v.] MATERIAL WELL-BEING AND POLITIOAL STABILITY. g9

on his visit to Athens seen Finlay, he might have learnt _3aabis,
from that admirable historian the same lesson on a still Zr. 81.2
more imposing scale in the ancient world, He would have
been told that even so momentous an event in the annals of
human civilization as the disappearance of rural slavery in
Europe, was less due to moral or political causes than to
such a decline in the value of the products of slave-labour
88 left no profit to the slave-owner. From the fall of the
Roman Empire to the mortal decay of Spain, and the ruin
of the ancient monarchy of France, history shows that
Cobden was amply justified in laying down the principle
that the affairs of a nation come under the same laws
of common sense ang homely wisdom which govern the
prosperity of a private concern,
In material well-being he maintained, and rightly maintained,
 that you not only have the surest foundation for
8 solid fabric of morality and enlightenment among your
people, but in the case of one of our vast and populous modern
societies of free men, the only sure bulwark against cease.
less disorder and violent convulsion, It was not, therefore,
 from the side of emotional Sympathy that Cobden
started, but from that Positive and scientific feeling for
good order and right government which is the statesman’s
true motive and deepest passion. The sentimental benevolence
 to which Victor Hugo and Dickens have appealed
with such power, could give little help in dealing with the
surging uncontrollable tides of industrial and economic
forces. Charity, it is trae, had been an accepted auxiliary
in the thinly peopled societies of the middle ages; but for
the great Populations and complex interests of the western
world in modern times, it is geen that prosperity must
depend on policy and institutions, and not on the compassion
 of individuals,
It is not necessary that we should analyse the contents