Your moralists might argue that to close and intimate a sympathy with the misfortunes of others would keep us so constantly unhappy as to make life unendurable. In answer to this, you have only to consider that if you separate from all your ills those which either directly or remotely are brought upon you by your imperfect social state, there are but few left besides death and its attendant sorrows. And of these few entirely comprised under the heads of sickness and accidents, there is a possibility of their greater diminishment by better modes of life. That you are slowly and gradually moving towards the stationary condition, unmistakable evidence proves. Material as well as spiritual indications confirm this belief. You can easily observe that wealth in the hands of the few is losing its opportunities for rapid increase. In your oldest advanced regions it has already worked out its resources to the extent of endeavoring to find abroad occasions for profitable use. But for the monopoly of land, which enables it to extract from industry an amount for its services out of all proportion with its value elsewhere, it would have been much further advanced towards the stationary state. One of the greatest obstacles opposing your approach towards the perfect society is your propensity to theorize and speculate upon matters which it is not given you to know. We have a saying that he who gets his feet in the air is lost. We mean by that to convey the idea, that all speculation not founded on positive knowledge is so utterly worthless, that any indulgence therein is useless to society. The opinion is unchallenged among us, that the inhabitants of the Earth are too prone to get their feet in the air. And yet the very ease by which this misfortune is accomplished among you is a proof of your goodness. Your inclination to virtue is your weak side of approach, and all your inherent and intuitive charity, which might during all these centuries have been exercised upon yourselves, has been to a great extent wasted upon your schemes of salvation, in which you have no assurance whatever but the wild promises of imagination. When you come fully to understand that happiness, true prosperity, virtue, and even beauty are but synonyms of truth, and that misery, crime, misfortune, and ugliness are but other names for falsehood, you will no longer have any dread or hesitation to search for that verity which destroys old beliefs, even though that search melts into air your most cherished traditions. You come to understand after a while that a truth can disseminate nothing but good; and that a falsehood, no matter how venerable with age, nor how respectable by adoption, can generate little else than evil. Your creeds have attracted you and plowed deep into your affections, because in them is gathered from yourselves the divine sentiments of goodness, out of which they are all robed in a pretended monopoly. Your virtues