There is a corrupt influence from large concentration of wealth and its unhappy distribution which will cause more beggarism, more softening and more syncophancy than all the laws which can be put upon the statute books regulating the hours of labor of women and children. Indeed the story of prosperity in every country shows the same picture again and again—pictures which one may find in New York City any time.
Says our great historical student, Professor J. Franklin Jameson:—
"Why do not Americans study more intently the age of the Antonines? There they will find a state of society singularly resembling our own—a world grown prosperous and soft and humane, with long-continued peace and abounding industrial development, a population formed by the mixture of all races, in which the ancient stock still struggles to rule and to assimilate, but is powerless to preserve unimpaired its traditions, a mushroom growth of cities, a universal passion for organization into industrial unions and fraternal orders, a system in which woman has exceptionally full equality with man, a society in which the newly rich occupy the centre of the stage, offending the eye with the vulgar display of brute wealth yet pacifying the mind and heart with the record of numberless and kindly benefactions."
Yet all the causes of the decline of Rome were working in this soil—the results were not long in forthcoming.
In these days of the ocean cable and the fast racers of the sea, waves of public opinion and thought and the struggles of other lands reach us so quickly, that whether
