enormous heredities. Then reason is no- 
 where : the instinct of self-preservation is lost, is swallowed 
 up in the final instinct of destruction. The wise of old 
 have written: "It is dangerous to trifle with the avenging 
 fates." 
 
 Now there is here a body of toilers, men and women, 
 numbered by millions, to whom every outrage offered to 
 the fellow is felt as a personal indignity, a dart that quivers 
 and rankles in their own flesh. In this common multi- 
 tude, made one by the sympathy and sensitiveness of the 
 common outrage, this latent mania exists in full force, but 
 is held hitherto in the consensus of repression. It struggles 
 and is forced down : it heaves again and again, made by 
 each new indignity less patient, more determined, more ter- 
 rible ; loosening by little and little the accustomed restraints 
 that held it in subjection. 
 
 "Bread or blood!" — at any hour when the cry lifts wide 
 and persistent the mania may emerge. There is not here 
 to meet it, as in Europe, the obedient force of millions of 
 soldiery. Our government does not rest on force : it is 
 based on popular consent. These thousands of millions of 
 dollars of the People's earned wealth, these hundreds of 
 thousands of square miles of the People's heritage are ap- 
 propriated by the capitalistic few, whose title holds only by 
 pen and ink that has no binding force, excepting for so far 
 and so long as the People is acquiescent. 
 
 Let a whirl of mania forestall the final outlet of the whirl 
 of evolution, and the insurrectionary explosion may flash 
 across the continent, from sea-board to sea-board, between 
 the rise and set of sun. Then the rule of the prudent wise 
 of the multitude is lost in the reign of the Terror. Mania, 
 the infernal goddess, whose hand brandishes the torch, 
 may show by it the road to the guillotine. For the last 
 
TI-lE NEW REPUBLIC. 6i 
 
 quarter of a century we have filled up the land with the dis- 
 contented myriads of the old world : they came expecting 
 freedom, hut have found new servitudes : they cameled on by 
 hope : they sit down brooding and sullen with despair : the 
 skies do not brighten to them, they darken and darken on. 
 
 Social Nationalism and the kindred preparatory move- 
 ments, by instilling hope and patience into the oppressed 
 masses, hold in suppression the explosive forces : but these 
 forces are approaching terribly near the surface : the limits 
 of the safety-line are very nearly overpassed. 
 
 Men have a curious habit of shutting the mental eyes to 
 what they dislike or are afraid to see. Another habit, when 
 successful, is that of thinking, in their phrase, that "old 
 Mr. Luck will always be good to them." This habit holds 
 possession of the average American mind. "No nation 
 was ever so successful as ours ; therefore it must always be 
 successful." They forget : this nation has been in rapid 
 motion : a thousand years of result have been whirled in- 
 to one century. Living so fast, it has lived almost to its end : 
 its to-morrow is with Death. It may rise again, a New and 
 Glorious Republic, socialised humanely to the resurrection 
 of the just ; but, as to its present form, movement, custom 
 and environment, it must first die. 
 
 It was the saying of Mencius, the ancient Chinese sage, 
 that "the object of knowledge is the discovery of the lost 
 mind." Now man has found his superficial mind, that of 
 the ego, his private self; and in it has found sublime 
 thoughts, vast germs of theogonies, philosophies, poesies, 
 humanities, that lie heaped, stranded on its margin like 
 treasures from some rich-freighted foreign Argosy that has 
 foundered in the seas. 
 
62 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 The shores of man's vast naturality are heaped with the 
 vestiges, and they constitute the wealth and worth of his 
 intellectual possessions. But he uses or misuses them as 
 might the barbarian :this drifted statue serves for a god in 
 the shrine of his fetishistic worship ; those relics of supreme 
 culture for the adornments of his tinsel literature. 
 
