Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/507

 Rh mincing the matter," says Mr. W. E. Forster: "unless the world goes back, democracy must go forward." "The democratic principle," says Maine, regarding it as a militant power like some barbarian horde, "has gone forth conquering and to conquer, and its gainsayers are few and feeble." "To attempt to arrest the progress of democracy," says De Tocqueville, in the same melancholy vein, "seems like opposition to God, and it remains for the nations of the earth to adjust themselves to the conditions imposed by Providence." But when viewed in the light of the far-reaching and hopeful inductions of Herbert Spencer, democracy, to many minds so fraught with peril to civilization, is divested of terror. They show not only why it is honored with the vast moral, intellectual, and material achievements of the last four centuries, but they show also why it is charged with the intolerable social and political evils that have blackened and still blacken the pages of history. By the operation of the law of evolution, as immutable as any law of Nature, the agencies of human effort, whatever be their purpose, have been enlarged almost to an infinite degree, and made immeasurably more perfect and useful. By the operation of another law, equally immutable, has been decreed the character of those agencies; it has determined whether the beliefs, institutions, and morals of a nation shall be—those of savages or those of civilized men those of war or those of peace.

Subjected to the solvent power of these inductions, all the phenomena of social life yield their secrets. They disclose the truth that feudalism, from which modern society took its origin, was not due to soil, nor climate, nor race; it sprang from the murder and pillage of mediæval barbarism. Of the same remorseless Fury were born its machinery of despotism and its hideous traits. She was the mother of the hatred, cruelty, greed, and lust that afflicted the world for a thousand years and still afflict it. Industry, however, has been the mother of peace, liberty, honesty, and virtue. Without security and freedom, traffic in labor and its fruits is impossible. Men must be protected from robbery; they must own themselves as well as their toil; they must have the right to exchange; they must be exempt from seizure and confiscation. Nor can traffic thrive without the benignant spirit of kindness and courtesy. It demands an effort to please, and the effort to please begets the habit of pleasing. It demands honesty and confidence, the basis of credit and a potent stimulus to enterprise. But traffic is a ship freighted with wealth, which gives leisure and permits the culture of the noble