into the shade, and render statecraft, priestcraft, lawyer-craft, and every other description of craft now in the service of landlordism and money-mongering, as odious and as obsolete as the occult sciences. With these powers and appliances at command, no portion of the human race needs the subjugation of any other portion for the gratification of its utmost legitimate wants and desires. With such prodigious advantages in its favour, the age we live in ought to witness the extinction of every vestige of every description of slavery known to man. The transition from chattel-slavery to proletarianism and wages-slavery cost, as we shall see, rivers of human blood; and, nevertheless, man’s ignorance and barbarity have, as we have seen, made the change rather a curse than a blessing to the majority of his fellows. The second social revolution--the transition from proletarianism and wages-slavery to real and universal emancipation--may be effected without the loss of a single life, or the sacrifice of a shilling’s worth of his possessions to any man of any class. Such, at least, is the creed of us, National Reformers. To make that creed known and appreciated by submitting it to a full and impartial examination by the public, and thereby to enlist as many as we can of the good and wise of all classes in the cause of human redemption, is, we hardly need say, the main object of this inquiry. In entering upon it, we found it necessary to begin at the beginning. The light of the past, though a lurid one, has appeared to us necessary to illumine the present; and, to see our way clearly into the future, both lights will, we think, be found serviceable. In other words, to render clearly intelligible _what ought to be_, we have deemed it an essential part of our inquiry to ascertain _what has been_ and _what now is_. In the prosecution of this task, we now proceed to show how Christianity and selfishness concurred in changing the slavery _that was_ into the slavery _that is_.