That old man vociferous has passed now to where beyond these voices there is peace, but the obscure mutterings of the man in the street, which was then but a vague undertone, has grown to an open menace. The Sphinx smiles as she hears once more the same cries, the same accusations. We of the middle classes, who threw off the yoke of the aristocracy, clamoured just such impeachments a century back. We are amazed now to hear them turned against ourselves. To us this seems an admirable world that we have made; orderly, peaceable, prosperous. We find no fault in it. It has not worked out, perhaps, on as generous lines as we had planned, but on the whole each man gets, we think, his deserts. We ask ourselves wonderingly if the aristocrat of the eighteenth century did not, perhaps, see his world in the same way. He paid no taxes, but he thought he did his just share of work for the body politic; he fought, he legislated, he administered. Perhaps it seemed also a good world to him; well arranged. Perhaps he was as indignant at our protests as we are at those of to-day. We thought ourselves intolerably oppressed by his expenditures of the money we earned, by his monopoly of place and power; but we argue in our behalf, that as we pay the taxes we should decide upon the methods of the money's use and have all the consequent privileges. What, we ask ourselves angrily, do these mad creatures, who are very well treated, mean by their talk of slavery--of wage-slavery? How can there be right or reason in their contention that the labourer rather than the capitalist should have the profit of labour? Does not the capitalist govern, administer, defend? Attacked, abused, execrated, we begin to sympathize with those dead nobles, who were perhaps as honest, as well-meaning, as we feel ourselves to be; who were as disgusted, as scornful, as little convinced by our arguments as we by those who accuse us in our turn of being greedy, idle feeders upon the sweat of others. Perhaps to him the established order of things seemed as just and eternal as it does to us. We begin to have more comprehension of that dead aristocrat. For a hundred years now democracy has had a free hand for testing its faiths and ideals. Let us reckon up the results of this reign of liberty, equality, fraternity. Out of the triumphant bourgeoisie has grown a class proud and dominant as the nobles of old days. They have wealth, luxury, and power, such as those nobles never dreamed of. Capital is organized into vast, incredibly potent aggregations. Labour in its turn has organized for itself a despotism far-reaching, unescapable, which the old régime would never at its haughtiest have ventured upon. The two are arrayed against one another in struggles of ever-increasing intensity.