ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 3 31 



Mr. Welling, after paying a high tribute to Mr. Ward's paper, 

 expressed the opinion that the complaint which it formulated, based 

 on the assumed failure of moral progress to keep pace with material 

 progress, was in itself the mark and the expression of growing moral 

 aspirations, seeking more and more to realize themselves in the 

 figure of society. It is a sign of intellectual growth when an age 

 is working vehemently on unsolved problems along the converging 

 lines of scientific inquiry; and it is an augury of moral progress 

 Avhen an age has become impatient of existing social adjustments 

 in their relation to public well-being, and is longing for a better 

 co-ordination of social relations and a better distribution of social 

 advantages. The unrest of such an epoch, he said, is the unrest 

 incidental to all transition periods, and is a ground of congratula- 

 tion rather than a source of lamentation. It is necessary that social 

 wants and moral aspirations shall be distinctly articulated before 

 they -can be properly embodied in institutions or in regulations; and 

 this embodiment must needs be a slow process under the formula of 

 social evolution, because social experiments are experiments made 

 on the grandest of all living organisms — the body politic — and not 

 in corpore vili. 



Nor is it enough that the co-ordination of society should be 

 directed by the highest intelligence of the community, if that intel- 

 ligence be congested in the head of the social organism. It is so 

 in China to-day, and has there resulted in a stationary civilization. 

 It had been so in the feudal system of the middle ages, and had 

 there resulted in a cast-iron polity destructive of moral progress 

 and of social well-being, until that cast-iron polity had been broken 

 by the expansive force of a larger and more complex social life 

 permeating the lower members of the body politic. True moral 

 progress can take place only in asocial organism which is "vital in 

 every part," for here the actions, reactions, and interactions of 

 public opinions give the widest possible distribution to social 

 thoughts, feelings, purposes, and aspirations. It is in such an 

 organism that "discussion becomes the mould of measures," to use 

 the fine phrase of Thucydides, and that the lines of safe social 

 change can be soonest discovered and soonest followed. In such 

 a community there will be a growing complexity and a growing 

 difficulty in the problems to be solved by each generation, but the 

 problems will not increase in difficulty or number beyond the grow- 

 ing resources of civilization for coping with them. He illustrated 



