REVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION: THE PALEONTOLO- 
GIST RENDERS HIS VERDICT 
KIRTLEY F. MATHER 
I 
Senators and bolsheviki, capitalists and members of the 
I. W. W., preachers and brick-layers, all, with few exceptions, 
are sincerely honest in their desire to improve the conditions, 
domestic, national and international, which determine the life 
and happiness of the individuals with whom they are acquainted. 
Most people would really be quite pleased, provided it did not 
entail too much labor or self-sacrifice on their own part, if the 
organization of society could be made more efficient and less 
wasteful, more subservient to the good of all and less profitable 
to the chosen few. We are still thrilled by the visions of the 
prophets of old and the propagandists of today with their dreams 
of a ^^new day’^ and a ^^new world.” But just about there, 
our unity of mind and action ceases. Few among the real 
thinkers of any class are certain as to what these better condi- 
tions, which shall usher in the ‘Mawn of the new day,” shall 
be. And among these few, scarcely any two are agreed between 
themselves in regard to other than general and hazy ideas. 
More deplorable still, there are even more sharply defined 
differences of opinion among forward-looking men as to the 
method by which the reforms which they desire may be accom- 
plished. 
At bottom, it is really this difference of opinion as to method 
that distinguishes the Socialist with the Red Flag from the 
Republican with the Stars and Stripes, or the priest with his 
ritual from the evangelist with his sawdust trail. The distant 
goals which each envisions, although by no means coincident, 
at least have the merit of location in the same quarter of the 
universe; but the roads which are suggested as proper avenues 
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