all times they dictated hours of labor and rates of wages; and they had at their command the law's mandate denying to the workers the right of organizing. In a degree diminishing after the American Revolution these laws were used for the purposes of capitalist tyranny, and were long sternly enforced by American courts steeped in British precedents. The law allowed factory owners, merchants, and shippers the right to organize militant protective associations but prohibited workers' organizations and strikes as criminal conspiracy.

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One after another these inequalities were swept away by the American people. Had the progress of any of these reforms been judged by its development through a short period, it would have seemed discouragingly slow. But great peaceable historic changes do not often move rapidly, especially in a country where the majority rules and where legislative power is widely decentralized. Proceeding unevenly, each movement leaves remnants of the old order for considerable periods after the original impetus.

Religious equality, America's first accomplishment, was gradual estimated by contemporary view but rapid measured historically. Ripe for it before the American Revolution, some States lost no time, once independence was declared, in abolishing taxes and tithes for church support and in opening the way to complete religious liberty. At first restricted to Protestants or to believers in the Christian religion, this liberty was later extended to all faiths. A few lingering States were

more than fifty years arriving at the effacement of all religious discriminations. But from its earliest days as a national government, America, according to the provisions of its federal Constitution, stood for the fullest religious equality. By the first amendment adopted by Congress and ratified by the States, no Congress could ever pass a law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of religious beliefs.

America's adoption of religious equality was regarded in Europe as an alarming innovation. Even in France, where after the French Revolution diversity of beliefs was allowed by law, the French could not understand the American view that people could differ in religion and yet live like good neighbors. During Napoleon's régime there was an agitation for uniformity of religion on the ground that the division of people into different sects necessarily would give rise to an equal number of hostile parties. England did not enfranchise the Roman Catholics until 1839, nor the Jews until much later. To this day various European countries retain in some form the old union of church and state. Our Ku-Klux Klan embodies nothing more than a recrudescence of an archaic prejudice which does not in any way affect the soundness of our laws. After achieving some temporary successes, the much more active Know-Nothing movement before the Civil War was completely extinguished by the very Protestant element it claimed to represent. The overwhelmingly fair-minded Protestant majority came to the rescue of the small Catholic minority.

Similarly so in the case of the American Protective Association, an antiCatholic organization, after the Civil War. Recently we saw how in Detroit many Protestants refused to countenance bigotry and helped elect a Roman Catholic mayor.

The pronouncement in our Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal evoked the derision of ruling classes everywhere. The repudiation of the monarchical idea likewise was met with the sneering prediction that a government based upon popular rule would inevitably "dissolve in anarchy and ruin." Equality in rulership was the passion of the American people. Hamilton, himself of a monarchist tendency, had to acknowledge for mally that the American people were intensely averse to monarchy. Since then, especially in the last decade, many nations have discarded the kingly institution, accepting the American idea that peoples are competent to govern themselves.

The indomitable struggle of the American people to overthrow caste aristocracy lasted, from beginning to end, 137 years, culminating in complete victory.

The first attacks, begun during the Revolution, stripped aristocracy of its intrenched legal powers and prerogatives. State after State abolished entail and primogeniture. It was against public policy, legislatures declared, to have any laws tending to exalt the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals by giving them undue and unequal influence. France in 1790 followed America's lead, while England is only now reaching the stage of eliminating primogeniture.

Our federal Constitution prohibited the granting of titles. Old laws and customs decreeing inequality in garb became obsolescent, and genealogies a laughing-stock.

Class differences in attire long since gave way to an indistinguishable equality. In point of style, at any rate, our working-girls now rival their rich sisters. Except in the matter of extravagant homes and of opportunities for leisure, visible badges of distinction have been shorn from aristocracy, whether of caste or of wealth. Traveling in one's own equipage was once a token of prestige; the widespread ownership of automobiles now removes all such pretensions of superiority. In the political field the last remnant of the once all-powerful caste aristocracy was obliterated in 1912 when an amendment to the federal Constitution was adopted providing for the election of United States senators by popular vote. Established originally as an avowedly aristocratic body to check "the turbulency of the people," the United States Senate had degenerated from a caste aristocratic body into a plutocratic

one.

Political equality was attained by the American people after a forty years' contest. When the American republic was founded the intrenched classes sought perpetuation of power in themselves by means of old laws and customs and new contrivances. Popular agitation resulted in the repeal by State after State of property qualification voting laws; every white man whether penniless or rich was given an equal right to vote, and his right to hold public office was no no longer conditioned upon the

amount of property he had. Jubilant American democracy wiped out the old methods by which certain families or groups had transmitted as a kind of heirloom the holding of important offices from father to son; it proclaimed and insisted upon the principle of rotation in office. In our own time political equality has been extended to include all

women.

Educational equality was achieved by the American people at large only after a hard struggle with caste aristocratic and capitalistic forces. The public school system became an imperative function of American life compelling the training of every child. Backward sections of the South were exceptions. We still have remnants of the old exclusive system in certain of our institutions of higher learning, to which only those in favored circumstances are admitted. But the ideal expressed by the Working-men's party almost a century ago may yet come to fruition-an ideal protesting that it was "an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the means of education in college while another is restricted to common schools," and demanding "a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be." Since that time, however, the high school, the equivalent in many respects of the old-time college, has become an essential part of our public school system, which now provides for more than 26,000,ooo pupils, requires more than 822,ooo teachers, and calls for an annual expenditure of $2,400,000,000.

