766 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



them wholesale when the chance of their abundance became 

 possible. It determined that millions of hmnan fellows should 

 be enslaved and should die in slavery, so that a few might 

 wallow in luxury, and decay unwittingly. "Those were the 

 nickel-plated days," as one of the enslavers once put it to 

 the writer. It compelled the enslaved ones to toil without 

 a man's reward; it bought and sold them in the market places 

 like cattle; it tore them apart as father, mother, and children 

 when the legal or other whim arose. It made human cruelty 

 a fine art, and the practisers of it rewarded men. 



It hedged round patents, that might benefit the race, with 

 costly fines or dreadful snares, so that the inventor became 

 often the sad and despondent one, who was exploited, fleeced, 

 and cast out by the competitive exploiters. It laid hold on 

 the streams, the bays, and the foreshores, so that the ever 

 changing waters and life of these were often locked up in monop- 

 olizing grasp. 



It has gone into the earth and laid cold greedy clutches on 

 the coal, the oil, the iron, and other minerals, so that from 

 the gain on these it might reach out and command other sources 

 of wealth. It got hold of and juggled that greatest possible 

 19th century blessing to man — the railroad system. Only 

 where this might minister to war and destruction did the 

 governments of some countries step in to make the railroads 

 national — i. e., aristocratic military — systems. The Leopolds, 

 the Goulds, the Harrimans, and the Krupps have used these 

 to bow national feeling to their desires, or to corrupt legis- 

 latures. Above all it has tried to hedge round education and 

 knowledge, as well as the means of gaining this by the bulk 

 of the people. So the free and compulsory educational sys- 

 tem came not from the monarchies of the old world, but from 

 healthy democratic proenvironal aspirations of the New Eng- 

 land settlers, who by their Massachusetts School Act of 1647 

 ])lanted an advanced standard of idealism that the other na- 

 tions have biologically been compelled to follow, as an absolute 

 necessity in the struggle for existence. One need only call 

 to mind here the shameful aristocratic hedging round of the 



