follies, the grossest vices. France, in her present struggles, shows a mingling chaos of all that is best and wisest, of all that is maddest and worst. Among the most rampant of her run-mad fancies is this wild dream of “fraternity” and socialism, with their Icarias and Utopian worlds. Would that these were confined to France alone! Unfortunately, we see their extravagant madness striding the Atlantic and stamping its too plainly marked foot-tracks on our own shores. That terrible fallacy compacted in the words, “The right to labour,” is rapidly working its mischief. “The right of man to labour, and of land whereon to labour,”—what is it, as our communists interpret it, but the right to rob? They would not labour for nothing, nor yet for such compensation as the true value of their labour, given where it is wanted and paid for as it is needed, will produce. They have the right to labour, be it for good or for ill. They have the right to be paid for that labour, let the capital they force into their use be theirs or another’s. You do not want my work,—it matters not,—“I have a right to work, and you, having capital, must pay me for such work, be it to your detriment or your benefit. I have the right to labour!”
Within this specious formula—“the right to labour”—lie concentrated the greater number of those terrible fallacies which now threaten to overrun and devastate civilized society. The hydra of communism holds struggling in its deadly folds the Hercules of truth. That the latter conquers, who can doubt? Man’s nature, his soul, and instinct, alike lead him to the light. The world is progressive. The past shows, the present hopes for, and the future promises this; but fearful are the doubts, the despondencies, and the agonies, through which society must pass to attain its highest tone! Around each great truth is gathered a crowd of errors—deceitful reflections of its beauty—giving to the mischievous a pretext for ill, and often, with ignis fatuus light, misleading even the true-hearted and the good.
There are crises in the world’s course, when, rousing from temporary lethargy, reason seems more than usually wide awake to the influence of truth and light. But, in this very waking, is she also more subject to the misleading influence of error. The craving
