curity. And wherever individual right is a principle of the State, property cannot be securely held unless there is a uniform recognition of the right of pos session-a general right of contract--an equality of right, as sacred to the small owner as to the large,a general sense of justice-a condition where every man may have a reasonable prospect of being an owner by the exercise of care, thrift, and diligence. And thus an unequal distribution of the great incentives of life renders the holder of those incentives less secure, and works to the detriment of all. It is this disturbance of the equilibrium of the body politic which furnishes at once the exhaustless and restless energy of the steam interest, and the motiveless inaction of the tramp; the thrift and confidence of the class which in one way or another is artificially protected and stimulated, and the hopelessness of the unorganized, unguarded, and unprotected individual. The individual has this instinctive sense of wrong; and it is because he fails to realize the underlying causes of its existence that his resentment to the wrong expresses itself in something like a direct retort, in violent acts and false theories, and in the formation of such organizations as the Knights of Labor and the Socialists. We may call these injudicious and foolish ways; but they grow out of other injudicious and foolish ways; they are the product of wrongs which lie behind them; they are in the logic of events. The methods of reform which are employed belong to the category of evils which

it is intended to reform, and proceed in unconscious imitation of the very processes which constitute the evil. While the lex talionis is not a law of civilization, but of barbarism, the resort to it illustrates the fact that there are barbaric methods among us which have brought it into exercise. One such method generates another. Thus when a corporate power undertakes to over-ride the sanctity of contract, and when Knights of Labor undertake to over-ride this sanctity, the industrial law becomes supplanted by military force, and civilization steps just so far backward. Nevertheless, occurrences like these serve the important function of attracting more general attention to the existence of the disease in the body politic, through the careful study of which the truer means of correction are thus more likely to be at last developed.

Another question connected with steam and machinery, arising from the redundance of the means of subsistence which they create, although an important one, is not often discussed. This is the law of population—the tendency of population to grow more rapidly than the means of subsistence. The consideration of the distribution of products for human consumption is of itself but a is of itself but a partial and inadequate estimate of the whole economic relation. Since this kind of distribution is but a meting out of that which is consumed and appropriated by the race, it suggests, as correlatives, another distribution, or rather a series of distributions, concerning the race itself.

In other words, on one side there is an estimate of the qualities and quantities of the thing consumed and their adaptation to the consumer; and, upon the other side, there is the necessary estimate of quantity and quality of the thing consuming the product, and the adaptation of the consumer to the product. Therefore, comprehended in the whole question of distribution, there must be considered the distribution of the supply of the product as it affects the distribution of the supply or increase of the race. In the distribution of the supply of the race there is involved the distribution of the sexes, the distribution of human faculty and quality, and the tendency towards the increase of the race.

The evils which arise from the pressure of popula tion upon the means of subsistence are, however, clearly not those which oppress the human race today. It is by reason of the redundancy of the means of subsistence that to many these particular evils never seemed more remote than they do now. Indeed, many of the evils which are peculiar to today arise out of the very opposite of those conditions which are contemplated by the theory of Malthus. Besides the circumstance that they do not appear at present to be threatening, there is a sentimental reluctance to consider them, as being repugnant to our ideas of beneficence. Nevertheless, if they be true, neither the assumed remoteness of the consequences nor an ideal repugnance ought to prevent consideration of them as factors in the great problem.

A cyclone is not a beneficence, but it is a fact which must be taken into account in the consideration of phenomena. When Darwin, by his generalizations, established the fact that prolification of animal life has its limit only in necessity, this law of population became a central fact of biological science. Happily, it undergoes many important modifications in its application to human life. As Bonar says:

"If the fear of starvation, the most earthly and least intellectual of all motives, is needed to force us to work at first, it need not therefore be necessary ever afterwards. Within civilized countries, in proportion to their civilization, the struggle in the lowest stages is abolished; the weakest are often saved and the lowest raised in spite of their unfitness.'

In this view man is not an animal; he is a citizen, and population is checked, not only by these miseries and the fear of them, but by all the mixed motives of human society. In the redundancy of the means of subsistence which now prevail, may we not therefore come to find an intellectual improvement of the whole race, and therefore a permanent modification of the ratios heretofore existing? It may be that through the employment of machinery to lighten the general burden of labor there will result a reduction of this ratio; or it may be that from the combined resources of modern industry there will come a quickening of the faculties that will tend to

1 "Malthus and His Work," by James Bonar, London, 1885, p. 46.

I

repress excessive increase. Nevertheless, the main features of the law, as applicable to the human race, remain. We must therefore recognize the present ratio of excessive supply of subsistence as more or less transient. There are multiplying evidences that what has been called "World-Crowding" is progressing at an unprecedented rate. Steam, whilst it has for a time inverted the old ratio between fecundity and subsistence, has by so doing only served to stimulate to a greater degree the increase of population. The mouths are coming like germs to absorb the excess. At some time the forces of the means of subsistence and the growth of population will become equal in the race. Whilst, when this occurs, the influence of intellectual advancement may, as I have said, moderate the struggle, nevertheless the struggle in some degree or other must come, and whether it be fierce or mild, of one thing we may be assured, that the rapidity of the present progress of population of America, both by birth and immigra tion, is bringing upon us each year a severer requirement from republican institutions. The problem to the Anglo-Saxon unit is yearly growing more complex. The power of absorbing, appropriating, and assimilating the hundred millions of people which this land will have within twenty years, must of necessity be far more difficult of accomplishment

1 "World-Crowding," an address by Robert Giffen, President of the London Statistical Society; Social Problems," edited by Titus Munson

Coan, N. Y., 1883.