Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/794

772 the ancient community, in which there was a warrior caste of masters with an industrial people of slaves, and the modern community, in which there is an industrial people of citizens with a standing army of professional soldiers, though most momentous, quite so radical as Mr. Spencer assumes. The most perfect type of a purely industrial community, perhaps, is China; not a very encouraging example, as the Chinese, besides their servility, their unprogressiveness, and their total lack of political life, are untruthful, vicious in some other respects, mean, and, as their punishments show, abominably cruel. In London and our other great commercial cities the military element is trifling, even taking in the volunteers; yet of vice and unhappiness there is surely enough. Biographers at some future time, seeking in Mr. Spencer's works materials for a life of the great philosopher, will find that he evidently had experience in his own person of some of the special evils of industrialism, such as plumbers who make business for builders, and crockery-breaking servant-girls, to whom he was compelled to apply that article of his ethical code which forbids you, when your crockery is concerned, to allow your line of conduct to be decided by altruism alone. These are but trifling instances of an industrial depravity over which jeremiads innumerable have been chanted, and which in its consequences even to life is hardly less destructive than war. The final transition will also be a most critical affair. A society wholly destitute of military force and without martyr spirit, which can hardly exist apart from religion, will be at the mercy of any surviving six shooter of the past.

In a recent number of this review there was an article by Mr. Spencer on "The Industrial Type of Society," to which was appended a note drawing a comparison between the morality of religious communities and that of savages who have no religion. The Christian era was represented as a hideous succession of public and private atrocities, innumerable and immeasurable, of bloody aggressive wars, ceaseless family vendettas, bandit barons and fighting bishops, massacres—political and religious—torturings and burnings, assassinations, thefts, lying, and all-pervading crimes. Nor was this description confined to the past. We were called upon to read the police reports, the criminal assize proceedings, the accounts of fraudulent bankruptcies, political burglaries, and criminal aggressions at the present day. With this picture we were invited to contrast the honesty, the truthfulness, the amiability, the mild humanity of the Bodo, the Dhimáls, the Lepchas, the Santáls, the Veddahs, the Arafuras, and the Hodas who have no notion of God nor belief in the immortality of the soul. Decisive judgment was given in favor of the savages by the philosopher, whom we can not suppose to have been indulging in mere rhetoric. But it will be allowed that the Christian nations are in general respects, and notably in everything pertaining to science, the most civilized. If in the