This cluster of questions is not yet settled with regard to the inhabitants of any one country. The most advanced nations are now in a condition of internal conflict upon them. As for the larger idea,--that nations as well as individuals are "parts and proportions of one wondrous whole," it has hardly yet passed the lips or pen of any but religious men and poets. Its time will come when men have made greater progress, and are more at ease about the domestic arrangements of nations. As long as there are, in every country of the world, multitudes who cannot by any exertion of their own redeem themselves from hardship, and their children from ignorance, there is quite enough for justice and charity to do at home. While this is doing,--while the English are striving to raise the indigent classes of their society, the French speculating to elevate the condition of woman, and to open the career of life to all rational beings, the Germans waiting to throw off the despotism of absolute rulers, and the Americans struggling to free the negroes,--the fraternal sentiment will be growing, in preparation for yet higher results. The principle, acted upon at home, will be gaining strength for exercise abroad; and the more any society becomes like a band of brothers, the more powerful must be the sympathy which it will have to offer to other such bands. Far off as may be the realization of such a prospect, it is a prospect. For many ages poets and philosophers have entertained the idea of a general spirit of fraternity among men. It is the one great principle of the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind. It is the loftiest hope on which the wisest speculators have lived. Poets are the prophets, and philosophers the analysers of the fate of men, and religion is the promise and pledge of unseen powers to those who believe in them. That cannot be unworthy of attention, of hope, of expectation, which the poets and the analysers of the race, have reposed upon, and on which the best religion of the world (and that which comprehends all others) is based. That which has never, for all its splendour, been deemed absurd by the wisest of the race is now beginning to be realized. We have now something more to show for our hope than what was before enough for the highest minds. The fraternal spirit has begun to manifest itself by its workings in society. The helpless are now aided expressly on the ground of their helplessness,--not from the emotions of compassion excited by the spectacle of suffering in particular cases, but in a nobler and more abstract way. Classes, crowds, nations of sufferers are aided and protected by strangers, powerful and at ease, who never saw an individual of the suffering thousands, and who have none but a spiritual interest in their welfare. Since missions to barbarous countries, action against slavery, and the care of the blind, deaf and dumb, and paupers, have become labours of