Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/389

 THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIENCE 373

In a sense, therefore, after the element of authority once has become established in connection with conscience, the story of its evolution becomes a story of its growth in this social con- sciousness ; because it is from this social medium of public opinion that we are more or less guided in the way we apply the authority of the moral sense to the problems of life. If we were to go into this story in detail, we should be obliged to sketch out the stages of change or advance in what people have come to look upon as good conduct or evil conduct from age to age.

We might illustrate in the feeling concerning war. It is said, for instance, that Julius Caesar slaughtered at least one million lives in the country we now call France, when he was adding that portion of Europe to the Roman empire. I am not sure that Caesar had any scruples as to what he was doing. I do not know that he even undertook to justify himself for the course he was pursuing. It was accepted as a matter of course that a strong, powerful country would try to conquer or swallow up the weaker countries. Had there been no offense whatever given on the part of Gaul against the people of Rome, and Caesar had proceeded to conquer that country at the cost of a million lives, it is doubtful whether he would have taken the trouble to apologize for it.

Nearly two thousand years have gone by. It is not quite sure that conscience on the inside has advanced from what it was in the city of Rome in those days. At any rate, we do know that under the Caesars there was in many persons a refined moral sense. Now, on the contrary, we notice what an effort the people of a country make to show a justification for a war they are undertaking the reasons they give, the way they go aside to study up the history of the case, and prove that they are in the right, and that the moral sense authorizes the course they are pursuing.

Whether this is a growth in conscience as such, I am not sure. But it is an extraordinary advance in the social consciousness. Nations have come to the point where they cannot pursue a war of aggrandizement without somehow furnishing at least super- ficial reasons justifying their course. If they do not do this,