If the obedience due this ruler of the modern industrial world is imperfect, the reason is not difficult to discover. It is because his reign has been brief, and human nature is still crude. Too many vestiges of countless ages of conflict cling to the brain of man. Too much misdirected effort is made to fit the institutions of murder and pillage to times of peace and industry. Obsolete as a battle axe or a coat of mail, they do not extinguish the traits inherited from savage ancestry; they only stimulate and perpetuate them. No matter whether they be tried under the despotism of a French feudal monarchy or under the popular sovereignty of the American Republic, the effect is identical. They engender the same greed, the same hypocrisy, the same deception, the same contention. No abridgment of liberty that philanthropists or statesmen may deem essential to the safety of modern civilization will permit them to realize their Utopian dream. The millennium lies in another direction—in the direction of greater liberty. As society becomes more and more complex, with wants so great and varied as to pass the knowledge of any benevolent despot ruling by divine right, or any group of despots ruling by virtue of universal suffrage, individuals must be allowed more and more to control their own destiny, and to take the consequences, good or bad. Whatever government they may need to direct their countless enterprises for the supply of those wants and for the regulation of their relations with one another and with the public, must not be the product of political selection, but of industrial selection; it must not be the choice of ward bummers and complaisant citizens that register the will of an unscrupulous and irresponsible demagogue, ambitious to exercise a power that decent people refuse him, but of the men that have staked their fortunes in business, whose success or failure is dependent upon the wisdom of their action. Not the least fit, but the most fit, will then administer the affairs of the world. With the continuance of peace and industry they will not be the greatest fools or knaves, now so often charged and unhappily so often proved, but the wisest and most upright. Civilization will not then go backward, as it now threatens to do, but it will go forward, as it did with the enlargement of liberty that has been the most splendid achievement of the last four centuries of thought and effort.
Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/51
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REVERSIONS IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL LIFE.
43
The eager haste with which men of fixed notions are apt to rush to conclusions is portrayed rather than caricatured in Lord Houghton's version of the debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the British Association in 1860, which Sir E. Grant Duff quotes in his Notes from a Diary. As the story is told, Mr. Huxley asserted that the blood of guinea pigs crystallizes in rhombohedrons. "Thereupon the bishop sprang to his feet and declared that ‘such notions lead directly to atheism.’"
