HEN the student of biological science investigates a problem of animal or vegetable life, his first inquiry is con cerning those surrounding conditions. which constitute the physical environment or medium in which the particular being lives. In like manner, before entering upon the consideration of social phenomena, it is indispensable that we should form a right estimate of the situation in which those phenomena occur. They are to the чи B world around them as the fish is to the water. There is action and re-action between the living parts of society and the social atmosphere in which they are, just as there is between the fish and the water. Unless we are right in this respect, our judgment is less to be relied on, and practical effort may fail for want of the necessary fitness of time or place. We live in an age of vast and momentous change, characterized as a period of, transition, as a passage from an old to a new order. The industrial movement is not separate or distinct from the other parts of the human progress. Industry is but one aspect of social life, and cannot be separated from other aspects, intellectual, moral, or political. When the public mind grasps a new political idea or seizes upon some lofty moral aspiration, it is not limited by the circumstances to which perhaps it may owe its origin, but penetrates to all the actions and desires of man. When the Radical manufacturers preached political change to the working classes, and set up before them political independence as a goal to strive for, they ought not to have been surprised to find that the ideas they had taught |