mind. Self-denial has had no result, and all the self-torture of centuries
has been thrown away. Lives spent in doing good have been lives nobly
wasted. Everything is in vain. The circle of ideas we possess is too
limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as ours are
outside those that were pondered over by Augustus Caesar.

The most extraordinary spectacle, as it seems to me, is the vast
expenditure of labour and time wasted in obtaining mere subsistence. As a
man, in his lifetime, works hard and saves money, that his children may be
free from the cares of penury and may at least have sufficient to eat,
drink, clothe, and roof them, so the generations that preceded us might, had
they so chosen, have provided for our subsistence. The labour and time of
ten generations, properly directed, would sustain a hundred generations
succeeding to them, and that, too, with so little self-denial on the part of
the providers as to be scarcely felt. So men now, in this generation, ought
clearly to be laying up a store, or, what is still more powerful, arranging
and organising that the generations which follow may enjoy comparative
freedom from useless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent
improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve
thousand years ago, and our children's children will still have to toil and
slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed an extraordinary
spectacle.

That twelve thousand written years should have elapsed, and the
human race--able to reason and to think, and easily capable of
combination in immense armies for its own destruction--should still live
from hand to mouth, like cattle and sheep, like the animals of the field and
the birds of the woods; that there should not even be roofs to cover the
children born, unless those children labour and expend their time to pay for
them; that there should not be clothes, unless, again,time and labour are