The Northern party, or that of equal rights and free labor, like their predecessors, hold many ideas which coming years will see realized, for—­as has always been the case in these contests—­science and learning are always on the liberal side.  By a strange accident, for the first time almost in history, the Republican party is for once in its constituted rights, on its own ground, while the feudal or conservative wing form the aggressors.  As of old, too, the Southern conservatives are enforcing theories once the property of their foes, who have now advanced to broader, nobler, and more gloriously liberal views.

For instance, the men of the South believe that labor and capital are still antagonisms.  Now it is true enough that they once were, and that when the people in different ages first began to rebel against their hereditary tyrants, the workman was only a serf to his capitalist employer.  That was the age when demagogues flourished by setting ’the poor’ against ‘the rich.’  A painful, sickening series of wars it was, ending too often by labor’s killing itself with its adversary.  Then, a foul, false ‘democracy’ was evolved, which was virtually a rank aristocracy, not of nobility, but of those who could wheedle the poor into supporting them.  Such was the history of nearly all ‘radicalism’ and ‘democracy’ from the days of Cleon and Alcibiades down to the present time.

But the enormous developments of science and of industry have of late years opened newer and broader views to the world.  As capital has progressed in its action it is seen that at every step labor is becoming—­slowly, but surely, as Heaven’s law—­identified with it.  The harmony of interests is now no longer a vague Fourieristic notion,—­for nothing is plainer than that the more the operative becomes interested in the success of the enterprise which employs him, the better is it for him and it.  And all work in it—­the owner and the employee.  But then, we are told that ‘the owner gets the profits.’  Does he?  Sum up the companies and capitalists who have failed during the past decade,—­compare what they have lost with what they have paid their workmen, and then see who have really pocketed the money, and whether on the whole the capitalists have been more than properly repaid for their risks, and wear and tear of brains.  To be sure we are as yet far from having realized a regularly arranged harmony of interests.  But I see that here, even in this New England, there is nothing which the great and most intelligent capitalists desire more than this harmony, or a system in which every man’s brains and labor shall be properly and abundantly remunerated, since they see (as all must see who reflect) that the nearer we approach such practical adjustment of forces, the less liable will they be to fail.  And the world, as it has reflected that labor has flourished among barren rocks, covering them with smiling villages, under the fostering