This law of violence received its first check through the parental instinct.  Parenthood built a fortress with walls and bulwarks about the babe.  Love of offspring caused a weakness to survive.  At last an era dawned when many parents united to construct a shield for weak children indeed, but also for weak adults.  The state lifted the shield between weakness and its oppressor.  The widow and the orphan were permitted to glean after the harvesters.  The traveler, passing through the field, might pluck a handful of corn or pull a bunch of figs.  The creditor must not take the blanket or coat from the laborer nor the boat from the poor fisherman, nor the plane or saw from the poor carpenter.  Stimulated by Christ’s example and teachings, society began to multiply the bulwarks against tyranny and selfishness.  Looking toward the child, for the protection of weakness and unripeness, the state built these shields called the school and library, looking toward the unfortunate and those weak in body or mind, the state built bulwarks called asylum and hospital.  Looking toward the chimney-sweep, the factory boys and girls, the state began to soften pain and mitigate the distress of labor.  Looking toward the serf and the slave and the prisoner, the novelist and poet constructed song and story as shields for the protection of the weak and the oppressed.

One hundred years ago a man was as a beast of the field, and the slaughter of men in Italy, by the tyrant who ruled over them, stirred no more thought in England than the news of the slaughter of so many beasts.  But fifty years ago the state had become so gentle toward the weak that when Mr. Gladstone made a protest against the savagery and infuriated cruelty wrought upon the inmates of the dungeons of Italy, then the heart of Europe turned toward Rome, the throne trembled upon its foundations.  Formerly when any foreign government wished to colonize Africa, they sent out a regiment of soldiers, cut off a slice of the country and annexed it.  Now public sentiment forbids such tyranny.  The only way the aggressive nations can obtain possession of new territory is to do it under the name of a protectorate, sugar-coating, as has been said, the deeds of tyranny.  If the dungeon has been rifled of its prey, if cruelty has been scourged out of the land, if despotism tottered, it is because society was slowly climbing up that stairway, of which the first step is fear and the last is love.

In these January days our earth, snow-clad and frost-bound, seems like a huge ball of ice.  Yet all unconsciously to itself, the earth is being swept on into spring and summer.  Unconsciously, but none the less truly, society, under the silent and secret impulse of the great God, has been journeying upward toward the time when love shall fulfill every law; when kindness and sympathy shall be organized in manners and customs.  All the revolutions of the past, all the clangor of war, all the tumbling down of Bastilles, all the piling up of cities, is as nothing to the advance of the world toward that era when love shall perfect man’s institutions and civilization.