“Your society presents to us the spectacle of a continuous skirmish among yourselves, your whole mass struggling to mount the summit of their individual hopes and ambitions, wounding and bruising each other with cruel unconcern. Our experience has taught us that this unhappy social condition is entirely due to the crude and imperfect stage of your development. Each of your new epochs brings some approach towards a better terrestrial life; but you have not fairly considered nor endeavored to surmount the chief obstacle to your progress in that direction. You have not yet learned to deal justly with one another. By your system of unequal advantages, one class is permitted, and even encouraged, to prey upon another one. One or more of you will enter upon a scheme of personal gain without the slightest concern for its effect upon others. You have permitted, from time to time, the passage of laws having a direct and unmistakable tendency to throw your wealth into the hands of a few, and as a consequence, to increase the hardships of the many. Your generation exults over all preceding ones in its progress in science and knowledge; but even that has not served to soften or remove the asperities of your lives, for the reason that most of the available material of this new advance has been prostituted to serve the interests of the few. “The growth of your social betterment rests almost entirely upon the total of your disciplined thought, yet by your methods, correct thinking is the rarest thing among you. Your social field, instead of being evenly stirred and seeded, is cultivated in spots and patches. Even your knowledge has been converted into a weapon of tyranny and oppression, and it is oftener pursued in the love of self than for the benefit of kind. Out of the helplessness of your neglected and unfavored masses, come the greater number of your individual accumulations of wealth. “In our stage of progress such a state of things is impossible. The performance of an act inflicting injury or even discomfort upon one or more fellow beings in our society, brings its punishment in the general condemnation and disgrace which follows. Active benevolence, which is with you an impulse, sporadic and exceptional, is with us an ever-present emotion, and upon it we have founded the chief pleasures of life. We have no eleemosynary establishments, because they are not needed. There can be no suffering from destitution among us, since each person finds in his own surroundings the ready, helping hand. No neglected orphan wanders about uncared for, because each family finds its pleasures increased by the opportunity to bestow shelter. Each dwelling is open to all, and no assuring salutation is needed to welcome the visitor. He enters the house of the stranger, as the stranger would enter his, by the right of the universal brotherhood which prevails.