The more intelligent and wealthy class have it in their power so to
mould this change as to render it peaceful, gradual and universally
beneficent; or they can turn a deaf ear to the calls of humanity, and
let the demagogue, the envious, the selfishly discontented, pervert it
into an engine of convulsion, destruction and desolation. As in the
days of King John, the barons laid the foundations of English political
liberty, so in our day the intellectual and philanthropic may guide the
car of progress, and in establishing industrial harmony may secure to
all but the stubbornly vicious or incurably afflicted, true
independence and ample means of subsistence and development; or they
can indolently leave all to the benighted and malignant, and see
reproduced a war of classes, different indeed in its weapons and its
physical aspects, but not different in its essential character from the
ravages of France by the _Jacquerie_ or the butcheries of the
reign of terror.
In this crisis of events, with an industrial war plainly threatened and
partially commenced, the doctrine of Association appears as a mediator
and reconciler. Its bow of promise shines broadly in the lurid sky; it
irradiates the murky visage of the gathering, muttering tempest.
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