susceptible to all this and to something beyond. The Fair and the Lovely must be all an open page to him, but he must be still more susceptible to what rises above the naturally Fair and Lovely. It is his peculiarly to realise the Fit and Good; to unveil the hidden springs, and trace the embodiment of whatever is great in moral achievement and endurance. To trace the morally fit, the pure, the good, from its root-principle through its developments; and to detect and expose its counterfeits, through all its ramifications, is his peculiar vocation. Such service was always needed by society, but the demand for it has now become urgent, imperative. We need it to vindicate Religion and the Supernatural from a Naturalism, purblind as it is pretentious. We need it to trace, develope, and establish the laws and conditions of social well-being through the widening relations and ever-increasing complications of our Modern Society.

now.

XXXL-SOCIAL COHESION.

"That they all may be one."

THE idea of SOCIETY is not merely a cumulative product, it is an organic growth. Wants and interests, diseases and perils which come to be felt more and more as Society becomes complicated and consolidated, all enter into it. Every man of intelligence and culture has not only his individual desires, tastes, and interests; he feels himself part of a great living organism, to whose fortunes his own are bound, and by cords the most intimate and vital. Homilies about the trivialty of this life, and the insignificance of man and his pursuits here, sound rather strange to us We have run out of sympathy with that kind of talk; and not, necessarily, because we regard the future life as less important, but because we are compelled to feel an importance in the present life, and the existing constitution of things, such as men never felt before-that Society has momentous interests, and that the life of every man in relation to Society is of incalculable moment. In short, it has become as it were a part of our living consciousness that Society is a great, abiding, cumulative aggregate, and that whatever affects its well-being is matter of solemn concern to each of its members. And, if this sense-this consciousness of an organic social life had not grown in this age of free and world-wide trade, alongside the "Gospel of Supply-and-Demand," where should we have been? An unchecked, iron-hearted, rampant selfishness would have possessed and tyrannised over humanity. This compulsion to look to others as well as to ourselves-to note their wants, and care for their well-being-is a merciful compulsion. Its growing pressure is merciful. It gives ground to hope that this selfish phase of human

exertion is but a passing phase; that, in its higher as well as in its lower forms it will be overcome; that human life shall yet be purified from that soul-selfishness which is mainly taken up with "my own salvation," as well as from that secular selfishness which looks only to "my own profit." Man, as a savage, cares but for himself, or, if for any beyond himself, at most only for those to whom his passions and affections immediately attach him. The ties that bind men to each other multiply with their culture and their artificial or acquired wants. Relations of mutual interest are now established between the most distant peoples, and they increase and extend just in proportion as new wants arise, or more come to experience them. The various classes of men, and the various nations of the world are now interested in each other as they never were before. They cannot help being so though they would. They are not only impelled, they are compelled. We now require our brother's services so much that we must, in a sense, become his keeper. And to be so after the fashion of the Southern Plauter, or His Holiness the Pope, will not longer do. Coercion by the will of another is an anachronism whether it be physical or spiritual. The cords of organic life are taking the place of external force.

Yet synchronous with this there is going on an equally distinct and manifest process of disintegration. Wherever there are old political and social organisations, save in Christendom alone, this process may be observed. In Turkey, in China, in Japan we find the one common fact—a tendency to anarchy and social dissolution. In India our dominion has been interposed in arrest, so far, of the same process. Indeed, it will be due to the agency and influence of the Christian nations-direct and indirect-if it is anywhere averted, and in this work ours is the leading part. We have saved the Turkish Empire from utter disintegration. We are actively engaged in the dubious endeavour to maintain the authority of the Mantchou Government in China, and in subordinating the anarchical power of the Daimios in Japan. But the influence of our all-embracing commerce is, probably, still greater, as that is supplying a new cohesive element. Industrial activity is evoked, money is circulated, the ties and interlacings of an active commerce are spread, extended, and multiplied; a new life and new bonds come in to save the dying and disintegrating mass from utter dissolution. As a lively periodical writer remarks, the "rights and wrongs " of the case are neither " very keenly felt nor very profoundly examined. We want a Tycoon that can carry out our treaties, an Emperor who can make satisfactory arrangements at Pekin for the trade of the Yellow River, a Sultan who can offer a decently quiet life to residents at Constantinople, maintain our telegraphic communications, and keep up the price of Turkish securities."

But what must social ties become ere Society can realise a healthy, all-pervasive unity? The interests of men and nations-in the secular

and commercial sense-form an altogether insufficient bond. Their interests in the secular and commercial sense it is the interest of all men and nations to live at peace. Their interests! What more disastrous to all that we can conceive to be comprehended in the interests of the American people than for North and South to engage in this bloody, relentless war? Yet, though they were a people believed to be beyond almost all others alive to their interests, they are prosecuting this war with an augmenting and exterminating fury, almost if not altogether unexampled in the history of mankind. We have in this contest a most signal illustration of the feeble power of material interests as against enflamed popular passion.

The shock of this terrible conflict has vibrated throughout the world, paralysing industry and commerce in far separated regions. The disorganisation and ruin thence ensuing only serve to bring out into bolder relief the fact that the bonds which connect, which knit together, the different portions of the race are ever extending, multiplying, and becoming more intimate. Such are now the wants of human-kind that every people needs all the service every other people can render it. We cannot afford that there should be isolation, wanton destruction, or resources and productive powers lying undeveloped. The field is the world, and man's wants urge him on with a voice of ever-deepening energy to occupy it. We have compelled the Chinese to concede to us the rights and privileges of trade, and we are now in conflict with the Japanese— the most exclusive and isolated of all oriental peoples-for the same object. We are not now raising the question of the policy of such measures the fact that they have been taken, and continue to be taken, in spite of remonstrance, in the face of our more immediate and obvious interests, has its deep significance.

