The hopeful light thrown upon the future by the revelation of freedom and co-operative sympathy, as fundamental laws of true political economy, can only be fully perceived by those who have measured the evils of slavery and sounded the fearful depths of misery produced by unlimited competition. The revelations of the results of this phase of competition in which we are living are all around us, in every class of society, in every quarter of the globe. The mercantile system, which makes wealth and money synonymous, and reduces every interest to a subject of trade, spares no relation of life, and desecrates every rank of society. We need not go back to the crimes which Warren Hastings committed to fill his treasury. The same methods of crushing the weak for money, of bartering honour and conscience in the lust of gain, are going on at this moment in Asia and Africa, in the islands of the Pacific, in uncontrolled America, and enchained Russia. Its effects are seen in the Legislature and the courts of law, in all professions and trades, in the mansion and the lodging-house. Corruption and cruelty inevitably resulting from a false system of political economy, are barring the progress of the human race. In the present day we prostitute the superior strength gained by us from the principles of Christianity, to the debasement of human beings. Money being considered identical with wealth, sensuality reigns supreme. Money having under this system become the great means of gratifying material desires, the strife to obtain it becomes ever fiercer. The statesman regards it as a highest duty to open new channels of commerce for national activity, quite regardless of the conditions of mutual freedom and sympathy which make commerce legitimate. Whisky, opium, and gunpowder bring rich returns from the ignorant peoples to whom their use was hitherto unknown, and this wicked abuse of our superior intelligence is in strict accord with the short-sighted teaching of the political economy accepted by trade.[14] This species of trade, carried on without limitation, without the large intelligence of religious insight, must produce a fall of any race equal to the height of its development; for although ‘religion without science is a purblind angel, science without religion is a full-blown devil.’ It is into the last possible phase of limitless competition in buying and selling, that our nineteenth century has entered, by permitting one-half the race to become the merchandise of the other half. Under a specious hypocrisy, falsely styled freedom of contract, a modern phase of slavery is still exercising its influence in our midst; for the slave-holding principle that the human body may be an article of merchandise is still applied to women, and conscience is still dead to the essential principle of freedom--viz., the sacredness of the human body, through which the soul must grow. CHAPTER II