EDITOR'S TABLE. 



705 



education by various legislative meas- 

 ures. Now the man who is going to 

 be made good by an act of the legis- 

 lature does not in general like the 

 prospect, and he is very apt to harden 

 his heart against the opei'ation. That 

 is why the more truly moral the law 

 is, the more it is apt to fail of its ob- 

 ject. As to capital, the possession of 

 it by an individual is a great respon- 

 sibility, and one that for the most 

 part is not as fully recognized as it 

 ought to be ; but we should much 

 prefer to trust to a growing moraliza- 

 tion of public opinion in the matter 

 than rashly to transfer all capital to 

 the state, and rely for its fructifica- 

 tion and wise distribution on the dis- 

 interested statesmanship of our rep- 

 resentative bodies. 



LIVING AND DYING NATIONS. 



Close inspection of Lord Salis- 

 bury's deliverance before the Prim- 

 rose League on living and dying 

 nations discloses a want of scientific 

 precision. Describing the living na- 

 tions, he said : " You have great 

 countries of enormous power, grow- 

 ing in power every year, growing in 

 wealth, growing in dominion, grow- 

 ing in the perfection of their organ- 

 ization. Railways have given them 

 the power to concentrate upon any 

 one point the whole military force 

 of their population, and to assemble 

 armies of a magnitude and power 

 never dreamed of in the genera- 

 tions that have gone by. Science 

 has placed in the hands of those 

 armies weapons ever growing in 

 the efficiency of their destruction, 

 and therefore adding to the power, 

 fearfully to the power, of those 

 who have the opportunity of using 

 them." Referring to the dying na- 

 tions, he said: "In these states dis- 

 organization and decay are advanc- 

 ing almost as fast as concentration 

 and increasing power are advancing 



VOL. LIU. — 48 



in the living nations that stand be- 

 side them. Decade after decade they 

 are weaker, poorer, and less pro- 

 vided with leading men or institu- 

 tions in which they can trust. The 

 society— and official society, the ad- 

 ministration — is a mass of corrup- 

 tion, so that there is no firm ground 

 on which any hope of reform or 

 restoration could be based, and in 

 their various degrees they are pre- 

 senting a terrible picture to the 

 more enlightened portion of the 

 world." The British premier him- 

 self did not cite any examples in il- 

 lustration of this classification. His 

 commentators, however, exercised 

 no such restraint. They w^ere sure 

 that among the dying nations we 

 should place Turkey, China, and 

 Spain, and among the living, that 

 is, the growing — Russia, Germany, 

 France, England, and the United 

 States. But, like the classification 

 of Lord Salisbury, such a list con- 

 founds the growth of military power 

 with the growth of industrial and 

 moral power. It attributes to dying 

 nations traits characteristic of living 

 nations, and, vice versa, traits at- 

 tributed to living nations belong to 

 dying nations. 



But before more trustworthy tests 

 can be applied it is needful to ascer- 

 tain what constitutes growth and 

 what constitutes death. Happily, the 

 law of evolution offers an easy solu- 

 tion of this question. Without be- 

 ing too precise, growth, according to 

 that law, signifies, first, an increase 

 of mass; and, second, such a rear- 

 rangement of matter and motion as 

 to effect a more perfect adjustment of 

 means to ends. But the attainment 

 of this object involves a change of the 

 mass from a homogeneous condition 

 to a heterogeneous one and from 

 an indefiniteness and incoherency of 

 parts to detiniteness and coherency. 

 Decay, on the other hand, means a 

 loss of mass, and such a rearrange- 