 "Whence came all these ? They have washed up from the 
 Lost Mind, from the buried social reason, the suppressed, 
 submerged intelligence of the social passion. All religions 
 of amenity, all charms and graces and virtues in society, 
 all that is truly sweet and dignified in human relations, 
 all that is logical and immortal in the human hope were 
 born in the social passion of the common breast ; flung 
 forth to revelation through quickening faculties of the so- 
 cial mind, and led to stature and persistence through the 
 toiling, battling energy of the incipient social purpose. 
 
 Now man, born into naturehood, is not as to his realness 
 of natural origin. The acorn does not need that it should 
 be planted in a grove of oaks to put forth the oak's quality 
 and reveal' its peculiarity. The wolf cub or the ape babe 
 does not need that he should be nursed and bonded in the 
 wolfery or apery to evolve the instinct and cunning and 
 fashion of his wolfishness or apishness : these are forms of 
 nature, egoistic fantasies and formulas that are capable of 
 evolution to full structure of their own species in their soli- 
 tary individualism. Contrariwise the human babe, for 
 the evolution of its humane quality, is dependent on its 
 social environment. The proof of this is found in the fact 
 that if the bo} T infant is stolen by wolves and introduced 
 into the cave where the dam suckles her cubs, he will feed 
 at her teats ; he will grow up with the young wolves as 
 brothers and sisters ; he will travel on all-fours ; his lan- 
 guage will be mere whine, bark and growl ; he will dive 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 63 
 
 for the fish like an otter and eat them raw ; he will pursue 
 the round of ferocious animal pleasures, ignorant entirely 
 that he is not wolf, but man. 
 
 Man, born with the germ of humanhood folded in and 
 throughout the structure of his naturehood, can only com- 
 mence to evolve and display the human quality as the so- 
 cial touch of the human species makes a connection, by 
 means of which that which is inmost and truly real within 
 him may commence to elaborate and grow forth to surfaces. 
 Humanly he is a germ that cannot grow excepting as it 
 finds a substance and form of humanhood that shall serve 
 as environment. By whatever there is of humanhood in 
 the family, the babe is taught to walk rationally upright. 
 But the humanhood in the family is still a struggling, not 
 a triumphant force ; the really human family has yet to come ; 
 its naturehood transubstantiated to the flesh and blood of 
 the humane divinity. 
 
 The child grown to youth, if of such human potence 
 that he can hold the upright attitude, is famished for social 
 food. According to his genius he searches for that food 
 through religion, books, arts, the drama, poesies, heroisms, 
 philosophies, sciences. In these he shapes environment ; 
 in these he creates for himself the vaster family. 
 
 He earns his bread by sweat of brow ; toils perchance 
 all the daylight under the wage-master. — Night comes and 
 his poor room opens : he is companioned there by each 
 illustrious character whose fires have touched to him by 
 the hand of art, or by the magic of the written page. He 
 becomes, as they say, "a self-made man." — Not self-made! 
 The form in which that virginal intelligence uplifts to en- 
 rich mankind by new discovery, is the form that the envi- 
 ronment of the saints and sages and artist-heroes, his 
 familiars, fashioned and ingenerated in his flesh. Grows 
 
b4 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 he at length to be, in the old phrase, "inspired of God?" 
 Yea, truly. The Supreme Power in evolution instars a 
 splendor upon his brow, by so much as he took in this vast 
 environment and made it invironment ; wrought of its woven 
 folds, as we may say, a second nature. So drew in the bosom 
 to grasp the rhythms of the nobler inspirations ; so trans- 
 posed the action of the brain that he might think and 
 reason from cause to effect, and thus from infinite to finite. 
 For evolution, that it may evolve to round upon the globe, 
 to fashion and transform its institutes, is dependent upon 
 the environment in which its instruments are clad and 
 armored for the fulfilments of its purpose. 
 