The combat for industrial equality was waged for a century and a quar

ter. Favored by public opinion, working-men by 1836 had secured the right to organize and strike. Nevertheless, in various aspects, industrial overlords maintained an autocratic position for sixty or seventy years longer. With few exceptions they refused to accord human rights to labor-unions and shielded themselves behind every artifice furnished by old laws and precedents for the purpose of declining to recognize moral responsibility. They resisted agitation for laws providing for shorter work hours, factory sanitation, compensation to injured workers, and payments to families of those killed through industrial hazards.

But the mighty power of coalesced wealth proved futile against the surge of public opinion backing the fighting spirit of labor-unions. spirit of labor-unions. A succession of State laws was followed by the Federal (Clayton) Anti-Trust Act of 1914 definitely abandoning the antiquated master-and-servant interpretation of labor and specifically defining that labor is not a commodity. The culmination had been reached where capitalists, individual or corporate, could no longer arrogantly refuse to meet labor-union representatives. representatives. The discussion of grievances thenceforth was on a plane of equal rights. Since about 1915 the old attitude of opposition to these standards on the part of the controllers of industry has been widely transformed into one of voluntary acceptance.

Racial equality alone was accomplished by methods which involved the use of armed force. If laws passed by some Southern colonies forbidding the slave traffic had

not been voided by King George III, the negro slave question would never have become acute. The tragic four years of the Civil War unshackled the negro and gave him legal and political rights as a man and citizen. The action of some Southern States in impairing these rights by legislative stratagem does not alter the fact that in general the negro race legally and politically is the equal of the white race. Social equality is another matter, which no law can effect. The American Indian has a pride in his race; may not the American negro develop a similar feeling? It is not so many centuries since the mass of white men were slaves or serfs.

With a hundred and fifty years of powerful momentum behind it, there does not seem to be the least reason for believing that America's traditional movement for equality of rights can or will cease. Consistent thus far in its successive steps, a consistency in sequel is more than implied; it is somewhat clearly indicated.

So long as we have huge disproportion in powers derived solely by accident of birth, the continuous effort of the American people to remove artificial distinctions and discriminations remains unfinished. The abolition of hereditary economic power was, in fact, included in the early American program for equality of rights; in 1829 and 1830 resolutions were passed in some American cities calling for the abolition of the power to transmit wealth, which then still consisted mainly of landed estates. But in the campaign for equality of rights other demands

came to be given priority; the time was not ripe for uprooting this kind of hereditary privilege; and the operation of the laws against entail and primogeniture was disintegrating the great feudalistic estates.

The principle then declared, that it was against social justice to allow accident of birth to endow certain persons with a superiority conferred by wealth, remains even truer as applied to the great economic power of to-day. Ownership giving mastery or control over industrial plants, railroads, public utilities, banks, mines, and other sources of material wealth passes from father to son. By the arbitrary, perhaps fantastic, rule of birth, a few children are thus placed upon a supereminent elevation of economic authority, while the mass of other children are compelled by the same process to start life burdened with pressing economic inequality.

That such a condition is in glaring contrast with all other conditions of American life does not admit of argument. No man can transmit political power to to his his children. Highly developed spiritual and intellectual qualities are confined wholly to the persons acquiring them. Fineness of character and excellence of reputation do not descend to offspring as a heritage. Neither does talent nor even athletic prowess. If children seek to emulate their parents in these, they must go through the same hard work in attaining them. But in the case of wealth, the sordid pursuit of which rates as among the lowest of human ambitions, successive generations are permitted to take inheritance. Often amassed by the most reprehensible

methods, wealth becomes a sacred process of hereditary descent, indued, as time goes on, with the full color of respectability.

Enormous wealth arrogates to itself an irresponsibility allowed to no other part of society. The ordinary business man risks failure, the professional man loss, the employed worker discharge, and the farmer ruin by not knowing required duties and personally attending to them. Too often the inheritor of control over industrial or other corporate concerns is ill informed if not ignorant of actual conditions in the plants from which his great revenues are derived. Management is intrusted to salaried executives who frequently are subordinated to the orders of distant banking financiers. Inherited proprietorship or control may come to be of an absentee character, allowing possessors of great wealth to live far from the properties that yield such riches. By inheritance the title to large holdings of stocks and bonds gives these individuals hereditary authority over large numbers of employees and insures the hereditary right to enjoy and enlarge wealth which they have done nothing to create.

The practice of the wealthy in making large donations for public benefactions did not have a voluntary origin. So strong was the American people's feeling against personal or family aggrandizement that it became customary that the rich should relinquish part or all of their wealth. Of the many evidences of this fact an editorial comment of the "North American Review" in October, 1848, may be cited: "in a manner, the very wealthy

are constrained to make large bequests for public objects in their wills; and if one occasionally fails to comply with the general expectation in this respect, his memory incurs such obloquy that sometimes his heirs have been shamed into an attempt to atone for his neglect."

There has, however, never been any popular approval of a social order allowing the few to posit themselves as benefactors and to extol themselves as philanthropists; it is not a creation of the American people but a legacy of the past when monarchs condescendingly bestowed largess.

American revulsion against anything savoring of patronage is traditional. Attempts, before the establishment of the public school system, to foist charity schools upon Americans were met by a boycott declared by self-respecting parents. It is just a century since, in a concerted movement, American artists indignantly repudiated the longstanding old-world custom of dependence upon patrons, and proclaimed that culture and talents outranked any superficial pretensions of rank or wealth. The head of any of our corporations will tell you that extreme care has to be exercised in talking about employees' welfare work so as not to arouse the resentment felt by working people against a spirit of patronage.

Among the objectionable characteristics of great wealth not the least is the inherent opportunity of buying commendation or renown by sheer lavish disbursement. Few donations have been made anonymously. In certain cases the motive of the donor may not be altogether