- ural world, and kindred factors; while Applied Science
supplies the means to that end by discoveries and inventions bearing on the amelioration and enhancement of living conditions.
The recognition of such startling innovations would be inevitably slow, and their adoption still slower. But it is precisely in their ultimately successful struggle for admission into the life and thought of the nineteenth century that we trace the evolution of the satire of the period, for the satiric reaction is merely one of the many reflections of that struggle.
A humanitarian democracy has turned the old ex cathedra criticism into the forensic. The satirist has been obliged, as one commentator observes, to descend from the upper window whence he had been haranguing the mob below; he might have added, much of the mob itself has been admitted into the entrance halls at least of the great Administration Building of modern life. But meanwhile the scientific method has added reason to emotion, so that while the democratic ideal was conceived in a rationalized sympathy, the stress has slipped more and more from the sympathetic to the rational element. None of the Victorians expressly would have denied the Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, but George Eliot, Meredith, and Butler were the first to make a real point of it. For by the latter half of the century the laboratory had come to be acknowledged as the colleague, if not the successor, of the pulpit, for implicit sermonizing as well as explicit instruction. And in the exercise of these functions, while the pulpit may indulge at times in a decorous ridicule, it is the laboratory that is the real, spontaneous, unconscious satirist. When the solemn moral exhortation, Ought, was supplanted by the autocratic sci-
