Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/527

Rh, geology, paleontology, biology and embryology, ethnology and archæology, philology, sociology, and economics.

Above all, he must be a devoted lover of truth and unwavering in its search. He must never be led away by an unsupported theory, however seductive.

It has been said in the past that great men make great men, that the influence of a great mind on plastic youth is invaluable; and it is as true now as ever. But the concept of what makes a great mind has changed. In an age of scholasticism, with an almost universal adherence to a fixed cosmogony, that man was great who by his personality and the influence that it carried could transfer that cosmogony as a whole to the minds of his pupils and the code of its ethics to the guidance of their lives. It is one of the glories of the new scientific thought that there can be no completed cosmogony, that it is ever growing and being rectified with each new truth discovered. The example of noble men of the past and the study of their deeds may stimulate others to live like them still. But for building up a stable character, the baseless, shifting philosophy of the past can never equal the study of exact truth as expressed in natural law and the humble facts of our own being. Nature never lies to her children if they stop and listen. There is more rigid, unprevaricating response to an honest query in a right angle than in all the sophistry of the schools. The young man that is thrust out into the world of action now, with only the scholastic cosmogony as a support for his moral code, is to be pitied when he finds his foundation swept away, as it surely will be if he truly thinks. How much more sturdy he would have been had he been led to clearly see the social necessities that step by step gave rise to moral law law that grows higher and broader with social need and raises ever to its own level its own creators!

A original system of raising revenue is described by Mr. Hugh Clifford as existing in the Malay state of Trengganu. "It is managed in one of two ways. Either a consignment of goods is sent to the village or to an individual, and a price considerably in excess of that current in the markets is demanded in return for them; or else a small sum of money is sent, and a message is conveyed to the recipients that a given quantity of getah or jungle produce is demanded in return. On the receipt of a serah a village headman calls his people together and enforces a public subscription to meet the sum required by the raja. The things are then divided among the subscribers, but as the quantity of goods is altogether out of keeping with the high price paid for them, and as the village elders usually insist on receiving the full value of their subscription, the weaker members of the community get little or nothing in return for their money." The other form of assessment likewise works oppressively upon its victim.