Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/24

18 ; any man may rise rapidly, and numbers are daily rising from the lowest round of the ladder to the chief places in commerce and the highest honours of the State. Equality, therefore, is the rule of life. It is the rule, as inequality is with us, throughout society. The farm labourer lives as an equal at his employer’s table, and I have seen very well-dressed children, the children I was told of wealthy parents, in school with the shoeless children of the emigrant. Perhaps in outward things the rule is sometimes carried to a superstitious excess, which is apt to provoke an inward reaction, as the outward deference exacted by rank does here. But on the whole I am persuaded that it is a happy rule. The fusion of classes fills society with a feeling of security, not so familiar here. It opens a wider and more varied range of social enjoyment, and better opportunities for the formation of social character to every right-minded man. I cannot conceive any countervailing benefits which an exclusive class, set on an eminence by itself, can either receive or confer. I know there are rich men in America who feel that wealth is not enough honoured, and who, while they conform to equality in public, recoil from it in secret, and are glad to come over to European society for comfort. It may be that wealth suffers a little there from the reaction of feeling after its domination here. But, on the whole, I confess it seemed to me that supposing a rich man to be a man of sense and capable of deriving enjoyment from the public welfare, equality added at least as much to his happiness as to that of the poor.

The relations between employer and employed again, so far as I could gather, though not free from difficulty or discord, are upon the whole sounder and more kindly than