 To call forth the lost mind is to find man again. What 
 offense could be so unforgivable as the offense of instilling at 
 one stroke into all the milk that mingles with the morning 
 food of every child on the continent, a slow, rotting poison ; 
 corrupting the growing, incipient humanhood in each, and 
 devoloping the seeds of the instincts of animal ferocities. 
 
 This is what our civilised individualism does : its envi- 
 ronments-are so fashioned, so surcharged with the greeds 
 and despotisms of all self-vice, that they flow as a constant 
 element of seeming nutrition into the soft, hungry, recep- 
 tive, indiscriminative sensitives of this vast childish body 
 of incipient, dependent mankind. "Wait:" cry our amiable, 
 intelligent conservatives; "when the race becomes angelic, 
 they will accept the environments which you propose." 
 Can they not see? The few heroic constitutions overcome 
 in part the daily poisons on which conservatives insist that- 
 all infants shall be fed: meanwhile the poisons make an 
 ever-growing flood, bearing generation after generation 
 down through defilements to the last corruption. 
 
 If it be a sin which grows to infamy, that man persists in the 
 degradation of his own human, how many million-fold a sin 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 65 
 
 is it, that he should persist in strengthening, enlarging and 
 making permanent the inhuman environments that by con- 
 current action dehumanise, age by age, the masses of the 
 peoples of the globe. Write this so deep, so high, so broad 
 that, wherever man turneth,the fire of the letters shall burn 
 in upon his brow; "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the least 
 of these my little ones ye did it not unto Me." Accept this 
 as the logic of the statement : they who persist for the dura- 
 bility of environments that corrupt and ruin the human- 
 boo 1 in man, are themselves guilty of his blood. "Am I 
 my brother's keeper?" — Thou art ; and as thou keepest him 
 so shall God keep thee. 
 
 Yet here we are confronted with another class of facts, 
 another series of laws ; the facts of the false heredity, the 
 laws of the action of the unreason. The suppression of the 
 ingermed racial consciousness, and the substitution there- 
 for of a superficial egoistic consciousness, results in the en- 
 thronement, as the temporary arbiter of destiny, of the 
 fictitious human being ; the enormous, proud, cultured, non- 
 social, anti-social and aggrandised ape. It is the ape, uni- 
 versally simulative, deceptive, a diabolised product of 
 naturehood, evolved through incipient manhood degraded 
 into baseness, that Bismarckises, that Bonaparteises, that 
 Gouldises, that McAllisterises, that Leopoldises ; — a fungus 
 ape-growth in rotted manhood, which asserts the human 
 in utter suppression of the humanly ; that clothes itself in 
 all the stolen robes, woven in the looms of social reason by 
 its social power, to flaunt its hideous deformity in the face 
 of heaven ; its food our human flesh, its drink our human 
 blood, its action our human waste and ruin. 
 
 It is the scientific, governmental, diplomatic, financial, 
 
66 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 mechanical man-ape, that by an inverted collectivity of 
 egoism is organised into the gigantic, opulent, overbearing- 
 fraud, which holds this attitude, and is massed in this huge 
 thing that fronts us in America by its aspect of Plutocracy. 
 It is this that the Nation, in the intelligent lawfulness of its 
 social manhood, must grasp by the throat and cast down 
 and extirpate once for all. 
 
 The Man-People is ridden tyrannically by the grinning, 
 hairy Deformity, the old man of the mountain that crept 
 on Sindbad in his sleep, and wound his hideous extremities 
 around the neck and made his seat upon the shoulders of the 
 wayfarer; whose limbs strangle, whose huge fist pounds upon 
 the brain and bosom, who makes of the man his beast of 
 burden and the wage-slave of his cupidities. This sums up 
 the situation. "Let us have peace," said Ulysses Grant, 
 after that last surrender at Appomatox. Let us have peace, 
 as Sindbad found liberty. He only found it when the foe 
 Avas extinguished beneath his feet.- 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Life is so bitter-sweet ; so chained in poverties, yet so filled 
 and burdened by suppressed wealth of infinite riches! Life 
 is so brief, by measure of the Hying years; so long when 
 one weaves into it, by fire of passion, and fulness of cul- 
 tures, and logic of right reason, and persistence of true en- 
 deavor the spiral round of the eternities ! 
 
