REVERSIONS IX MODERN INDUSTRIAL LIFE. 43 



If the obedience due this ruler of the modern industrial world 

 is imperfect, the reason is not difficult to discover. It is because 

 his reign has been brief, and human nature is still crude. Too 

 many vestiges of countless ages of conflict cling to the brain of 

 man. Too much misdirected effort is made to fit the institutions 

 of murder and pillage to times of peace and industry. Obsolete 

 as a battle axe or a coat of mail, they do not extinguish the traits 

 inherited from savage ancestry ; they only stimulate and perpetu- 

 ate them. No matter whether they be tried under the despotism 

 of a French feudal monarchy or under the popular sovereignty of 

 the American Republic, the effect is identical. They engender the 

 same greed, the same hypocrisy, the same deception, the same 

 contention. No abridgment of liberty that philanthropists or 

 statesmen may deem essential to the safety of modern civilization 

 will permit them to realize their Utopian dream. The millennium 

 lies in another direction in the direction of greater liberty. As 

 society becomes more and more complex, with wants so great and 

 varied as to pass the knowledge of any benevolent despot ruling 

 by divine right, or any group of despots ruling by virtue of uni- 

 versal suffrage, individuals must be allowed more and more to 

 control their own destiny, and to take the consequences, good or 

 bad. Whatever government they may need to direct their count- 

 less enterprises for the supply of those wants and for the regula- 

 tion of their relations with one another and with the public, must 

 not be the product of political selection, but of industrial selec- 

 tion ; it must not be the choice of ward bummers and complaisant 

 citizens that register the will of an unscrupulous and irresponsible 

 demagogue, ambitious to exercise a power that decent people re- 

 fuse him, but of the men that have staked their fortunes in busi- 

 ness, whose success or failure is dependent upon the wisdom of 

 their action. Not the least fit, but the most fit, will then admin- 

 ister the affairs of the world. With the continuance of peace 

 and industry they will not be the greatest fools or knaves, now 

 so often charged and unhappily so often proved, but the wisest 

 and most upright. Civilization will not then go backward, as it 

 now threatens to do, but it will go forward, as it did with the 

 enlargement of liberty that has been the most splendid achieve- 

 ment of the last four centuries of thought and effort. 



The eager haste with which men of fixed notions are apt to rush to con- 

 clusions is portrayed rather than caricatured in Lord Houghton's version 

 of the debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the Brit- 

 ish Association in 1860, which Sir E. Grant Duff quotes in his Notes from 

 a Diary. As the story is told, Mr. Huxley asserted that the blood of guinea 

 pigs crystallizes in rhombohedrons. "Thereupon the bishop sprang to his 

 feet and declared that 'such notions lead directly to atheism.' '' 



