Day by day the labor question in its older aspects becomes of less and less importance. The relationship of master and servant is rapidly dying the death; co-operative farming and industrial partnerships must supersede it everywhere at no distant date. In these systems we shall find the remedy against the decline of trade with which the English-speaking countries of the earth are threatened. The existing system of labor is anti-democratic; it is at once productive of and founded on the existence of an aristocracy of capital and a servitude of workmen; and our English democracies cannot afford that half their citizens should be dependent laborers. If manufactures are to be consistent with democracy, they must be carried on in shops in which each man shall be at once capitalist and handicraftsman. Such institutions are already in existence in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Pennsylvania, and in Sydney; while at Troy, in New York State, there is a great iron foundery, owned from roof to floor by the men who work in it. It is not enough that the workman should share in the profits. The change which, continuing through the middle ages into the present century, has at last everywhere converted the relation of lord and slave into that of master and hireling, is already giving place to the silent revolution which is steadily substituting for this relationship of capital and labor that of a perfect marriage, in which the laborer and the capitalist shall be one. Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty trickery, no jealousy, no waste of time. Each man‘s individual interest is coincident with that of all. Where the labor is that of a brotherhood, the toil becomes ennobled. Were industrial partnerships a new device, their inventor would need no monument; his would be found in the future history of the race. As it is, this latest advance of Western civilization is but a return to the earliest and noblest form of labor; the Arabs, the Don Cossacks, the Maori tribes are all co-operative farmers; it is the mission of the English race to apply the ancient principle to manufactures. CHAPTER VIII. WOMAN. In one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind and strangely in advance of other democratic countries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the legal position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of man as it is in England or the East.