IS THIS A DEGENERATE AGE? 491 



so many wait in dread, is likely to remain a nightmare. Great Britain 

 needs Russia's grain; Russia needs the manufactures of Britain and 

 Germany. Germans control Russia's trade even in far-ofE Siberia, and 

 Germans are teaching Russians how to develop their resources. The 

 rabble in each country may rave as they please — a power mightier than 

 they makes for peace. 



The same influence is exerted for maintenance of friendly relations 

 within the commercial nations themselves. Compulsory arbitration 

 of labor disputes has been established in some portions of the British 

 empire and several of our own states have taken the initial step by 

 appointing arbitration commissions to serve when called upon. The 

 trend of public opinion among us was shown during the recent steel 

 strike, when arbitration was urged not only by journals defending the 

 strikers but also by those which denounced the strike as wholly un- 

 justifiable. Individual differences, settled in olden time by combat, 

 are settled now by arbitration before judge or jury in open court; the 

 day is not far distant when differences between organizations, large 

 and small, will be settled in the same way. Here, too, our vast com- 

 mercial organizations make for peace, since their gigantic interests are 

 so interwoven with the equally gigantic interests of labor that 

 serious interruption of friendly relations threatens destruction to 

 both. 



Improvement in politics is not very distinct to those living in our 

 great cities, for the present degradation is of comparatively recent 

 origin and due largely to foreign immigration. Cities, like sieves, 

 permit most of the good to pass through and the worthless to remain, 

 while universal suffrage enables this residuum to convert them into 

 sinks, which receive partial cleansing only when rogues disagree and 

 the 'outs' seek revenge by temporary combination with decent people. 

 Leaving the cities out of consideration as temporary anomalies, one 

 finds that men holding positions of honor and trust are expected to 

 perform their duties faithfully. Charges of corruption are not bandied 

 about freely by reputable journals as they were sixty years ago; in 

 Great Britain and the United States, errors in policy are not charged 

 to venality, but to lack of common sense. Fair dealing is so ingrained 

 in commercial life that we are coming to expect it naturally in political 

 life. ' Senator Sorghum,' the creation of a jester, belongs so much to 

 the past that his utterances afford only amusement. Commercial 

 Britain has the best city governments in the world ; its civil and diplo- 

 matic service shows a sense of honor as high as that of the American 

 army; within the United States, civil service reform has gone far 

 toward removing the evils of patronage which degraded our politics 

 even less than thirty years ago. It is true that politics here and in 

 Great Britain are far removed from millennial conditions, but another 



