772 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the ancient community, in which there was a warrior caste of masters 

 with an industrial people of slaves, and the modern community, in 

 which there is an industrial people of citizens with a standing army of 

 professional soldiers, though most momentous, quite so radical as Mr. 

 Spencer assumes. The most perfect type of a purely industrial com- 

 munity, perhaps, is China ; not a very encouraging example, as the Chi- 

 nese, besides their servility, their unprogressiveness, and their total lack 

 of political life, are untruthful, vicious in some other respects, mean, 

 and, as their punishments show, abominably cruel. In London and 

 our other great commercial cities the military element is trifling, even 

 taking in the volunteers ; yet of vice and unhappiness there is surely 

 enough. Biographers at some future time, seeking in Mr. Spencer's 

 works materials for a life of the great philosopher, will find that he 

 evidently had experience in his own person of some of the special evils 

 of industrialism, such as plumbers who make business for builders, and 

 crockery -breaking servant-girls, to whom he was compelled to apply 

 that article of his ethical code which forbids you, when your crockery 

 is concerned, to allow your line of conduct to be decided by altruism 

 alone. These are but trifling instances of an industrial depravity over 

 which jeremiads innumerable have been chanted, and which in its 

 consequences even to life is hardly less destructive than war. The 

 final transition will also be a most critical affair. A society wholly 

 destitute of military force and without martyr spirit, which can hardly 

 exist apart from religion, will be at the mercy of any surviving six- 

 shooter of the past. 



In a recent number of this review there was an article by Mr. 

 Spencer on " The Industrial Type of Society," * to which was appended 

 a note drawing a comparison between the morality of religious com- 

 munities and that of savages who have no religion. The Christian 

 era was represented as a hideous succession of public and private atroci- 

 ties, innumerable and immeasurable, of bloody aggressive wars, cease- 

 less family vendettas, bandit barons and fighting bishops, massacres 

 political and religious torturings and burnings, assassinations, thefts, 

 lying, and all-pervading crimes. Nor was this description confined to 

 the past. We were called upon to read the police reports, the criminal 

 assize proceedings, the accounts of fraudulent bankruptcies, political 

 burglaries, and criminal aggressions at the present day. With this 

 picture we were invited to contrast the honesty, the truthfulness, the 

 amiability, the mild humanity of the Bodo, the Dhimals, the Lepchas, 

 the Santals, the Veddahs, the Arafuras, and the Hodas who have no 

 notion of God nor belief in the immortality of the soul. Decisive judg- 

 ment was given in favor of the savages by the philosopher, whom we 

 can not suppose to have been indulging in mere rhetoi'ic. But it will 

 be allowed that the Christian nations are in general respects, and nota- 

 bly in everything pertaining to science, the most civilized. If in the 



* "Contemporary Review," October, 1881. 



