86 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



virtuous by its fiat if it pleased. Happiness and virtue may 

 be things that are not " makeable." If " making " is a cate- 

 gory applicable only to a very limited aspect of the opera- 

 tions of the human mind it may not be applicable at all 

 to the operations of the Universal Mind. "What if, in the 

 nature of things, nothing better is achievable than that 

 which has been achieved and is being achieved? "We have 

 wars still : possibly without them civilisation might fall into 

 rottenness and decadence. They are not followed, however, 

 nowadays by the enslavement and slaughter of unarmed 

 populations. As, moreover, the customary law in each na- 

 tion, when it gained sufficient strength, in the end created 

 a tribunal to enforce it, so it seems possible that inter- 

 national law, which now exists in the shape of custom only, 

 may also similarly develope itself. "We have thus, perhaps, 

 in the very fact of the existence of international law, a pro- 

 phecy of a federation of the nations strong enough to make 

 public war as impossible between civilised States as private 

 war is now within them . 



Not many years ago we were in despair at the anticipation 

 that the trend of our industrial civilisation was in the direc- 

 tion, no doubt, of making the rich richer, but at the same 

 time of making the lot of the poor harder than ever it had 

 been. Eecent developments appear to indicate that this was 

 only a transitional stage. It is coming to be widely believed 

 now that the unfailing tendency of every new invention is to 

 shorten the hours and to increase the remuneration of labour, 

 as well as to increase the purchasing-power of its earnings. 

 It seems on all grounds well within the bounds of possibility 

 that the next century will see an enormous diminution in the 

 physical miseries of the w^orld, and it seems open to us, at 

 any rate, to hail every achievement of science as something 

 that is without fail hastening on that consummation. Im- 

 partial, unbiassed reasoning alone appears to be all that is 

 requisite to warrant our faith in the beneficence of the Mind 

 that is guiding our destinies. 



