"The doors to premature and violent death,
To penury, famine, and full-fed disease."
Wealth was a living God, who rules in scorn, and whom peasants, nobles, priests, and kings blindly reverence, and by whom everything is sold—the light of heaven, earth's produce, the peace of outraged conscience, the most despicable things, every object of life, and even life itself.
In a proper condition of society, which should be strictly co-operative, there would necessarily be no pauperism, and
"No meditative signs of selfishness,
No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,
No balancings of prudence, cold and long;
In just and equal measure all is weighed;
One scale contains the sum of human weal.
And one the good man's heart."
The fruits of Shelley's enunciations on the labor and capital questions, and the school of political economists to which he belonged, have made wondrous progress. The world is beginning to see that labor has the unrestricted right of coalition, that there should be only a standard day's work, according to the wants of society, with prohibition of labor for at least one day in the week; that legislation is required for the protection of the life and health of the working man, and that mines, factories, and workshops should be strictly controlled by sanitary officers selected by labor; that no children's work should be permitted, or women's, which may be considered unhealthy; that prison work should be regulated, and that laborers' co-operative and benevolent societies should be administered independently of the State.
Liberals must learn from their enemies, must organize and let the ramifications of unshackled thought spread through the lands, and must, above all, conserve the control of education. Whereever there is a church or chapel, let there be beside it a hall or club, in which shall be inculcated the simple doctrines of a pure, integralised religion.
On the statute book of England there yet remains a law directed against the freedom of the press and discussion; to even discuss the question of the divinity of Christ was considered blasphemy, and the person so offending was punished most severely by the criminal laws. At the present time this wretched remnant of the dark ages is practically a dead letter. The friends of Shelley suffered from this most intolerant spirit. Keats, it is believed by many, was wounded unto death for daring to speak on behalf of freedom, and we are given glimpses in the Adonais of his feelings on the subject; Leigh Hunt and his brother were imprisoned and fined for the same; the publisher of the pirated edition of Shelley's Queen Mab was cast into Newgate; Eaton, a London bookseller, had been sentenced by Lord Ellenborough to a lengthened incarceration, for publishing Paine's Age of Reason, and hundreds of others suffered similarly. The abominable circumstance of Eaton's conviction caused great uproar; the Marquis of Wellesley, in the House of Lords, stated it was "contrary to the mild spirit of the Christian religion; for no sanction can be found under that dispensation which will warrant a government to impose disabilities and penalties upon any man on account of his religious opinions." Shelley, who was then only nineteen years of age, and had himself suffered from bigotry at Oxford, threw himself publicly into the controversy with great vehemence, with "a composition of great eloquence and logical exactness of reasoning, and the truths which it contains on the subject of universal toleration are now generally admitted." Lady Shelley, from whom I have just quoted, says that her husband's father, "from his earliest boyhood to his latest years, whatever varieties of opinion may have marked his intellectual course, never for a moment swerved from the noble doctrine of unbounded liberty of thought and speech. To him the rights of intellect were sacred; and all kings, teachers, or priests who sought to circumscribe the activity of discussion, and to check by force the full development of the reasoning powers, he regarded as enemies to the independence of man, who did their utmost to destroy the spiritual essence of our being."
To Shelley's able advocacy, and to his appeals against the stamping out of political and social truths opposed to custom, particularly the celebrated letter to Lord Ellenborough, it cannot be denied that the toleration now enjoyed in Great Britain owes much.
Shelley was one of those who most earnestly deprecated punishment by death. In his early years, if a man stole a sheep, or shot a hare, committed forgery or larceny, was a recusant catholic or a wizard, there was, on his conviction, but one penalty meted out—death. To Shelley's sensitive nature, this painted and tinged everything around him with an aspect of blood. In one of his political pamphlets, summoning all his energies, he depicts in fearful colors, the depraved example of an execution—how it brutalized the race, and how it was the duty of man not to commit murder on his fellow-man, in the name of the laws. The abolition of the first of these, he stated that reformers should propose on the eve of a great political change. He considered that the punishment by death harbored revenge and retaliation, which legislation should be the means of eradicating, and he urged that