THE STUDY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 61 1 



And this, I think, is clear to whoever considers the forces that are 

 mustering — that the struggle to come will be fiercer and more momen- 

 tous than the struggles that are past. 



There is a comfortable belief prevalent among us that we have at 

 last struck the trade-winds of time, and that by virtue of what we 

 call progress all these evils will cure themselves. Do not accept this 

 doctrine without examination. The history of the past does not coun- 

 tenance it, the signs of the present do not warrant it. Gentlemen, 

 look at the tendencies of our time, and see if the earnest work of 

 intelligent men be not needed. 



Look even here. Can the thoughtful man view the development 

 of our State with unmixed satisfaction ? Do we not know that, under 

 present conditions, just as that city over the bay grows in wealth and 

 population, so will poverty deepen and vice increase ; that just as the 

 liveried carriages become more plentiful, so do the beggars ; that just 

 as the pleasant villas of wealth dot these slopes, so will rise up the noi- 

 some tenement-house in the city slums. I have watched the growth of 

 San Francisco with joy and pride, and my imagination still dwells with 

 delight upon the image of the great city of the future, the queen of 

 all the vast Pacific— perhaps the greatest city of the world. Yet what 

 is the gain ? San Francisco of to-day, with her three hundred thousand 

 people, is, for the classes who depend upon their labor, not so good a 

 place as the San Francisco of sixty thousand ; and when her three hun- 

 dred thousand rises to a million, San Francisco, if present tendencies 

 are unchanged, must present the same sickening sights which in the 

 streets of New York shock the man from the open West. 



This is the dai'k side of our boasted progress, the Nemesis that 

 seems to follow with untii'ing tread. Where wealth most abounds, 

 there poverty is deepest ; where luxury is most profuse, the gauntest 

 want jostles it. In cities which are the storehouses of nations, starva- 

 tion annually claims its victims. Where the costliest churches rear 

 the tallest spires toward heaven, there is needed a standing army of 

 policemen ; as we build new schools, we build new prisons ; where the 

 heaviest contributions are raised to send missionaries to the ends of 

 the earth to preach the glad tidings of peace and good- will, there may 

 be seen squalor and vice that would affright a heathen. In mills 

 where the giant power of steam drives machinery that multiplies by 

 hundreds and thousands the productive forces of man, there are work- 

 ing little children who ought to be at play or at school ; where the 

 mechanism of exchange has been perfected to the utmost, there thou- 

 sands of men are vainly trying to exchange their labor for the neces- 

 saries of life ! 



Whence this dark shadow that thus attends that which we are 

 used to call "material progress," that which our current philosophy 

 teaches us to hope for and to work for ? Here is the question of all 

 questions for us. We must answer it or be destroyed, as preceding 