 These gray hairs tell almost of the threescore years and 
 ten, yet it seems as but yesterday that the child's lips kiss- 
 ed to the mother's bosom. "To-morrow, and to-morrow, 
 and to-morrow, and all the ways tread on to dusty death?" 
 Nay, there is no death : our to-morrow is in God! 
 
 Resuming, in this discourse, a Public Ministry that has 
 
THE X EW R.E PUBLIC. Qi 
 
 been suspended for the last thirty years, words may be 
 pardoned that should not otherwise be spoken; a reminis- 
 cence be indulged in, that but for the end in view might 
 savor of vain-glorying. Avoiding hitherto the personal, 
 let me be forgiven if I employ it now. 
 
 In 1848 I was minister of the Independent Christian 
 Congregation in New York. There was a growing and 
 alarming body of Juvenile Destitution and Crime in that 
 city. During one pleasant summer week, for some un- 
 known reason I was unable to think out my usual discourse. 
 A strange brooding quietude and stillness possessed the 
 mental faculties. Saturday evening came, leading with it 
 a calm that became intense; that made in the senses a 
 suppressed thrill. 
 
 Retiring to the solitude of my study, it seemed that a 
 voice, which was rather intelligence than voice, filled the 
 air and played by a rhythm into the brain, generating 
 words ; "We wish you to write for us to-night." The same 
 voice, by an identical process seems with me now. 
 
 1 sat down at my desk, and the words of the Christ came 
 for a text ; "Suffer little children to come unto me and for- 
 bid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God." From 
 this I went on to write, as rapidly as words or symbols of 
 words could be traced on the paper ; yet with most absolute 
 self-possession, and concentration of mental passion. No 
 pause, no intromission of a foreign thought till the whole 
 was written : no cerebral excitement, but the continued 
 breathing rhythm, diffused in solemn yet joyful calm. 
 
 I read that discourse on Sunday morning to my great 
 congregation : read it in that same mystery of vibrating 
 intelligence, quivering with love, calm as the stillness of a 
 perfect night in mid-summer ; while from eye to eye it 
 seemed as if the hushed, melted audience diffused an atmos- 
 
BS THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 phere that held the dew of tears. 
 
 As the people rose unwilling to depart, Mr. Horace Greeley^ 
 one of the office-bearers of the Parish, stood up in his place 
 and requested the congregation to remain. A public meet- 
 ing was organised, and the "New York Juvenile Asylum" 
 was born from the deliberations. A committee of the Parish 
 was placed in charge of the initiatory work. 30,000 copies 
 of the sermon were distributed in pamphlet form as rap- 
 idly as possible. The discourse, in parts or in entirety, 
 was copied in leading dailies. And, heretical as the author 
 was considered, the sermon was preached verbatim on the 
 following Sunday from leading orthodox pulpits ; good 
 Dr. Muhlenburg, rector of the episcopal church of the Holy 
 Communion, prefacing by saying that it was borne on his 
 heart to address his people on the subject, but that this 
 discourse said what he wanted to say in better words than 
 any of his own. A charter was procured at the incoming 
 session of the Legislature : the gifts of the citizens of New 
 York were supplemented by a large public appropriation : 
 lands wero purchased and an edifice at once commenced ; 
 the good work so far accomplished. 
 
