it is certain that the wise use of liberty must come long after emancipation.

Those who make use of this rgument against the enfranchisement of servants are very often shining examples of the fault they condemn. Their own leisure is devoted either to the pursuit of pleasure or the pursuit of a culture that has for its object the attainment of accomplishments for merely selfish purposes. But in how few cases is it used nobly! In fact, they who have learned to make a wise use of leisure are precisely those who wish to see extended to all classes the same opportunities they themselves enjoy. The use of leisure is in reality work. It lies alone in the privilege it gives of choosing the work for which one has a special aptitude. As soon as consciousness is transferred from self to the whole it becomes clear that social wholeness, like physical wholeness, or health, depends upon the perfection and activity of all its parts. Then only do we we realize that whatever individual loss may be demanded in the social transformation going forward to-day will be more than compensated by the gain to the whole. And this is not a form of self-sacrifice; it is rather self-expansion-because both suffering and enjoyment come through consciousness, and wherever the enlargement of that consciousness takes place the way is prepared for enjoyments that were before impossible.

The first use that the woman in the kitchen makes of her freedom is perhaps one that makes the lady in the drawingroom smile disdainfully; but after all it is only an imitation of that lady's own pleasures and pursuits. She, herself, is quite as much an object of pity to those who are a little further advanced in mental development. At present among the vast majority of women the prevailing ideal is social self-advancement, with its dependent ambitions of dress and household decoration. The woman whose heart is set upon the possession of jewels, fashionable dresses, and bonnets has no reason to look down upon her poorer sisters who aspire to a cheap imitation of these things. It is a difference of degree only,

not of kind. It is only when the woman develops beyond a desire for these things that she finds herself suddenly coming upon a plane where the objects of her ambition are of a kind that lose nothing in the sharing, but on the contrary grow greater by being shared. And it is this class, small though it be to-day, but growing in power, that is voicing the demands of servants for a larger share in the opportunities of modern life. They have only to voice it. The work of transformation is being done by many unconscious workers, but resistance can be lessened and the work of evolution go forward more smoothly through the intelligent coöperation of more advanced minds.

Boston, Mass.

AMNE L. VROOMAN.

TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

By B. O. FLOWER.

THE BROADENING SOCIAL IDEAL.

The history of civilization has been the story of an ascent from the darkness of ignorance, barbarism, and savagery toward the light which ever glorifies the mountains of the ideal, where the moral order reigns, where altruism rises above egoism, and where the love of the best overmasters all baser dreams and desires.

It has been a slow and a toilsome ascent, over pathways that may be compared to trails that lead from fens, bogs, and swamp-lands to the regal summit of a mighty mountain range. Between the lowlands and the heights rise ranges of foothills and low mountains, with valleys intervening-eminences from which the pilgrim bands inhale for a little time rarefied air and behold broader and grander visions than have heretofore been vouchsafed to them, and depressions that hide them from view and shut out from their eyes the glory of the heights until it becomes to many a memory rather than a reality.

From time to time groups, and even nations, have reached such noble eminences, and joy has kissed the brow, hope welled in the heart, and a song leaped from the lips of those who stood in the light. Greece in her nobler and freer moments, Rome during brief periods, and other nations of the far-away past experienced something of this exaltation that is known to man as he rises toward the light; but for the most part the great prophet voices, the true philosophers, and the poets of the olden times have been lonely witnesses to the truth who have sung of the ideal that is to bring growth to the soul, light to the mind, felicity to the heart, and the deep, unfathomable joy to life that can only be known when civilization recognizes the solidarity of the race and the mutual responsibility, duty, and obligation of every unit as the underlying principle upon which the happiness, progress, and growth of humanity rest. Jesus taught, and the early Church for a little season, ere she became corrupt, sought to practise

this supreme lesson of life; but the night settled around the cradle of the new religion-a long, dark, and tragic night, in which growth was so slow as to be almost imperceptible.

In the middle of the fourteenth century, however, from the intolerable misery and suffering of the very poor, there came a voice that struck the key-note of the prophets' messages of the past-aye, and went even back to the closing gates of Eden-a voice which raised a question that reaches the very root of social problems. Coming as it did from the pit of popular misery and taking up the cry which had long been sounded by the prophet sentinels on the walls of progress, it marked a great forward step, a real advance toward the light. The essence of this cry, this disquieting question that was taken up as a refrain and sounded from one end of England to the other, was found in this rude couplet:

"When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who then was the gentleman ?”

We hear it first during the years of terrible suffering that marked the reign of Edward III., after the black plague had devastated England, and the throne and parliament had striven by edicts to reduce the toilers to intolerable slavery. The wretchedness of the poor and the oppressions endured by them beggar description, and from this awful night of suffering issued this momentous question, first propounded, perhaps, by old John Ball, whom the alarmed nobles denounced as a "mad priest" and whom the courts imprisoned, but to whom the multitude flocked, even as in another age and land they flocked to hear the message of universal brotherhood and the Golden Rule as taught by One who was even then under the shadow of the cross. We can easily understand how the upholders of special privilege heard with dismay and denounced with vigor as the ravings of an insane brain such ominous words as these, which fell from the lips of Ball:

"Good people, things will never be well in England so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the same father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and warm in their furs and their ermine, while we are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we

have pain and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state."

"It was," says the historian Green, "the tyranny of property that then as ever roused the defiance of socialism." At that time also William Longland, the poet of the poor, in his creation of "Piers the Ploughman," further voiced the people's cry which spoke so significantly in the night of feudalism of the broadening social ideal that had at last found expression at once in priest, poet, and the slow-thinking multitude.

To-day in sweeping the past of history this cry and the vision of the suffering men of that time stand out as a headland in social history. It was one of those milestones that reveal the enlargement of man's social conceptions-the expanding of the consciousness of right in the heart of the people. A reaction followed, but it was but the receding of the incoming tide, and in the first century of modern times and during every succeeding century it rose higher, until, with the American War of the Revolution, the French Revolution, and the upheavals of the first half of the nineteenth century, the progress became very marked and the periods of depression were shorter and less pronounced. It seemed to be evident that civilization had reached the plateau that divides the foothills from the mountain range.

Now, it is true, we are in a period of depression; but is it not possible that the seeming retrograde movement which narrows the horizon and shuts civilization from the broader and truer outlook, and which is marked by wars, by insolent arrogance among rulers, and by commercial injustice and oppression, is but a small valley that fringes the base of the noblest range that rises before humanity? The diffusion of the light of education among earth's millions, the hunger of the heart of the world, and the voice of the advance-guard of social progress indicate such to be the case. To-day as never in all historic time there is a general recognition of the fundamental fact that happiness must rest on justice and that the upward progress of the world depends on each man doing his share of work and receiving what he earns, and on no man reaping where he has not sown. Now for the first time man is coming to appreciate the fact that the unfaltering acceptance of the imperative mandate, said to have come from Deity as the gates of Eden were closing, holds the key to the true happiness of all-the real solution of the social problem. This thought, which may be said to hold the kernel of the new