Through the last four or five years, the doctrine of Association has been widely disseminated through the country. The labors of its ardent advocates, few but faithful, have been ably seconded by some portion of the press, and both have been immensely aided by the course of events. The great themes of political discussion in our day--the tariff and the currency--lead directly to a consideration of the conditions of labor, of the relations between producers and products, of mutual rights and respective interests of employers and employed. The existence of extreme destitution and consequent misery in the midst of general prosperity and plenty, of willing hands vainly seeking employment amid unsurpassed industrial activity and thrift, cannot have escaped attention. The disasters resulting from industrial anarchy, from "strikes" of operatives for higher wages or fewer hours of labor, the stoppage of work by combinations if not by outright violence, arrest general attention. Truly the remedy for these errors and evils has yet been perceived and embraced by comparatively few, but the conviction that the present organization of industry cannot be advantageously maintained, and some radical change is at hand, must have already forced itself upon very many intelligent and candid minds. The readjustment of the relations of capital and labor on a basis of harmony and mutual advantage, is manifestly the great problem of the age. But that a change is at hand is evident: the practical question regards not its probability or certainty, but its character. The more intelligent and wealthy class have it in their power so to mould this change as to render it peaceful, gradual and universally beneficent; or they can turn a deaf ear to the calls of humanity, and let the demagogue, the envious, the selfishly discontented, pervert it into an engine of convulsion, destruction and desolation. As in the days of King John, the barons laid the foundations of English political liberty, so in our day the intellectual and philanthropic may guide the car of progress, and in establishing industrial harmony may secure to all but the stubbornly vicious or incurably afflicted, true independence and ample means of subsistence and development; or they can indolently leave all to the benighted and malignant, and see reproduced a war of classes, different indeed in its weapons and its physical aspects, but not different in its essential character from the ravages of France by the _Jacquerie_ or the butcheries of the reign of terror.