Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/661

Rh appropriate for times to come. Yet it needs but to go back to the remote past, when industrial life was held contemptible and virtue meant fortitude, valor, bravery; or to the less remote past when noble meant high-born while laborer and villein were equivalents; or to the time when abject submission of each grade to the grade above was thought the primary duty; or to the time when the good citizen of every rank was held bound to accept humbly the appointed creed; to see that the characters supposed to be proper for men were unlike the characters we now suppose proper for them. Nevertheless, the not-very-wise representatives of electors who are mostly ignorant, are prepared, with papal assumption, to settle the form of a desirable human nature, and to shape the coming generation into that form.

While they are thus confident about the thing to be done, they are no less confident about the way to do it; though in the last case as in the first, the past proves to them how utter has been the failure of the methods century after century pursued. Throughout a ChristendonChristendom [sic]full of churches and priests, full of pious books, full of observances directed to fostering the religion of love, encouraging mercy and insisting on forgiveness, we have an aggressiveness and a revengefulness such as savages have everywhere shown. And from people who daily read their bibles, attend early services, and appoint weeks of prayer, there are sent out messengers of peace to inferior races, who are forthwith ousted from their lands by filibustering expeditions authorized in Downing Street; while those who resist are treated as "rebels," the deaths they inflict in retaliation are called "murders," and the process of subduing them is named "pacification."

At the same time that we thus find good reason to reject the artificial method of molding citizens as wrong in respect alike of end and means, we have good reason to put faith in the natural method—the spontaneous adaptation of citizens to social life.

The organic world at large is made up of illustrations, infinite in number and variety, of the truth that by direct or indirect processes the faculties of each kind of creature become adjusted to the needs of its life; and further, that the exercise of each adjusted faculty becomes a source of gratification. In the normal order not only does there arise an agent for each duty, but consciousness is made up of the more or less pleasurable feelings which accompany the exercise of these agents. Further, the implication is that where the harmony has been deranged, it gradually re-establishes itself—that where change of circumstances has put the powers and requirements out of agreement, they slowly, either by survival of the fittest or by the inherited effects of use and disuse, or by both, come into agreement again.

This law, holding of human beings among others, implies that