128
How noble is the maxim; and how far short does the world fall of it! Ignored by rulers, unheeded by statesmen and held impracticable by politicians, this golden rule has always been honoured more in the breach than in the observance. War and pestilence, greed and ambition, sin and selfishness, hold the world fast in their iron grip; and any plea for the equality and liberty as the birthright of all is a mere fancy, an idle day-dream. How grand, how noble, how far fairer than the fabled Eden would this sinful world—this hotbed of iniquity, this very sink of all that is unworthy and ignoble—be, if each person placed the world at par with himself? "Chapels had been churches and poor men's cottagss princes' palaces," if one and all held it a supreme duty to accord to others what they universally price so highly—liberty and love, the right to obtain and to possess all that is held "pure and lovely and of good report." But no; systematically the world ignores the principle; man loves himself but not his neigh-
