25
boast of. There has been no demand for it, but unfortunately there has arisen a supply of promoters of discontent and annihilation which is a satire on the philanthropy and liberal ideas of the twentieth century. With these elements and these ideas prevailing amongst all classes, is it any wonder that there should be a want of confidence and an apprehension throughout the world as to the outcome? There is no demand for fresh enterprise, there is no speculation or energy for new undertakings where the capital of the thrifty is brought into jeopardy by the crude, wrong-minded, impudent, and mischievous doctrines of the levellers who have nothing to lose and who would spoil the possessions of those by whose enterprise and intellect they exist. This is the state of things at the present moment as regards the supply of capital and the demands of labour. The whole world is convulsed and paralysed by the mania from which no country is exempt, and which threatens to end in a revolution, the outcome of which will, if our position in the twentieth century be one of progress, initiate a base and degraded course on the progress of this cycle. It would seem as if in the so-called growth and progress of education and liberal ideas all that is to be revered and traditional in our minds is to be swamped by the irreverent and irresponsible. The worst feature is that the demand for intellect exceeds the supply in the conduct of the world's affairs. The inertia begotten of luxury and life made easy is throwing the control into other and less scrupulous hands. Maine, in his "Ancient Law," says: "In spite of overwhelming evidence it is most difficult for a citizen of Western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilization which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world. It is indisputable that much of the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by the embodiment of some permanent record. One set of usages has occasionally been violently overthrown and superseded by another; here and there a primitive code,
