Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/668

648 And, happily, of the three sets of brain areas, that which forms the physical basis of the moral faculties is by far the most capable of improvement by cultivation. It is the part which most quickly and fully responds to educative influences. And there is entire correspondence in the improved outward conduct, which may as truly be looked upon as the effect of increased brainpower as stronger muscular action is of more highly developed muscles.

History demonstrates the pre-eminent educability of the moral part of man. The ancient athlete did not differ essentially from his modern ectype. There is not much to choose intellectually between Cicero and Wendell Phillips, between Aristotle and Herbert Spencer, between Copernicus and Charles Darwin, between the prehistoric genius who first smelted iron ore and Edison. The intellectual status of the educated classes of ancient Rome did not differ materially from that of the corresponding classes of modern London or New York; but compare their moral status! The wealth, beauty, and fashion of Rome assembled in eager thousands to witness the entertaining spectacle of wholesale human butchery: we stigmatize a bull-fight as intolerable savagery, worthy only of belated Spain, Portugal, or Mexico, and even the blood and bruises of a prize-fight are too much for the humanity and self-respect of any but blacklegs, thieves, "sports," and of a few scions of royalty and other quasi-respectable men. The ancients punished not only their criminals but often their innocent captives with death by torture: imagine a populous city of our day, absorbed in its various employments and pleasures, unconcerned while in full sight on a neighboring plain men are for days together writhing and moaning out the inconceivable agonies of crucifixion! Not only would such a thing be impossible in our day, but we are actually divided in opinion as to whether painless death by electrocution is not too barbarous a way of disposing of criminals. The ancients immured their lunatics and idiots in noisome subterranean dungeons, and left their paupers, their halt, blind, and deaf to shift for themselves or to depend upon casual private benevolence: we build almshouses, hospitals, and asylums, and our best scientific skill is taxed to its utmost in behalf of our unfortunates of these classes.

Such are a few of the ways in which improvement in the average moral sentiment of humanity within the Christian era is shown. We wonder at the monstrous cruelties of past ages. How could they have been possible, we ask, since "human nature has always been the same"? But human nature has not always been the same; it has always been changing; it is changing now, and it will always continue to change. And the rate of improvement is continually accelerating. Those born since the war find