That the Conference was incapable of solving a problem of this magnitude is self-evident.  But the delegates could and should have referred it to an international parliament, fully representative of all the interests concerned.  For the best way of distributing the necessaries and comforts of life, which have been acquired or created by manual toil, is a problem that can neither be ignored nor reasoned away.  So long as it remains a problem it will be a source of intermittent trouble and disorder throughout the civilized world.  The titles, which the classes heretofore privileged could invoke in favor of possession, are now being rapidly acquired by the workers, who in addition dispose of the force conferred by organization, numbers, and resolve.  At the same time most of the stimuli and inventives to individual enterprise are being gradually weakened by legislation, which it would be absurd to condemn and dangerous to regard as a settlement.  In the meanwhile productivity is falling off, while the demand for the products of labor is growing proportionately to the increase of population and culture.

Hitherto the laws of distribution were framed by the strong, who were few and utilized the many.  To-day their relative positions have shifted; the many have waxed strong and are no longer minded to serve as instruments in the hands of a class, hereditary or selected.  But the division of mankind into producers and utilizers has ever been the solid and durable mainstay of that type of civilization from which progressive nations are now fast moving away, and the laws and usages against which the proletariat is up in arms are but its organic expression.

From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders remained open.  The abolition of slavery changed but little in the arrangement—­was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment.  In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form better adapted to the modified conditions.  But the filling up of that chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different basis.  And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat.  It cannot be gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering injustice themselves or demoralizing others.  And it seems nowise impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best qualified.