Page:Man's Machine-Made Millennium.djvu/3

572 said: "All law, all philosophy, all wisdom, depend upon the practice of these principles. Moderate thyself. Instruct thyself. Live for thy fellow creatures that they may live for thee." He is the best business man who abides by this teaching.

There is a no more common error of belief than the one that altruism is a mere matter of sentiment, for it has a practical business side, a side befitting cold, calculating policy. Perfect selfishness and perfect altruism lead to a common goal, where life is found to be an equation—the individual on one side, other people on the other side.

If two persons were to proceed with equal wisdom, one actuated by purely selfish motives and by policy, the other by purely altruistic motives with no idea of policy, the one would serve others by his own self-service, and the other would serve himself by his service to others. The unselfish man would find it necessary to conserve himself in the interest of others, and the selfish man would find that he must conserve others equally in the interest of himself.

If, for argument's sake, we were to assume a condition of mechanical and scientific perfection, where every want except human companionship and sympathy could be supplied by pressing a button, there is no place in the world that would not be a prison-house if these requisites to happiness were lacking.

The first step to be taken toward the coming millennium is to fit the great human procession for millennial possibilities. There can be no millennium, no way of making complete living common, until there shall have been weeded out of the great human garden the obnoxious plants that now grow rank in the hothouse of unbridled passions, fertilized by drugs and watered with alcohol.

"The wrong are weak: the right are strong: This mean the two terms, right and wrong. And truth sought out to any length Finds all wrong weakness; all right, strength."

Thus it is that, before we pass into any human paradise, we must go by the somber prison-house, the reformatory, and the hospital.

HUMANITARIAN PROGRESS

Just as we now elect what immigrants shall come into our country to reside and mingle their blood with ours, so we have the right to choose—and shall soon know enough to exercise that right—what blood we shall let continue to flow into the great human stream. The reform will come not by punishing the offender, but by his isolation. The criminal will then be classed with the leper, and men will no more think of punishing for theft or than we now think of punishing for insanity or smallpox. But the public will be protected much more efficiently then than it is now. It is the ignorance of barbarism that leads us to imprison men for crimes they cannot help committing, releasing them after a stated period with the impulse toward crime unchecked. This is as unwise as it would be to imprison a leper when the first flush of his disease appeared, then to release him to mingle with the human throng and contaminate others, and again to imprison him for that contamination, releasing him again after punishment, to continue the contagion.

The remedy will be the establishment of a great institution for the reception and isolation of all human derelicts. It will be a national institution. It will not be like any prison we now know, for it will be wardened by kindness. A large tract of fertile country will be set apart. It will be an enormous garden, and the tenantry of that great park will have their little farms and cottages. There will be cities with beautiful residences, schools, colleges, clubs, libraries, and art-galleries—in short, every convenience and luxury common to the civilized life of that time. There will be but one restriction—the lives of all who enter there, although lived and ended in comfort and even luxury, shall not be perpetuated in others. There will be no son and no daughter to inherit the property of the thrifty manufacturer, house-owner, or landholder, for all property will belong to the commonwealth, and on the death of a tenant the property occupied by him will revert to the commonwealth to be assigned to some new offender sent in from the outer world.

Man is a warring animal. The first sun of civilization's dawn broke through a war cloud, and what light it has since shed upon mankind has been through rifts in clouds of war. The history of nations is the history of wars; but while armies of men have met and hewn each other down, there have been enemies in the ranks of the combatants on every side far more deadly than he of the two-edged sword.

WAR WITH DISEASE

In every war pestilence has slain dozens to every one that has fallen in battle. There are no rifts in the clouds of war waged with the deadly germs of disease. It is a