 The course of public life led me away from New York at 
 no distant period. The incident, was almost buried from 
 memory till some years afterward, a solitary wayfarer, in 
 the dusk twilight, weighted with huge griefs and burdens 
 of the People's care, I passed a great edifice, enclosed in 
 ample pleasure grounds, on an eminence in the suburbs of 
 the city. I heard from it the chorus of many voices of 
 children singing their evening hymn. I asked a passer by, 
 "What building is that?" He answered, "the New York 
 Juvenile Asylum." — Verily, "he that goeth forth and 
 weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again 
 with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 09 
 
 Xow I have? referred to the incident, that the application 
 may be to the present time. This great Columbia is an ampler 
 New York. Every man in it, every woman in it, is by the in- 
 most human a little child. Ah ! and how really destitute is 
 this child, this child People, pining for that divine human- 
 hood which can never be reached by any one, till it shall 
 be realised in the common society and enri ■hinent of all. 
 
 This Common Body of our Commonwealth is lacerated : 
 it Weeds at every pore : this common breast is ripped open : 
 these common senses and members are pollute 1, in the de- 
 filement of the land's daughters, and in the debasement 
 and profligacy of its sons. 
 
 The Rich know — and I appeal to them — that, gaining 
 wealth, they are still pauperised, defrauded from the vital 
 satisfactions, in the absence of which gain is but waste and 
 gold but misery. 
 
 The Poor — to them I appeal — they know, for they see 
 and feel, that mankind and womankind are rotting down 
 around them ; that there are worse griefs than those that 
 come from insecure employment and incomplete reward. 
 
 Sec ! man and wife look on these prattlers about the table, ' 
 these babies in the crib or on the breast. They dare not 
 forecast : they shrink utterly appalled from the thought, — 
 I cannot say it all: your sympathetic hearts will till the le- 
 sion, — the thought of the ominous, broken-hearted future. 
 
 Lo ! and this night — every night of the year — Hell 
 opens, organised, exacting, palpable, with its bloody sweat 
 dripping to the flagstones; and with its ribald blasphemy 
 an offense to every passer by. Hell opens; never closes; 
 the ever-growing and devouring, the ever-remorseless, the 
 ever-insatiable. 
 
 A gentleman whom I knew in New York said to me, in 
 effect, " You may think that these loot girls come mainly 
 
70 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 from the toiling classes. In the parlor of Madame I 
 
 made the acquaintance of so and so; a graduate of Vassar 
 College. On thus greeting her, she filled my astonishment 
 by telling me of seventeen girls from Vassar whom she 
 knew, who were in the city, and receiving gentlemen as she 
 was doing." 
 
 One such as these, yet unstained, is worth more in Hea- 
 ven's eyes and to God's heart than all this wealth of Stan- 
 ford. One such, in the utter loss, is more loss, on the scale 
 of human magnitudes and values, than if California with 
 all her riches went down to be buried in the sea. 
 
 Now I plead, I plead for the soul-flesh and body-flesh, the 
 soul-blood and body-blood of Living Columbia. I gather 
 up all this wealth of sonship that is blasting ; all this riches 
 of daughterhood that is withering, and show them to you. 
 I gather up all this mass of sordid, defiled, corrupted, ruined 
 manhood and womanhood, that around our feet becomes 
 wormy and serpentine; that soaks the air with vice, and 
 loads it with corruption. 
 
 I gather up in one, this great, glorious husbandhood and 
 fatherhood, this sacred wifehood and motherhood of America; 
 benignant, mighty, awful in force of character, beautiful 
 in fore-gleam of the immortalities. Then I say, Let us have 
 mercy on our own most vital qualities ; our own most as- 
 sertive virtues. Let us have respect to the fountains of our 
 enjoyments and the high sources of their beatitudes. Let 
 us find anew the springs of our origin and enter by full 
 movement into the flowings of our destiny. Let us cast 
 out from our temple the "money changers and those who 
 sell doves." Let us dare to penetrate to the vital fact of 
 Life, that is buried within this surface show of custom, ha- 
 bit, partisanship and rivalry. Let us once for all take in 
 this truth of truths, that for every sister that is ruined a 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 71 
 
 vital part of us is rotted ; that for ever}* man who goes to 
 wreck a vital part of us is deranged and withered. 
 
