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the corporation we have had in our own times ample and baleful demonstration. We have seen it rise on the ruins of partnership. We have seen it attack civil society and compel that society to give it the right to flourish and to reign.

But beyond the corporation there arises a still greater and more abusive fact, and that is the trust. Edward Bellamy saw the trust rising above the corporate life and drawing into its own circle of power, not one corporation, but hundreds and thousands of them, making them the materials of its own life.

It is at this point that modern society has made a pause. Bellamy, however, perceived that the pause is only temporary. He perceived clearly that there is no finality in the human evolution, but only an ongoing and new development for ever and ever. He therefore looked ahead and anticipated somewhat the possible state of society to come. He looked beyond the corporation and the trust, beyond the prodigious development of modern commercialism and municipality, and saw something higher and grander than these rising in the distance. What he saw towering in dim outline was the Social Trust of which all men are to be the beneficiaries. He imagined the possibility of seizing upon the present order and converting its gigantic evils by a gentle curve into the way of the greatest good. He saw beyond the existing order arising in dim outline the COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH-a sort of socio-industrial, intellectual, and moral commune of associated interest, of mutual support and counsel.

It was at this point that Bellamy made his splendid leap. In doing so he was perfectly rational. He knew that society is not going to stop at its present stage of development. He knew that something else besides the present order must arise and stand in its stead. Disbelieving in the present order, he attempted in an ideal way, very gently and humanely, to put the present order aside. His effort was made with the pen. It was made in right reason and with the virtue of a great moral purpose. It was made in a manner so interesting as to draw the sympathetic attention of the whole world to this weak-bodied but great-souled man. The common folk among the nations took up his first book and saw reflected in it something of their own dreams and hopes. The leaders of society

took it up, followed the argument, and admitted its truthfulness so far as the disease and the diagnosis are concerned, but refused to follow further. After their manner they yawned and laid down the volume. Indeed it may be said in a general way that all of Bellamy has been accepted except his remedial agencies and his prophetic indications.

This is the manner, however, of the English-speaking race. The man who speaks English never accepts anything until it is thrust upon him. Generally he does not accept it until it is forced upon him by revolution. Afterward he will say that he likes it very much and that he was always striving to get it. There is a strange admixture of cowardice and courage, of daring and conservatism, of reformatory tendency and stolid reactionism in the Anglo-Saxon constitution. If the race were practically as adventurous in the direction of ideal betterment as it is in the way of geographical adventure, seafaring, conquest, colonization, and government, then by the agency of this courageous but immobile division of mankind the world would long ere this have reached a millennium.

But the English-speaking people hold back from any rapid approach towards ideal conditions. The whole product, therefore, of the civilization which the Anglo-Saxon stock has produced is essentially like an old English cathedral, which, beginning in a shanty, has never demolished anything, but always added to it and covered it up; and to this day should anyone search in the heart or remote wing of the cathedral for the original hut, and should he propose to remove it with its rat-holes and bat-haunts, the whole race would be up in arms for fear the Existing Order might be disturbed, religion injured, and society be visited with the vengeance of heaven on the score of sacrilege!

Had we the courage to clear away sometimes, to lay a new foundation, to bring in a new architecture that shall be consistent with itself and equal to the aspiration of the age, then we should all become apostles of Edward Bellamy. In that event we should take up and carry forward, if not complete, the building of that exquisite and humane structure which the author of "Looking Backward" and "Equality" beheld in his visions and dreams.

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"We do not take possession of our ideas, but are possessed by them. They master us and force us into the arena,

Where, like gladiators, we must fight for them."-Heine.

THE ARENA.

VOL. XX, No. 3. SEPTEMBER, 1898. WHOLE NO. 106.

THE GREAT QUESTION IN RETROSPECT.

BY HON. WILLIAM M. FISHBACK,

Ex-Governor of Arkansas.

O assume that the more than six and a half million men

who voted on whichever side of the question in November, 1896, are knaves or fools would do violence alike to common sense and to decency. One or the other side was simply but honestly mistaken; and now that, nearly two years after, the partisan prejudices and passions which a presidential election invariably arouses have so far subsided that men can consider the subject as a question of political economy rather than as one of partisan politics, it would seem a propitious time to ascertain which side was mistaken.

Those who followed the discussions of the campaign of 1896 must have remarked that the advocates of the gold standard almost without exception spoke or wrote of monometallism and bimetallism as if the existence of either or both depended upon "circulation." It was alleged that the "free coinage of silver would drive gold out of circulation, and that we should be upon a single silver standard; that we now have both metals in circulation and therefore have a true bimetallic standard."

Than this nothing could be more confusing and even misleading. Indeed, just as the chief merit of a modern pendulum consists in the fact that the two metals of which it is composed never contract or expand in equal degrees at the same time, so the chief merit of a bimetallic standard lies in

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