IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORMERS 209
lution, or rather since the Protestant Reformation, has been toward the enfranchisement of the individual. The victory of personal liberty as a principle is complete in the leading nations ; the practical application of the principle is also nearing its com- pletion. The next great word, as Mazzini says, is association.
The process of enfranchisement has unfettered immense forces, but it has also resulted in disorganizing society. The old feudal bonds have been dissolved, but new bonds have not taken their place. The peasants of Europe are no longer bound to the soil or to its lord. They are free to go where they like. As a result many of them are torn loose from the sheltering and restraining ties of kinship and neighborhood and are swept like human flot- sam and jetsam into the great cities where none knows them or cares for them. Is it a clear gain to them ? The same process comes close home to us in the negro population of the South. They are free now, under nobody's ownership, but also under nobody's care. It is probably fair to say that the benefits resulting from their emancipation have not been as great as had been hoped. In Germany improved agriculture has shortened the harvest season ; as a result large bodies of men and women migrate from place to place, hiring out as laborers ; they move like the tide, and one section is swept bare of its youthful popu- lation, while other sections are inundated with a crowd of strangers. It is easy to imagine that this migratory life does not tend to stable habits, family affection, or clean morals.
With the city population things are similar. The guilds are gone. The relation of master, journeyman and apprentice has given place to that of employers and hands. The human inter- est and relation between them has dwindled away ; the money relation is the sole bond. The old feudal relations were often unjust and dwarfing, but they gave a certain security and a defi- nite place in which a man could live and move. Now men are free, but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence. This condition is not a final one. New forms of association must be created. Our dis-
