the dial of progress in democratic government. The Revolution was discredited in almost all eyes by its eventuating in a succession of ever more unspeakable horrors. A great reaction set in, and for thirty years after Napoleon was disposed of scarce any one around the whole world dared breathe a word against tyrants, or to treat as anything more than a rhapsody the doctrine that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. The very word "liberty" came to be suspect of sedition, where it was not used by tyrants themselves to deceive the people.

sat once more securely on their thrones.

ECONOMIC CHANGES SUPERVENE

66

Despots

The so notable subsidence of revolutionary sentiment did not mean that politically the world was content; it meant only that the world-masters had largely succeeded in tying the tongues of political reformers who would again venture to call in question the divine right of kings, or rhapsodize" over the universally inherent rights of man. Radical politics thus tabued, the drift of thought on social matters turned to questions of economics and the industrial life, which was taking on new phases. The situation of the workers had been rendered exceedingly critical since 1780 by the introduction of machinery to do work before done by hand, a change which completely revolutionized the whole system of production other than agricultural. The old order

of things under which every producer had, or could have, his own shop and in it his own simple implements, gave way to an order requiring capital to do anything, requiring buildings of some size, expensive machines, and many hired operatives. Enormous increase of efficiency was attained, greatly swelling the product and lowering its price in every industry, in almost every case driving the small producer, working in the old way, out of business, and forcing him to seek his livelihood as an employé in some large establishment. The number of persons thus compelled to turn to the great factories for employment far exceeded the demand for their services, as every man at a machine displaced a considerable number of hand workers, and they were inevitably brought into sharp competition with one another for what places there were, with the result that wages were next to nothing, barely what would suffice to keep body and soul together. So the centers of the new industry became promptly the centers of poverty and wretchedness, and such, to a somewhat less appalling degree, they have mostly remained to this day. At the same time the profits of the new productive enterprises, particularly in England where they were earliest developed, were very large, amounting to fifty, even one hundred or more per cent. on the investment, speedily building up great fortunes. The gulf between rich and poor deepened and widened, augmenting the hideousness of a spectacle always so sadly common, of two classes living, one flaunting, the other drudging,

both dying, side by side, and yet apart as heaven is from earth.

The hardships often extreme growing out of the industrial situation in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the miseries untold to which the toilers were reduced, tended vastly more to their discontent than ever had any tyranny of any government. It was the bourgeoisie, the middle class, that in 1789 quarreled with the king, led the Revolution, and profited by it. Fattened on the spoils of the church and the nobility, or prospered in new undertakings, they had become the comfortable, the well-to-do class. In all lands men of this class were pushing the great enterprises and reaping the great harvests. Naturally they were satisfied with things as they found them, loyal to the existing order. Not so with the burden-bearers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water; or they in yet worse plight who found no wood to hew, no water to draw. And these were and always have been the great part of the human race. They had been patient, all-enduring in building the pyramids of Egypt, the temples and hanging gardens of Babylon; with scarce a murmur they had tramped to their death over the world with the worldconquerors; but now some of them had acquired a little knowledge, some had seen better days, and not a few in face of starvation openly revolted at their lot. Here and there, in desperation, they marched on the mills and destroyed the machines, which they took for mortal enemies, invaders of their domain, plun

derers of the poor, snatching the food from their mouths, the clothes from their backs. * But this was to contend with fate, to fight against the gods. Laying hold of the forces of Nature and applying them to the work of production, putting upon them the burden of toil which human hands before had borne, is the great step forward in the industrial world, the greatest ever taken, the natural, inevitable step, and one which, under the proper social order, so far from inducing hardship to any one would have been fecund of blessing to all sorts and conditions of men round the whole earth, lightening every load, creating plenty, carrying into all households comfort, light, and joy. The very fact that multitudes were made miserable by the harnessing of steam and waterfalls to do the drudgery of life is itself proof positive that there was something radically wrong in the existing social order, something not to be glossed over, no minor defect calling for a little tinkering, but a structural viciousness, beyond remedy short of fundamental change.

To this view, after Napoleon's banishment had left Europe time to reflect, many thinkers came, and thenceforth with them the pressing problem was less a political than a distinctly social one. Some of them

* Shortsighted as this now appears to have been in the workers, in extenuation it is well to remember that even long after, many, including so distinguished a writer as John Ruskin, took the ground that the way out of labor troubles was to discontinue the use of machinery and return to hand-production.

saw and sympathized with the suffering and the ominous disquietude of the toilers, and with rare selfdevotion undertook measures for their relief; others, smitten themselves with a great unrest in view of the way the momentous social problem was left to drift, urged upon the State the duty, to take precedence of all other duties, of looking after the most vital interests of the great body of its people, and, by managing the great industries, prevent the abuse of them.

THE WORK OF SAINT-SIMON

The snows of only two winters had whitened the blood-drenched field of Waterloo when one of those geniuses came to the front who seem to rise now and then as if on purpose to make amends, materially or spiritually, for the losses inflicted on the world by another of their countrymen: * Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon. Of aristocratic birth, as his title indicates, Saint-Simon early freed himself of the exclusive feeling characteristic of his class; and seeing the backward trend of France, seeing too the wrongs done to the great mass of the toilers, who, driven to desperation by the situation in which they. found themselves, must ultimately, if denied social justice, either break out in violent revolution or so degenerate physically and morally as to imperil the

*It will be remembered that Huxley said of Pasteur that his material service alone made good to France the indemnity of five milliards francs paid to Germany, - price of the folly, not to say the crime, of Napoleon III.