1. “Was the leisure of the Greeks not owing to the hard work of the helots and slaves they had?” asked my old friend, Thomas Dixon, in his letter given last month.

Yes, truly, good labourer; nor the Greeks’ leisure only, but also—if we are to call it leisure—that of the rich and powerful of this world, since this world began. And more and more I perceive, as my old age opens to me the deeper secrets of human life, that the true story and strength of that world are the story and strength of these helots and slaves; and only its fiction and feebleness in the idleness of those who feed on them:—which fiction and feebleness, with all their cruelty and sensuality, filling the cup of the fornication of the kings of the earth now to the lip, must be, in no long time now, poured out upon the earth; and the cause of the poor judged by the King who shall reign in righteousness. For all these petty struggles of the past, of which you write to me, are but the scudding clouds and first wailing winds, of the storm which must be as the sheet lightning—from one part of heaven to the other,—“So also shall the coming of the Son of Man be.”