This world has not been fit to live in fifty years. There is no liberty in it--very little. Why, it is only a few years ago that all the Christian nations were engaged in the slave trade. It was not until 1808 that England abolished the slave trade, and up to that time her priests in her churches and her judges on her benches owned stock in slave ships, and luxuriated on the profits of piracy and murder; and when a man stood up and denounced it they mobbed him as though he had been a common burglar or a horse thief. Think of it! It was not until the 28th day of August, 1833, that England abolished slavery in her colonies; and it was not until the 1st day of January, 1862, that Abraham Lincoln, by direction of the entire North, wiped that infamy out of this country; and I never speak of Abraham Lincoln but I want to say that he was, in my judgment, in many respects the grandest man ever President of the United States. I say that upon his tomb there ought to be this line--and I know of no other man deserving it so well as he: "Here lies one who having been clothed with almost absolute power never abused it except on the side of mercy." 340. Swedenborg Swedenborg was a man of great intellect, of vast acquirements, and of honest intentions; and I think it equally clear that upon one subject, at least, his mind was touched, shattered and shaken. Misled by analogies, imposed upon by the bishop, deceived by the woman, borne to other worlds upon the wings of dreams, living in the twilight of reason and the dawn of insanity, he regarded every fact as a patched and ragged garment with a lining of the costliest silk, and insisted that the wrong side, even of the silk, was far more beautiful than the right. 341. Jeremy Bentham The glory of Bentham is, that he gave the true basis of morals, and furnished the statesmen with the star and compass of this sentence: "The greatest happiness of the greatest number." 342. Charles Fourier Fourier sustained about the same relation to this world that Swedenborg did to the other. There must be something wrong about the brain of one who solemnly asserts that "the elephant, the ox and the diamond were created by the Sun; the horse, the lily, and the ruby, by Saturn; the cow, the jonquil and the topaz, by Jupiter; and the dog, the violet and the opal stones by the earth itself." And yet, forgetting these aberrations of the mind, this lunacy of a great and loving soul, for one, that's in tender-est regard the memory of Charles Fourier, one of the best and noblest of our race. 343. Auguste Comte