IN THE NOON OF SCIENCE 



their agonizing voices. A great manufacturing 

 town is hideous, and life in it is usually hideous, 

 but more science, more mechanical skill, more soul 

 in capital, and less brutality in labor would change 

 all these things . 



Science puts great weapons in men's hands for 

 good or for evil, for war or for peace, for beauty or 

 for ugliness, for life or for death, and how these weap- 

 ons are used depends upon the motives that actuate 

 us. Science now promises to make war so deadly 

 that it will practically abolish it. While we preach 

 the gospel of peace our preparations for war are 

 so exhaustive and scientific that the military spirit 

 will die of an over-dose of its own medicine, and 

 peace will fall of itself like a ripe fruit into our hands. 

 A riotous, wasteful, and destructive spirit has been 

 turned loose upon this continent, and it has used 

 the weapons which physical science has placed in its 

 hands in a brutal, devil-may-care sort of way, with 

 the result that a nature fertile and bountiful, but 

 never kind and sympathetic, has been outraged and 

 disfigured and impoverished, rather than mellowed 

 and subdued and humanized. 



The beauty and joy of life in the Old World is a 

 reflection from the past or pre-scientific age, to a 

 degree of which we have little conception. In spite 

 of our wealth of practical knowledge, and our un- 

 paralleled advantages (perhaps by very reason 

 thereof, since humility of spirit is a flower that does 

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