During recent years we have seen in America a transformation which is without parallel in the history of the world. Till the middle of the nineteenth century the United States might be described as an agricultural country, which, apart from negro slavery, had no division of classes, no poverty, and no social question. It was a highly favoured region which to the most energetic and enterprising of the working classes of Europe had for generations been a Land of Promise. The early settlers had in the main brought from England all that was best and highest in respect of character, belief, and institutions. In particular, for the planting of New England the “finest of the wheat” was sifted from the most progressive counties of England; and as the area of emigration widened it embraced the best elements in the British Isles and in north-western Europe, the best endowed and the most progressive in the world. The country they came to live in had resources, and offered opportunities which were almost boundless. In the development of the country from the first settlement of Virginia, there was just enough of difficulty to stimulate and correct the energies of a free people. A marvellous set of new conditions came into operation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The industrial revolution ran its course with astonishing rapidity and thoroughness, and on a scale absolutely unprecedented. The Republic now has a gigantic machine industry and a vast railway and financial system organised in trusts which are controlled by a few men wealthy beyond example in history, and it has also got a large wage-earning class, the unemployed, poverty and slums. If the commonwealth has not already become a plutocracy, it appears to be on the downward way to it.