 Again I say, "Little children !" — Now then let the Father 
 speak in Christ, from the old gracious words, "Suffer little 
 children to come unto me, and forbid them not ; for of 
 such is the kingdom of God." 
 
 If Columbia can but open heart, mind and purpose to this 
 Brother Christ, this divine incarnation of fraternity in the 
 heart and flesh of man; — if she can bat compass the prin- 
 ciple that works to the social righteousness by the instant 
 and immanent laws of our common human evolution, the 
 miseries of the People shall roll from them as the stone 
 from the sepulcher, and their manhood and womanhood 
 shall rise, rilled with God, as if in all such goodly vastness 
 this Christ were risen. 
 
 Finally, if this speech is with an assurance of certainty, 
 it is not as from the religious or social enthusiast: these 
 are the matured convictions of the long-trained specialist 
 in public affairs. It is not the one side of Truth that helps, 
 especially in crisis and emergency : it is Truth in full circle, 
 rounded to the touch of every salient point and pressure of 
 the occasion. The study of this one life has been to be- 
 come a fall-centered, all-round man. 
 
 Each vital problem of man has its outer form and envi- 
 ronment of social-industrial bone, flesh, nerve and skin : 
 each political, industrial, social problem has its vital con- 
 tent and invironment of human thought, passion and pas- 
 sionate force. Each class, each specialty of human character 
 and condition, is played through by the vital currents that 
 make for the higher, the humanising and final evolution. 
 It is by the concurrence of all these vital currents, rising 
 
72 THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 by the rhythms of their sympathies through the luminous 
 and socialised man, that evolution pushes on to avouch and 
 demonstrate for the last conclusions. 
 
 Whoever would know mankind thoroughly, as he now is 
 and is environed, must mentally, feelingly and practically 
 enter into and abide in the fellowship of his universal ser- 
 vice. This, by the continuous duties of a half-century of 
 humane toil, I have sought to do ; till, standing in the door- 
 way that opens from the co npletel round, I find and meet 
 mankind, full breast. And man is still precious; more 
 precious, in that I have found the touch of the divinity 
 that survives within him, in spite of all the chronic malady 
 and defilement. 
 
 From this acme of result one thing at least is logically 
 evident: it is this, that given the men, evolutionised into 
 the spirit and passion of the service ; given a quickening 
 of the masses; given the ho/ir of the opportune, it is no 
 more a matter of difficulty to organise the New Republic, 
 throned iivthe structures of fitting environment, crowned 
 with the splendid lights of a supreme human intelligence, 
 than it was for the Argonauts of '48 to open the treasures 
 of the placars, and fur their successors to establish this pre- 
 sent Statehood. 
 
 But evolution now is reaching to the result for which all 
 the advance of former struggle was but preparative. The 
 complex structure that we know as Civilisation has reach- 
 ed the utmost verge to which it can travel on the lines and 
 levjh, anl by means of tin activities of the private self, 
 and its mutually repe lant and adverse individualisms. 
 The People touches to the last stone of the road, whence 
 there is no further path of advance on the present lines of 
 human travel. Beyond this is but ascent, or downfall into 
 ruin. The Hour is pregnant: the evolutionary forces are 
 
THE NEW REPUBLIC. 
 
 involving stores of energies; making of the deeper, the 
 more interior vessels of the human system treasuries, mag- 
 azines, laboratories for the fiery and fluid powers. 
 
 Surely there is a way, could it be found, by which these 
 laws and forms of humane social relations might be so pre- 
 sented, that this whole body of the common vital People 
 might hear them gladly and accept them cordially, as was 
 once of old : then might it be said, "the fields are white al- 
 ready for the harvest ;" then might be fulfilled that ancient 
 social prophecy of "a nation born in a day." 
 
