nation, class warring against class.  The democratic movement about which we hear so much is equally unsuccessful.  After its brilliant promises it leaves us helpless against the passion and stupidity of the mob.  Popular education adds to the tribulations of society.  It rapidly increases the number of the discontented.  The half-educated are led astray by quacks and demagogues who flourish mightily.  The higher technical education increases that intellectual proletariat which Bismarck saw to be a peril.  Science, which once was hailed as a deliverer, is now perceived to bring only the disillusioning knowledge of our limitations.  The bankruptcy of Science follows closely upon the bankruptcy of Faith.  Mechanical inventions, instead of decreasing the friction of life, enormously increase it.  We are destined to be dragged along by our own machines which are to go faster and faster.  Philanthropy increases the number of the unfit.  The advances of medicine are only apparent, while statistics show that tuberculosis, a disease of early life, decreases, cancer and diseases of later life increase.

As for the general interest in social amelioration, that is the worst sign of all.  “Coming events cast their shadows before,” and we may see the shadow of the coming Revolution.  Is there any symptom of decadence more sure than when the moral temperature suddenly rises above normal?  Watch the clinical charts of Empire.  In the period of national vigor the blood is cool.  But the time arrives when the period of growth has passed.  Then a boding sense comes on.  The huge frame of the patient is feverish.  The social conscience is sensitive.  All sorts of soft-hearted proposals for helping the masses are proposed.  The world rulers become too tenderhearted for their business.  Then comes the end.

Read again the history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  How admirable were the efforts of the “good emperors,” and how futile!  Consider again the oft-repeated story of the way the humanitarianism of Rousseau ushered in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

With such gloomy forebodings do the over-civilized thinkers and writers try to discourage the half-civilized and half-educated workers, who are trying to make things better.  How shall we answer the prophets of ill?

Not by denying the existence of the evils they see, or the possibility of the calamities which they fear.  What we object to is the mental attitude toward the facts that are discovered.  The spoiled child, when it discovers something not to its liking, exaggerates the evil, and indulges its ill-temper.

The well-trained man faces the evil, studies it, measures it, and then sets to work.  He is well aware that nothing human is perfect, and that to accomplish one thing is only to reveal another thing which needs to be done.  There must be perpetual readjustment, and reconsideration.  What was done yesterday must be done over again to-day in a somewhat different way.  But all this does not prove the futility of effort.  It only proves that the effort must be unceasing, and that it must be more and more wisely directed.