Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/851

Rh of a conflagration. It is a whole, healthy, and complete development, a method full of infinite possibilities. Yet it has its apparent drawbacks. The minds of people working peacefully at home are not in the recipient state of that of the soldier, who has broken the chains of law and habit and grown singularly porous to the reception of new ideas. Local prejudices dwell at home with localized people. Knowledge has to fight its way through a thick crust of self-satisfied home partisanship. Men must come into contact with each other if conservatism is to be eliminated. They are fortunately coming more and more into peaceful contact with each other. Modern facilities are rendering habits of travel more general. There is as much peaceful movement now as there was warlike movement of old. The stay-at-home society is yearly losing membership.

And this process is wonderfully aided by another instrumentality. Men's bodies on longer need to touch for their ideas to come into contact. Ideas themselves are on their travels. The whole world, in a contracted sense, lies before every man at his breakfast table. The newspaper, aided by the telegraph, is a most powerful civilizing agent. In books not only the thought of the existing world, but a condensed epitome of the thought of all the past, is placed before the reading public. The library is the great granary of ideas. The press is the brain of the world, the grand receptacle of its thoughts.

Thus, in a wider sense than ever before, we travel and learn. Our souls travel while our bodies are at rest. The whole world is harvesting all the experiences and ideas gained by any portion of mankind. It is not the destructive harvesting of war, but the careful harvesting of peace. And prejudice—the mental isolation which has succeeded to national isolation—is breaking down before it. We are growing more and more receptive. The world's mind is becoming strikingly porous to new thought. We are cutting loose from fixity of belief, rigidity of custom, and devotion to authority, and growing mentally flexible, inquiring, and rebellious against bigotry. The reign of faith is giving way to the reign of reason.

And in this modern mode of development ethical evolution comes actively into play. Human progress has its three phases—the physical, the intellectual, and the moral. The last, the highest of all, was but imperfectly provided for in the old civilizing agencies. War has a brutalizing tendency. Only in peaceful development can moral progress fully display itself. As the highest moral advancement of mankind has seemed to keep pace, perhaps necessarily, with the highest intellectual development, it was undoubtedly to some extent favored by war. Certainly, in the warring nations of Europe morality has reached a far higher stage