THE EVOLUTION OF HIGH WAGES. 753 



of one generation, even of one decade, consists in what liad been 

 wasted in the previous decade. We are always within less than a year 

 of starvation, yet never before did we possess such absolute assur- 

 ance of abundant consumption. 



I never happened to read Disraeli's strange novels until the pres- 

 ent summer. While I was thinking of what I had to say in this 

 matter I came across a paragraph which seems to me to cover much 

 the same ground over which I have been led by my observations of 

 the hard facts of a long business life. " Man is not the creature of 

 circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men. We are 

 free agents, and man is more powerful than matter." This is an- 

 other way of saying that man dominates the forces of ISTature, and is 

 not dominated by them. 



Does not this same conception pervade the Hebrew Scriptures? 

 Under the name of Moses it is written of mankind " to be fruitful 

 and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have do- 

 minion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over 

 every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Do we not find 

 throughout the Scripture record of the Jewish history the same con- 

 ception of the unity of the creative mind named by the Hebrew 

 Jehovah, by the Christian named God? Do we not find in the 

 Hebrew theory of the origin of species the sense of order and uni- 

 formity? Is not mankind a part of that universe, and have we not 

 the right to believe that to man by the power of will and reason, of 

 forecast and imagination, has been given such dominion over the 

 forces of ISTature as to enable him to direct these forces to conditions 

 of progressive welfare the scope and end of which no one can even 

 yet measure? Each of these great investigators whom I have named 

 in his day and generation has served to promote the very progress 

 with which his own conceptions seemed to be most at variance. 



The prime object which Maltlius had in view was to overcome 

 the evils of the then existing poor laws of Great Britain, which he 

 accomplished. The theory of evolution is held by the masters of 

 science to have given the greatest incentive to movement and prog- 

 ress yet recorded in the history of scientific research. Yet it may 

 not be complete. In almost the same year in which Maltlius presented 

 his malignant theory, justifying war, pestilence, and famine as neces- 

 sary factors in the life of man, Immanuel Kant published his great 

 essay on Eternal Peace, resting its certainty on the development of 

 commerce and on the mutual services which men render each other 

 in spite of the interruptions of war, and in spite also of the evil 

 conception of the functions of commerce which has so long per- 

 vaded the legislation of this country, from which we have yet to 

 emerge — namely, that the import of the goods of foreign origin 



VOL. LIII. — 52 



