Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail.  The colours, too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and co-operative work.  The labours of such a bureau of international effort as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left perforce to those who can understand them.  Yet it is precisely in these things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic features of the age are to be found.  For in them and in similar movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we started, reason and sympathy:  reason winning triumphs over nature, sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their powers to mutual aid.  ‘Idle dreams’, it will be said, as we hurl more and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly developed resources of science.  Yes, but the same nations were only yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow fell.  The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind abroad.  And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing approximation.  Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die away.  They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a detailed study in itself.  This is the relation of the more advanced and powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive peoples.  It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the best, test of the advancement of any single people.  For it involves some joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less advanced.