All values, whether in soil, waterfalls, precious stones, or money, are forms of social force. Land in a great city sells for two thousand dollars a front foot, because millions of people, drawn by the powers of commerce, have come into fellowship upon it. Robinson Crusoe would have given all the money he had on the ship for a loaf of bread. The heaps of gold and silver in Wall Street are so valuable, because seventy millions of people are circulating around them. Moral laws are social products. They are not empirical, but fundamental, eternal, and essential. They inhere in the constitution of man. But it is only through relation that man comes to the recognition of them, as binding for conduct. Light and heat have their laws, definite and unfailing, but if natural particles never vibrated at a rate sufficient to create these forces, the laws would not appear. They arise along with the forces, and the same conditions which give rise to the forces, give rise to the laws. So moral laws accompany a certain degree of attainment and culture, only possible through relation. Religion itself, the highest and most sacred deposit of human life, is a product of social force. Whether we regard it as “modes of emotion,” as Lecky; or the “recognition of all our duties as divine commands,” as Kant; or as “awe in the presence of the mystery of an inscrutable power in the universe,” as Spencer; or as “the infinite nature of duty,” as Mill; or as “the immediate feeling of the dependence of man on God,” as Schleiermacher, it never arises outside the range of relation. Still, religion is something constitutional, inalienable, divine; but man would never be thrilled by its hopes, or soothed by its peace, did he not stand in vital relation to his fellows. The elements and raw material of religion are eternally present, but relation calls into exercise the susceptibilities and faculties which appropriate these elements and raw material, turning them into hymns, theologies, prayers, sacrifices, liturgies, and ceremonies. Commerce, by bringing men together under the necessities of finding food, clothing, shelter, enables them to find their intellects and what they can know, their hearts and what they can love, and their wills and what they can do. Thus we trace the genesis of social force, with the expressions which it makes of itself, in property, literature, law, art, and religion, to mutual human relations, for the establishment of which, among men, Commerce seems to have been ordained. If men could, without trading, have found the means of subsistence, as do the foxes and the lions; then no relations in the high sense of the term would have been established among them; and like the foxes and the lions, they would have remained on the earth without progress and without history. The sun must be making tremendous drafts upon some unseen sources of power, to be able to make, throughout the solar realm, such ample expenditures of energy without bankruptcy.