The Progress of the World. 



405 



is tantamount to a confession on the 

 part of the Government that they 

 regard agitators for Women's Suffrage 

 as outside the pale of the law, although 

 amenable to the punishments of the 

 law. It is no argument to say that 

 the women went to the meeting in 

 order to make a disturbance, and that 

 therefore they brought their fate upon 

 their own heads. It is no exaggeration 

 to say that the}'' were as much forced 

 to go to the meeting by their con- 

 victions as any martyr was forced to 

 meet his death in the public arena. To 

 assume that those who allowed their 

 baser passions full reign were justified 

 in so doing because of interruptions 

 would lead one logically to the right of 

 any landowner to brutally maltreat a 

 trespasser, and, in fact, anybody to 

 blacken the eyes of a man, woman or 

 child who jostled him in a Tube hft. 

 We do not think that the Government 

 wUl take any action, but not to do so 

 is to lower the moral and judicial 

 standard of the Home Secretary to the 

 level of that of a Welsh mob made 

 drunk by the words of a Welshman 

 whose oratorical magnetism was not, 

 however, sufficient to arrest the passions 

 which he had evoked. There is no 

 question that the cause of the militant 

 section gained enormously. 



The British Associa- 

 Soiencc and the tion at Dundcc which 

 Makinii of Life, was exceptionally well 



attended, has created 

 something of a sensation by reason of its 

 President's address. Professor Schafer, 

 discussing the problem of life, and 

 enumerating the elements that went to 

 the fornuition of tlic most rudimentary 

 living organisms, went so far as to say : 



The combination of these elements into a colloidal 

 compound represents the chemical basis of life, and 

 when the chemist succeeds in building up this com- 

 pouad it will without doubt be found to exhibit the 

 phenomena which we are in the habit of associating with 

 the term " life." Th« above considerations seem to 

 point to the conclusion that the possibility of the pro- 

 duction of life — i.e., of living material — is not so 

 remote as has been generally assumed. 



After all, this is nothing more than a 

 scientifically enunciated guess that such 

 a thing might happen soon. Even if it 

 did happen soon, and if by the combina- 

 tion of elements of what had hitherto 

 been called non-living matter living 

 matter came to be, we should simply 

 cease to call the constituent elements 

 non-living matter, and consider them as 

 we consider seeds that have not as yet 

 germinated. Matter would then be 

 regarded as potentially ahve, and the 

 combination in the chemist's laboratory 

 would be only equivalent to putting 

 seeds into conditions where they might 

 germinate. Philosophers, both on the 

 idealistic and on the empirical side, 

 have long ago ceased to regard what we 

 call matter as non-living ; they have 

 declared it to be essentially, if only 

 dormantly and potentially, alive. The 

 wonder of life, instead of being eva- 

 porated under these chemic tests, would 

 be simply extended over a larger area 

 of being than ever before. 



It may seem a far cry 

 The Eucharistic fi"oni Profcssor Schafer 

 Congress. at Dundce to the devout 

 Catholics that met in the 

 Eucharistic Congress at Vienna. But 

 they are nearer than perhaps they 

 think. Once the essential vitality of 

 matter is recognised, however indi- 

 rectly, the old Cartesian absoluteness 

 of distinction between matter and spirit 

 which challenged the Mass falls to the 



