In your germal life, the universe seemed to you nothing but a vast and unlimited expanse of water. The submerged earth upon which you lay and rested, with its murky surroundings, and the expanse of sunless liquid clouds above you, was the only world and universe you knew. By what authority of reason or science then do you conclude, that the stage of evolution, which brought you out into the glorious sunshine and free air, and adapted you with the form and comprehension you possess, is the end? From the cold, sluggish, and unconscious, to the warm, alert, and intellectual, is no greater a step of progress, than the coming one, which will make clear to your understanding the mysteries of life and nature, so unknowable and unthinkable in your present immaturity. Out of your next stage of spiritual supremacy, you will look back upon the present, with all its conditions, so condemned by the contrast of better things attained, that it will be but little more to you than is now the repulsive uncanny, and incommunicable habitat of your beginning. CHAPTER VII. The confidential relations between our government and people have given it a parental character. It has consequently been the study of our legislation for ages past to assuage, as far as possible, those natural evils which creep in as the result of unrestricted social forces. Regarding the whole mass of our inhabitants as a family, the government could never feel that its duty was faithfully performed, while a number of its people were, relating to the ordinary enjoyments of life, in a state of suppression from any removable cause. You began your civilization, just as we began ours, by the crystallization of society into two classes. Those who at first, by thrift, acquisitiveness, or strong arms, became possessed of sufficient property to escape the necessity of daily toil for the sustenance of life; and those who, by the absence of these qualities or from other causes, were obliged from day to day to exercise their muscular and nervous energies for the benefit of those who found it profitable to use and pay for them. This condition of society is a natural and just one, and there is nothing whatever in it to prevent the largest possible amount of happiness to all. But before many ages we discovered that the interests of the property class and the labor class were not equally equipped to maintain a fair and equitable relation with each other. We found that the interests of labor in the many bore no comparison in its political weight with the great power of wealth in the few; and foreseeing that subjugation in time, of one by the other, which your experience has shown, we made wide provision against it.