172 THE PORTAL OF EVOLUTION 



start to grow before the crop takes possession of the soil 

 unless by intense cultivation, or all weeds have been caused to 

 grow and been destroyed by weeding or ploughed under the 

 soil before the seed was sown. The same law is strictly 

 adhered to in mental as well as physical developments. 



So if we wish to get a crop of virtue from literary 

 knowledge, not a superlative crop of vice, we must not be 

 content to manure the ground with culture and let the weed 

 of war, animosity, strife and might overrun the fields of our 

 minds and souls, or the crop of virtue will be almost exter- 

 minated by socialism, anarchy, rebellion, and religious and 

 social fanaticism and hate before the crop of useful virtues, 

 we are striving to attain, bears fruit. The German 

 ' Kultur ' that incites its people to war, degraded by the vilest 

 form of savagery, is a striking illustration of the manner in 

 which Science, Religion and Invention may run to weed and 

 increase vice ; but out of the growth of such weeds as the war 

 and our trades-unionism, the French Revolution and the Pro- 

 testant Reformation and Huguenot persecutions, and the crimes 

 of Nero, spring the seeds of virtuous advancement, in the 

 same manner that in our individual life it is the ill-natured 

 slander of narrow-minded persons which stimulates us to our 

 greatest efforts to remedy our individual sins or failings. 



So if we would guard against like failures in the 

 future ages of religious and scientific advancement, we must 

 be most careful to see that our state laws curtail individual 

 liberty, to ensure the encouragement of a love of work, ambi- 

 tion for skill in unscientific as well as scientific efficiency, 

 and universal thrift, and to organize a commercial 

 system of a well-disciplined army of mechanics in place of 

 antagonistic trade organizations which tend to make one pro- 

 fession anxious to gain special preferences over another and 

 to set employers and employees at loggerheads, instead of 

 working in unity and dividing losses as well as profits. 



It is easy to get the employee to divide the profits 

 but he must also learn to take his share of the loss in 

 other ways besides the one of contribution to taxes, such as 

 working overtime free of charge upon special occasions, put- 

 ting his heart and soul into the work and its success, as his 

 employer has to. He must also learn to curtail his individual 

 liberty that he may add to the benefits of the business or 



