Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/777

Rh of one generation, even of one decade, consists in what had been wasted in the previous decade. We are always within less than a year of starvation, yet never before did we possess such absolute assurance of abundant consumption.

I never happened to read Disraeli's strange novels until the present summer. While I was thinking of what I had to say in this matter I came across a paragraph which seems to me to cover much the same ground over which I have been led by my observations of the hard facts of a long business life. "Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter." This is another way of saying that man dominates the forces of Nature, and is not dominated by them.

Does not this same conception pervade the Hebrew Scriptures? Under the name of Moses it is written of mankind "to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Do we not find throughout the Scripture record of the Jewish history the same conception of the unity of the creative mind named by the Hebrew Jehovah, by the Christian named God? Do we not find in the Hebrew theory of the origin of species the sense of order and uniformity? Is not mankind a part of that universe, and have we not the right to believe that to man by the power of will and reason, of forecast and imagination, has been given such dominion over the forces of Nature as to enable him to direct these forces to conditions of progressive welfare the scope and end of which no one can even yet measure? Each of these great investigators whom I have named in his day and generation has served to promote the very progress with which his own conceptions seemed to be most at variance.

The prime object which Malthus had in view was to overcome the evils of the then existing poor laws of Great Britain, which he accomplished. The theory of evolution is held by the masters of science to have given the greatest incentive to movement and progress yet recorded in the history of scientific research. Yet it may not be complete. In almost the same year in which Malthus presented his malignant theory, justifying war, pestilence, and famine as necessary factors in the life of man, Immanuel Kant published his great essay on Eternal Peace, resting its certainty on the development of commerce and on the mutual services which men render each other in spite of the interruptions of war, and in spite also of the evil conception of the functions of commerce which has so long pervaded the legislation of this country, from which we have yet to emerge—namely, that the import of the goods of foreign origin