 The People's breast is pregnant with all manner of good 
 and fruitful seeds. These obsolete customs, jealousies, dis- 
 sentions, superstitions ; these swinish and wolfish environ- 
 ments bite and freeze upon that vast bosom. All are afraid 
 to suffer the social worths that are in them to cleave the 
 bulb, and put forth the tender springing leaf. 
 
 Servitors are called for by the Hour, so inspired and re- 
 dolent of this human heat and radiancy that, entering among 
 the People, they shall meet and overcome these bitter 
 storms and colds of winter wherein the better life is buried 
 and the days are slain. 
 
 A multitude of clear thinkers, who are yet cold thinkers, 
 are ready to admit and to hope for the grand national-in- 
 dustrial result, but this only as a consequence of very slow 
 and partial change. They see the New Boston of "Look- 
 ing Backward" lifting possibly by the close of another thou- 
 sand years. 
 
 The Nation is socially barbaric : be this granted. Bur- 
 ied in naturality ; unable to conceive of its own latent hu- 
 manhood : be this also granted. Yet was not Ireland a con- 
 geries of raging savage hordes ? Then did not the youth 
 10 
 
74 THE NEW EEPUBLIC. 
 
 Patrick, solitary, unfriended, unarmed, venture into the very 
 heart of it ? Did not an humane civilisation quicken by 
 his touch ? Did not that rugged mass of harsh and cruel 
 barbarism melt from granite to warm soil, open for sowings 
 of the generous and kindly harvest? Did not Augustine 
 penetrate the gloomy recesses of Albion and, as by the wav- 
 ing of extended arms, cleave and clear the wilderness for 
 the rising cultures of a quickening mankind? 
 
 Has the race so hardened and chilled since then that 
 Histoiy cannot repeat itself to that higher result of evolu- 
 tion which these old transformations shaped for and pre- 
 figured ? It is always safe to trust the latencies of evolution, 
 when their ascending pressures are felt moving through 
 the great Common Heart. It is always safe to make the 
 final and supreme appeal, not to the instincts of the feed- 
 ing animal, but to the reasoning enthusiasm of the yearn- 
 ing man, in whom the Power dwells that would lift him up 
 to stand, according to the potence and promise of his origin, 
 revealing the insociate likeness of Almighty God. — " Accord- 
 ing to thy faith so shall it be to thee." 
 
 Let Boston but find her Patrick, her Augustine, and a 
 sublimer vision than that of Bellamy will greet her ; even 
 as if the hanging curtains of the mirage vanished, to reveal 
 on solid soil the paradisal familisteries and temples of an 
 actualised Apocalypse. The environment follows the man. 
 The energy of transforming Character moves on, in the logic 
 of the event, to shape its out-birth in transformed environ- 
 ments of institutions. 
 
 For this waits New York, Chicago, New Orleans, San 
 Francisco, — each great mart and center of thought and toil. 
 By this the shadowed Ethiopa of our dark belt shall " stretch 
 forth her hands to God," and so embrace the Social Deity. 
 Prophesy to these dry bones of Nationality ; and the dry 
 
T HE X K W E E P U B L 1 C . , ; » 
 
 bones shall live, and stand up as in EzekieFs vision ; an ex- 
 ceeding great and mighty host. It is not now "educate" alone: 
 it is inspire and educate: bear the uplift on through the 
 propaganda of social education. Repeat in social worth of 
 work the miracle of Wesley's impoverished but irresistible 
 itinerancy. Hearts must be converted and opened to the 
 social passion, as once they were initiated to the individual 
 promise of the life eternal. 
 
 No more needs here be said. "They who are wise" in 
 this emergency "shall shine as the sun," and they who 
 lead this bewildered, constrained and perishing many into 
 the enduring organic form of the People's social righteous- 
 ness "as the stars forever and ever." The evidence and 
 fulfilment of the promise is open to every one who rises to 
 welcome, and persists to entertain and serve the Genius of 
 the Hour. 
 
