68 THE THRESHOLD OF EVOLUTION 



commenced to talk. Had I published such a treatise as this 

 two hundred years ago, the powers that were, would have put 

 me in an asylum. I dare say some of my readers may hold 

 the opinion that this would be a wise course and consider it 

 a pity I am not there, instead of being permitted to destroy 

 the dearest beliefs of their childhood. But is it well to be 

 a child, because childhood is more innocent than man- 

 hood, and is it not nobler to learn what sin is, and how to 

 decide for ourselves between right and wrong, so that we may 

 be able to fight and conquer wrong? In the past it was man's 

 duty to conquer the world of Matter, no matter by what means. 



Whether right or wrong mattered not, for had he 

 not conquered Matter, Matter would have conquered him ; 

 therefore, as self-preservation is the first law of Nature, in the 

 earlier stages of evolution, the end justified the means till 

 man became wiser. We have made the highest of all virtue 

 the virtue of murder, for what else is war, and what virtue has 

 received higher merit in the past than the virtue of being able 

 to destroy one's fellow-men and the works of civilised art? I 

 remember Sir Gerald Strickland, who was one of my intimate 

 friends, lent me a book entitled, so far as I can remember, 

 Chronicles of the Northern Countries, which gave the past 

 history of my own and his family, both families being War- 

 dens of the Scottish Border. When I read this book I could 

 not refrain from exclaiming, " What a race of robbers and 

 murderers I am descended from!" But the age now dawning 

 is the age of peace, as the age now expiring has been the age 

 of selfishness and war, and the evolution of energy. So in the 

 future we have to relegate war to a back seat to make place for 

 peace, which will come about by modern warfare becoming too 

 costly a luxury for mankind to be able to indulge therein, so 

 he will have to find a less expensive amusement. Then murder 

 will cease to be a virtue any longer. 



In the future the aim of man must be to assist Nature to 

 evolve, by extending the hand of freedom and peace to all men 

 and to all nations. Had this been done in the past, it would 

 have frustrated the evolution of Government, Commerce and 

 Religion ; but in the future man will have to devote his mind, 

 not to the building up of empires and the creating of internal 

 commerce, but to conducting the chariot of free trade over the 

 boundaries of all nations and destroying empires, out of the 