Nor is colonisation, in its progress and implications, less significant. Those regions of the earth where the indigenous population is sparse and held together by few social bonds are being invaded and peopled from those where society is complicated, and the social ties close and many. This colonisation contributes in two ways to the growing and extending social cohesion of the race. Relations, many and intimate, are maintained between these new communities and the old societies from which they have migrated, whilst the tribes among whom they settle must accept the essential conditions of civilized neighbourhood, or be repelled and bemmed in on narrower and still narrower ground, till they ultimately perish.

But, in these and in many other phenomena of our time-social, political, and international—we have clear and ever-accumulating evidence that the tendency, requirement, necessity of the time is-social cohesion. Even those things which seem most to militate against this conclusion confirm the fact. The wars and social convulsions of the time arise out

of the obstructions to it, and are working their reduction. What do they assail? Either tyranny, which has ever been an isolating force, or the forceful maintenance of slavery, each of which is essentially repugnant to social cohesion.

But the spirit of trade is by itself inadequate to effect and secure the social adhesion it demands. Its essence is selfish. Its object is gain. Its fundamental maxim-"to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest"-contemplates not the "greatest good of the greatest number," but the greatest good of "number one alone.

What is it that increases the need for mutual service? Increase of mutual wants. But, on the principle just referred to, each wishes to purchase the desiderated service at the least possible cost-that is, in plain terms, at the least amount of service in return. This is the principle which gives life to commercial activity, therefore commercial interest alone will not be an adequate social bond. This desire to render the lowest price, translated into the hard plain fact of every day human activity, means to get the largest amount of desirable objects at the least expenditure of labour. But human labour continues to be requisite, and such is the rate at which our wants grow and multiply, that, as a popular journalist has put it, "the class of the needy is as rapidly on the increase as the amount of the public wealth." We have enlisted immense mechanical powers, but our needs augment as fast as does its capacity of rendering us service. At their sources, so to speak, all commodities need much human labour. It is in agriculture, horticulture, mining, and building, that machinery does least for us. But the spirit of trade makes these slow and laborious occupations distasteful. Men will not be producers when they possess or can otherwise obtain the means of being purchasers. Of this we have sufficient proof in the dearth of breadstuffs and provisions in many of our colonies, where the agricultural resources are rich and limitless-where the soil needs but to be broken up and sowu to produce the most abundant crops. Indeed, as we have before had occasion to remark, all eschew or try to escape from productive occupations who are not kept to them by want or compulsion.

Must this tendency continue to increase? If so, with our modern facilities for trade and power of purchase, the outlook is not an assuring one. The Times lately told us that, if we have the power, we have a clear right to compel any people to trade with us. That is, to compel them, however unwilling, to sell us the commodities we want. But if this be a sound principle, will it not follow, that we have also a right to compel them to do the work which may be needed to produce the commodities? Yet what were this but to assert our right to reduce them to slavery? And, indeed, we may find a solution of the growing difficulties in the way of abolishing slavery and man-stealing, in the number and urgency of our wants, compared with the number of those who will voluntarily labour at

supplying them. Where should we seek a cure? In increasing the number of labourers, or in restricting our wants? We need not directly attempt either the one or the other. What we require is a force that will silently operate both ways. Where shall we find such a force? The spirit of trade does not supply it. We have the bane there, but, certainly, not the

antidote.

What if the evil lie, not in the number but in the character of our wants -not in the measure, but in the nature of the demand. When the wants of our sensuous nature predominate over the wants of our intellectual and spiritual nature, the predominance operates in a twofold way in destroying the industrial balance. By stimulating unproductive consumption, it diminishes the wages' fund; and it limits the labourer's freedom of choice and action, both as to the kind of work he will undertake and the locality in which he will labour. Had not the indulgence of sensuous wants (by themselves or their progenitors) kept our labourers poor, many of those who are now crushed and pinched at home would have been producers in our colonies. Through the thinning of the labourers' ranks, wages would inevitably have risen; whilst, but for the same unbalanced sensuous expenditure among the rich, there would have been an ample wages' fund to supply the higher rate. Nor would this be all or even half of the happy result. One reason why so many desert productive labour is because it is so poorly paid. They are tempted into business, or drawn to the professions, from the hope of realising larger incomes. But, proportioned to the subordination of sensuous wants would be an equitable re-adjustment of remuneration. Workmen would be better paid in proportion as there was a less urgent necessity laid on them to labour. The workman who can maintain himself without labour for so many months, or transport himself to another country where there is ample scope and demand, can make his own terms with those who require his services. The labourer in such a case is truly free, and the question at what he will work, and where he will work, just resolves itself into the question, at what and where he will obtain the highest remuneration? Wages would thus adjust the industrial balance, and, under these conditions, they would come the nearest possible to adjusting it perfectly. The highest remuneration would be required to draw men to the most disagreeable and laborious occupations, and the remuneration would rise till the supply became adequate.

And thus, too, would social friction be reduced to a minimum. The labourer would have no reason to envy the capitalist, when everywhere meeting him on a footing of equal independence. In fact, it would be within the power of every labourer to become himself a capitalist. Given a few years of health, and with adequate exertion and self-control he, too, may become an employer.

And as social friction would be thus diminished, so, proportionately,