The people of the United States cannot afford at any price to support a class which proposes to stay in one spot, making no endeavor to go further or go higher. No grade of society can afford to support such a class. The class itself cannot afford to remain in any such position. Allusion has already been made to the willingness of men of the present generation to enslave their fellow-men when they get special opportunity. The methods are not the same as of old, but the fact is the same and the practice is steadily fostered by the inability of a great number of men and women to impress upon the public any ability to be anything better than slaves. The workingman may take such consolation as there may be in the fact that this rule does not apply to him or to his own class alone. It exists everywhere. There are plenty of business houses who keep their men under their power, body and soul, by a custom, apparently founded on good nature, of lending them money in excess of their earnings. It is a modification of the South American _consistado_ plan, to which allusion has already been made, and it works just as well in New York or Chicago, or any other manufacturing centre, as it does in South America. A man who will not spend his earnings in advance if he can get them is pretty hard to find. If this were not so there would be very little of running to banks, by business men, for discounts and loans, and “shaves.” The impulse to discount the future is almost as old as the world itself. It dates all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when our first parents began to devour some fruit which they were not yet entitled to. It may be that slavery sometimes is pleasant. Indeed, it often is. In spite of all the bad stories that were told about the treatment of the southern blacks during old slavery days, there were a great many plantations from which the slaves did not run away, even after they heard of the Emancipation Proclamation, and knew, from what they heard in the dining-room and parlor, that the South was on its last legs, and that the good old times could not possibly come back again. There were many plantations found by the Union army, during its tramps through certain States, which the masters and the mistresses had abandoned, but to which the colored people clung closely, from old association alone, and were found there when the owners came back again. Slavery exists still in many portions of the world, principally eastern countries, and Europeans of high character and close observation have declared that the condition does not inflict cruel or unfair burdens upon the enslaved.