16 THE VINE AND CIVILIZATION. 
peoples who are the most subject to its guidance, such as Italy, 
Portugal, Spain, South America, are of all Christian peoples 
the most miserable, the most ignorant, and the least civilized. 
The economists have seen the progress of civilization in the 
increase of production and consumption, by all imaginable 
means. Under the influence of their systems thousands of 
human beings have been buried alive in infected workshops — © 
changed literally into mere machines ; in the day-time devoted, 
- without pity or compassion, to work above their physical 
strength; in the night, penned up like farmer’s cattle, in 
shameful promiscuity. Such are the consequences of a social 
economy which has for its fundamental axiom, that the civil- 
ization of a people is in proportion to its production and con- 
sumption; and, for morality, that the man the best clothed, 
who eats and drinks the most, is the ideal of humanity on our 
earth. 
‘* For these schools the divine Plato, clothed in a plain 
woolen mantle, on Cape Surrium, and teaching to disciples, 
poor as himself, the contempt of riches, moral obligation, and 
the immortality of the soul, was a miserable creature compared 
to a fat and bloated citizen of London. 
‘‘After the economists came the socialists. These gentle- 
men propose several infallible means of changing this earth 
into a world of delight. They assume as a principle that man 
is born for happiness. At once encamped on this axiom, which 
they propagate easily among the indigent and working classes 
of society, they give themselves up to criticising in the keenest 
manner against civilization, monarchies, liberals, the Jesuits, 
property owners, original sin, with their ridiculous ideas of 
vice and virtue, good and evil, &c., &c., and after a certain 
number of discourses they propose to drive all that is evil from 
our earth, and to change the social arrangement; to unclass 