 Open thy vast womaned heart, thou Mother Columbia! 
 Reach forth immaculate arms, wide to the farthest, and 
 low to the poorest of thy babes. Speak thou, in tones as 
 when the Master spake, and the grave opened, and the 
 dead heard and arose and lived again. Call thou, that thine 
 own who love thee may inspire life, purpose and courage 
 by the spirit of the message : " Suffer little children to come 
 unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom 
 of God." 
 
J 
 
Appended Note. 
 
 There are, as I think, two strong tendencies, each seeking for expres- 
 sion through the industrial agitation of our time. There is first, on the 
 outside, a tendency to the formation of a system of action in lines of 
 material advance, pure and simple. Unless I am mistaken — which I 
 truly hope that I may be — there seems to be an impulse in certain 
 quarters to push the movement upon the lines of the economic ; to 
 bring about legislation that proffers a sure and abundant recompense 
 for material labors, by means of the appeal to educated and enlight- 
 ened selfishness. We in America have been so inbred to the commer- 
 cial spirit, so accustomed to make of each humane service a matter of 
 mere dicker, to rely upon considerations addressed to the interests of 
 the private self as weapons for the advance of change and the ameliora- 
 tion of institutions, that there is a persistent reluctance to the com- 
 plication of affairs by any introduction of the pure ethic. 
 
 There are inevitably, as Mr. Gronlund puts it, " two temperaments 
 among us, those of an individualistic and those of a socialistic temper- 
 ament," In other words, there are men, and able men, who endeavor 
 to think out the problem, and enforce the methods of the occasion from 
 the ground of the finite, private ego. Now, the educated private ego 
 sees full well the material side of all this splendid opportune : to its 
 vision all the kingdoms of this world and all the powers of them, the 
 wealth, the art, the pleasure are easily within the grasp of the huge, 
 organised multitude, which by the conflux of ego to ego shall be able 
 to uplift and throne that common private self in its resplendent but 
 superficial paradise. 
 
 The present capitalistic system is bleeding to death ; it is committing 
 suicide. There is but one remaining alternative at the service of the 
 concentrated Plutocracy : that is, boldly and decisively, to adopt the 
 form of National Collectivism as the clothing for its own spirit, The 
 associated interests that command Congress, legislatures, courts, parties ; 
 the nation's wealth, implements and soil; its army, navy and police; if 
 
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 they but in this emergency are wise to the full wisdom of their selfishness, 
 have it possibly in their power to suppress the humanly in man, by the 
 shaping of compromised adjustments that shall satisfy the measure of 
 his civilized animality. The Gold Colossus, master-piece upon the board 
 of Evil Destiny, may be able yet so to array bishops and castles and 
 knights and pawns, as to combine in its allegiance the present opposing 
 forces ; unless perchance the Power behind evolution wills that it shall 
 be otherwise. 
 
 Some are already saying, " narrow the question down to the mate- 
 rial." The issue that awaits, is between these two policies, the ethical 
 and the material. Mr. Gronlund says again, " I am more and more 
 convinced that Karl Marx's doctrine, that the bread and butter question 
 is the motive force of progress, is not tenable ; but that we must grasp 
 the very highest moral and religious truths." Is there or is there not an 
 infinite human truth, which is to the vast public movement of the time, 
 as the soul of the man is to the body of the man? If so, are we to ignore 
 that infinite human truth? The Master of Nazareth, were he here now, 
 would hardly be able to find a place, certainly not a full expression of 
 his thought, in any periodical which would object to the consideration 
 of the problem of the humanly, in its devotion to the economic. 
 
 I have sought in these pages, in some tentative and I fear very imper- 
 fect way, to set forth this fact of the humanly: to show that this vast 
 social movement that seeks to become organic environment should nu- 
 cleate, not around a common greed, but around a common God. I speak 
 but as a pupil and under great embarrassments ; yet I speak because the 
 burden is upon me. 
 
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