MATERIAL PROGRESS. 



113 



satisfy, and so will not slave to produce things in 

 order to satisfy the wants of civilized man. The 

 trader therefore must excite passions powerful 

 enough to overcome the natural indolence of the 

 savage ; and so with rum and rifles he gratifies his 

 desire of drink and of revenge. Thus the savage 

 enters on the path of money-getting, propter vitam 

 vive7idi perdere causas, an endless path whence there 

 is no return, and where to falter is to fall. He is 

 demoralized and often too destroyed, but civilization 

 triumphs and the world " progresses," and though 

 each generation be more unhappy than its prede- 

 cessor, each hopes that its successor will be more 

 fortunate. 



And in another way at any rate, material progress 

 has been the source of much misery, and a chief 

 factor in the increase of social discord, by widening 

 the material gulf between the rich and the poor, 

 and the intellectual gulf between the educated and 

 uneducated, and by stimulating the envy of the 

 poor, nay, by making possible the education which 

 made them conscious of their misery. It is the 

 fierce lust for the material good things of life which 

 has brought upon modern society the great and 

 growing danger of revolutionary Socialism, and 

 which baffles the well-meant efforts of those who 

 would content it with less than the utter destruction 

 of civilization. And not the least pathetic feature 

 of a desperate situation is that, while the unreason- 

 ing insistance of those who claim the good things 

 of life is becoming fiercer, the happiness they covet 

 is imaginary, and those who are supposed to possess 

 the means to happiness are either too blas^ to enjoy 

 them, or have made them the means to new pains. 

 And though these progressively increasing pains 



R. ofS. I 



