52 JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 



were employed in producing and bringing that little instrument to 

 me. As I sit in my library to read a book, I open the pages with 

 a paper-cutter, the ivory of which was obtained through the em- 

 ployment of a tribe of African elephant-hunters. The paper on 

 which my book is printed was made of the rags saved by the beg- 

 gars of Italy. A watchman stands on guard in Hoosac Tunnel 

 that I may some time ride through it in safety. If all the men who 

 have worked for me, directly and indirectly, for the past ten years, 

 and who are now scattered through the four quarters of the earth, 

 were marshaled on the plain outside of the city, organised and 

 equipped for war, I could march to the proudest capital of the 

 world and the armies of Europe could not withstand me. I am the 

 master of all the world. But during all my life I have worked for 

 other men, and thus I am every man's servant ; so are we all ser- 

 vants to many masters and masters of many servants. It is thus 

 that men are gradually becoming organised into one vast body- 

 politic, every one is striving to serve his fellow-man and all work- 

 ing for the common welfare. Thus the enmity of man to man is 

 appeased, and men live and labor for one another; individualism 

 is transmuted into socialism, egoism into altruism, and man is lifted 

 above the brute to an immeasurable height. Man inherited the 

 body, instincts, and passions of the brute; the nature thus inher- 

 ited has survived in his constitution and is exhibited along all the 

 course of his history. Injustice, fraud, and cruelty stain the path- 

 way of culture from the earliest to the latest days. But man has 

 not risen in culture by reason of his brutal nature. His method of 

 evolution has not been the same as that of the lower animals ; the 

 evolution of man has been through the evolution of the humanities, 

 the evolution of those things which distinguish him from the brute. 

 The doctrines of evolution which biologists have clearly shown to 

 apply to animals do not apply to man. Man has evolved because he 

 has been emancipated from the cruel laws of brutality." 1 



In another place he shows that, though competition of plant 

 with plant and brute with brute is the means of biotic progress, 

 civilised man does not compete with plant or brute, but destroys 

 what are hurtful to him and improves what are beneficial. When 

 man competes with man in the struggle for existence no step in 

 evolution results. 



" Vestiges of brutal competition still exist in the highest civ- 

 ilisation, but they are called crimes ; and, to prevent this struggle 

 for existence, penal codes are enacted, prisons are built, and gal- 



1 Trans. Anthropological Soc. of Washington, Vol. III., pp. 195-196. 



