But the enormous developments of science and of industry have of late years opened newer and broader views to the world. As capital has progressed in its action it is seen that at every step labor is becoming--slowly, but surely, as Heaven's law--identified with it. The harmony of interests is now no longer a vague Fourieristic notion,--for nothing is plainer than that the more the operative becomes interested in the success of the enterprise which employs him, the better is it for him and it. And all _work_ in it--the owner and the employee. But then, we are told that 'the owner gets the profits.' Does he? Sum up the companies and capitalists who have failed during the past decade,--compare what they have lost with what they have paid their workmen, and then see who have really pocketed the money, and whether on the whole the capitalists have been more than properly repaid for their risks, and wear and tear of _brains_. To be sure we are as yet far from having realized a regularly arranged harmony of interests. But I see that here, even in this New England, there is nothing which the great and most intelligent capitalists desire more than this harmony, or a system in which every man's brains and labor shall be properly and abundantly remunerated, since they see (as all must see who reflect) that the nearer we approach such practical adjustment of forces, the less liable will they be to fail. And the world, as it has reflected that labor has flourished among barren rocks, covering them with smiling villages, under the fostering care of capital, when fertile Southern lands are a wilderness for want of this harmony between it and capital, has concluded that the old battle between rich and poor was a folly. The obscure hamlets of New England, which have within thirty years become beautiful towns, with lyceums, libraries, and schools, are the most striking examples on earth of the arrant folly of this gabble of 'capital as opposed to labor.' In the South, however, the old theory is held as firmly as in the days when John Randolph prophesied Northern insurrections of starving factory-slaves against manufacturing lords, and--as President Lincoln recently intimated in his Message--the effort is there being made to formally enslave labor to capital. That is to say, the South not only adheres to the obsolete theory that labor is a foe to capital, but proposes to subdue it to the latter. The progress of free labor in the North is, however, a constantly increasing proof that labor _is_ capital.