most revolutionary and suggestive in human annals. The recent meeting at Gettysburg, not to speak of the minor earlier ones at Lookout Mountain and elsewhere, indicates an advance in human nature so immense that it has not been realized. Not the least significant thing it demonstrated, is the vast decrease in the necessity of wasting thousands of lives and billions of treasure to settle differences of opinion.

As this is now so startlingly indicated regarding the Irrepressible Conflict which culminated at Gettysburg, and which could be settled by force, is there not even much more reason to hope for a settlement not very remote, by methods of reason, of our new Irrepressible Conflict, which cannot be settled by force?

But even if the outcroppings of the conflict are so soon settled, the fundamental conflict will persist as long as the difference in men is so great, and that difference is the most important thing to be dealt with by all lovers of peace and humanity. The only way to cancel it is for the men in front to help those behind, and for those behind to help themselves—to everything that does not belong to somebody else.

But those in front are entitled to have their judgments followed where they are not plainly tainted by self-interest, and it will pay them to keep self-interest out of their judgments so far as self-preservation does not demand it. But how much self-preservation can properly cover, is a difficult question, and space permits little more than the suggestion of it. Shall a man's self rightly be a wearer of but one suit of clothes, an occupant of a hut, an eater of the plainest food, and an entertainer of no guests: or shall his self rightly be clothed beautifully and suitably for all occasions, occupy a house that shall be a pleasure to gaze upon, consume the food essential to both the greatest refinement and the greatest efficiency, dispense a generous hospitality, broaden his mind and develop his taste so that he can enlighten and inspire others, encourage letters and the arts, and have leisure to devote to charities, education and the common good? There are plenty of illustrations that a man may preserve a self as large as this—as large as Goethe's or Marcus Aurelius's—and yet issue no advice unworthy of the respect of smaller men, and be of an advantage to the race beside which the cost of maintaining such a self is nothing.

If most men cannot have the things just enumerated, and if many of those who have them abuse them, is it best that none should have them? That all should have them is, in the present stage of human development, impossible. If all the wealth of the United States were divided equally among us, we would have but a little over $1,300 apiece,[2] and much of it would be wasted at once, and no conceivable laws would prevent what might be left, being in a very short time as unevenly distributed as now. The only glimpse we can see of a time of even fortunes, is of a time of even capacities; and the only rational way we can see to such a time is through helping each other: every other experiment toward it has proved illusive.

The principal roots of the difficulty are generalized as ignorance and incompetence. The ignorance has already been strongly, though very blunderingly, attacked in the public schools, but not much more blunderingly perhaps than in the universities. It is a strange paradox that education, though the special care of the educated, should be among the most backward of the arts, yet so the highest-educated are the first to admit it to be. We are making hopeful progress in it, though, and are rapidly developing it to care for incompetence not only in mind but in body and disposition.

Then in the struggles of wage-earners and wage-payers, the principle of arbitration is certainly making rapid inroads on the practice of violence. The settlement of the recent great railroad controversies was by deliberative assemblies, not by mobs.

The farther lessening of the difference in material possessions by leveling down on one side as well as leveling up on the other, has lately become a very real and active question. While the inventor has seldom realized his share of production, and while the average director of industry has seldom realized more than his, undoubtedly extortionists and monopolists have rolled up fortunes out of all proportion to their deserts; and the regulation of these, though not doing much to fill up the differences, will do more to relieve the spirit of discontent.

It will be interesting to see how much of the share now going to the employer can go to the employee without stopping the employer's functions of finder, organizer and director of profitable work. We cannot intelligently foresee conditions in which these functions on his part will not be absolutely essential to the progress of society. The functions, however, are being more and more performed, even under the trusts, by men rising from the ranks; and even the men remaining in the ranks are probably performing more and more of those same functions, though some of the short-sighted policies of the unions are obstructing them.

And the unions themselves, despite policies not yet outgrown, have unquestionably done much to raise the wage-earners' fortunes, and are probably, with more experience and wider outlook, to do vastly more. But not until they get beyond the policy of holding their own best men back, will they enter on their full career, and then their least effective men will most benefit. Moreover, the wisest and most effective men are those most ready to learn from criticism, and when the unions realize it, they will have another avenue to usefulness. They will be helped to realize it, however, by more patience, candor and disinterestedness on the part of the critics. So far, everybody is bellicose, as first at Gettysburg. Cannot both sides to the present Irrepressible Conflict better anticipate a conciliatory disposition than did those heroes of fifty years ago?

When we can always carry the Irrepressible Conflict into courts and arbitrations and, as Godkin said, substitute for the shock of battle, the shock of trained intellects, peace will be in sight.

Its first essential is always a clear understanding. There are lies somewhere in every human conflict. Probably the most pitiful and pernicious of all lies is that all men are equal. The only remedy is to make it true.

THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT

During the past five years the agitation in favor of so modifying our governmental system as to remove all those barriers which stand between the will of the majority and its immediate execution has attained formidable dimensions. That the defects which American government has exhibited in many directions have been so serious and so persistent as to furnish great justification for this agitation no candid observer can deny. In both of the two ways upon which advocates of the initiative and referendum lay so much stress, our representative institutions have indeed sadly failed of being ideally representative. Venality of individual legislators, or the control of whole bodies of them by corrupt bosses, has resulted in innumerable instances of special legislation for the benefit of powerful private interests and contrary to the interests of the people. And it must be admitted that apart from any question of venality or corruption there has often been a degree of inertia in the enactment of enlightened and progressive legislation which cannot be ascribed to legitimate conservatism, but must be set down either to the unfitness of