Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/295

 OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XHL 103

and to conquer. Far-off Australia leads the van, and has already taken the first steps toward the single tax. In Great Britain, in the United States, and in Canada, the question is on the verge of practical politics and soon will be the burning issue of the time. Continental Europe cannot long linger behind. Faster than ever the world is moving.

Forty years ago slavery seemed stronger in the United States than ever before, and the market price of slaves both working slaves and breeding slaves was higher than it had ever been before, for the title of the owner seemed growing more secure. In the shadow of the Hall where the equal rights of man had been solemnly pro- claimed, the manacled fugitive was dragged back to bondage, and on what to American tradition was our Marathon of freedom, the slave-master boasted that he would yet call the roll of his chattels.

Yet forty years ago, though the party that was to place Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential chair had not been formed, and nearly a decade was yet to pass ere the signal-gun was to ring out, slavery, as we may now see, was doomed.

To-day a wider, deeper, more beneficent revolution is brooding, not over one country, but over the world. God's truth impels it, and forces mightier than he has ever before given to man urge it on. It is no more in the power of vested wrongs to stay it than it is in man's power to stay the sun. The stars in their courses fight against Sisera, and in the ferment of to-day, to him who hath ears to hear, the doom of industrial slavery is sealed.

Where shall the dignitaries of the church be in the struggle that is coming, nay that is already here? On the side of justice and liberty, or on the side of wrong and slavery? with the delivered when the timbrels shall

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