absolutely necessary. Wages, we are told, are fixed by free. consent; and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part, and is not called upon for anything further. The only way, it is said, in which injustice could happen would be if the master refused to pay the whole of the wages, or the workman would not complete the work undertaken; when this happens the State should intervene, to see that each obtains his own, - but not under any other circumstances.

to ask

This mode of reasoning is by no means convincing to a fair- Workingmen minded man, for there are important considerations which it have a right leaves out of view altogether. To labor is to exert one's self employment for the sake of procuring what is necessary for the purposes of life, and, most of all, for self-preservation. "In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." The preservation of life is the bounden duty of each and all, and to fail therein is a crime. It follows that each one has a right to procure what is required in order to live; and the poor can procure it in no other way than by work and wages.

Section 110. Progress and Effects of Natural Science The development and achievements of modern science have never been sketched with more enthusiasm and warmth than by Carl Snyder, who has given us a brilliant picture of "the world machine," or universe as now conceived.

of the mod

From the infancy of the race there have been minds which, 399. The turning aside from the ordinary pursuits and passions of men, development from the prizes of trade, from the clamor of war, have given ern scientific their lives to the search for truth. Argonauts in quest of the conception of golden fleece of knowledge, their voyages have penetrated to a mechanistic the remotest corners of the earth and reached out among the (condensed) stars. Magicians and sorcerers they seemed to the tribal man; philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, when Hellenism rose;

universe

Slow but tolerably steady

advance of

science

The world

conceived as a machine or mechanism

Scientific progress a part of general evolution

their creation. Amid the destruction and decay that attends all else from human hands, their achievements remain.

Thanks to five or ten thousand years, perhaps a still greater period, of tolerably connected and consecutive effort, there has been built up a considerable stock of knowledge which, deftly fitted together in an orderly way, has become our one sure guide. So it may be that some future historian, chronicling the stages of human development, will write :

"It was at about the beginning of the twentieth century that man attained at last a true picture of the world, came to know, in brief, the cosmos as it is. It was at about this time that he came to perceive the eternal round of matter in the universe, the coalescence of vague and formless nebular masses into suns and satellites, their slow refrigeration into dark bodies, with the transient appearance of life, their dissipation again into primitive nebula. It was then that he came definitely to conceive the whole scheme of world formation as a mechanical process, following simple and well-understood laws. It was at about this time that he came to recognize that the varied life of these vast globes springs up under appropriate material conditions and in response to simple physical and chemical stimuli; that the races of intelligent beings, with all their attendant creations of civilization,—their art, literatures, sciences, institutions, are part and parcel of this same mechanical or physical process. In a larger phase, it was at this period that the more instructed among men came definitively to regard the universe as an unceasing machine, with no beginning and without end."

We may now perceive that the development of a science of the earth and sun and stars, like human development in general, is an integral part of that vast scheme of evolution, of unfolding and becoming, which pervades the world. If life be universal, and of this we may little doubt, this growth of the race mind is a constant incident of the cosmic process. Doubtless in æons past other races upon infinitely distant planets have pursued the same difficult and devious way toward the light; doubtless in æons to come, when, by the chance collision with some dark sun or huge swarm of meteorites our

little earth and the system of which it is a part has been resolved again into chaos, the same process will be endlessly repeated within other systems possibly yet unborn.

This development of science in some sense forms the fairest Striking conpossession of stumbling, groping humanity. In this it presents trast between political an inspiring contrast to the empty bubble of wars and dynas- history as ties, of conquests and crusades, that passes ordinarily for his- commonly written, and tory: whole armies of men flung into a field to butcher one the history another for an envied province or an imagined slight; arson of science and thievery, pillage and atrocious crimes applauded under the sounding name of conquest; great cities sacked, the populations sold into degrading slavery, the women to shameful lives; until a scant century ago, the lower classes lost in barbarism and ignorance; the upper class-a privileged few - despising work, despoiling the poor; heroes fed to slow fires for the preservation of the religion of God; low intrigues and court scandal.

Set over against this tale full of sound and fury is the steady advance of civilization, often slow, often halted, but ever renewed; the progress of invention, the amelioration of savage and brutal customs, the abolition of slavery, the wide diffusion of material comforts, of justice and of peace, in larger phrase, the broadening of the human mind, the heightening of the human consciousness. Instead of the mood of Volney's Ruins we have that of Macaulay's pæan upon the Baconian philosophy; instead of disheartenment, a buoyant and invigorating sense of things done, of progress, and of attainment.

Darwin's idea of evolution called forth innumerable attacks such as the following, taken from a pamphlet published in 1873, entitled Darwinism Reproved and Refuted.

Darwin's theory of the descent of man, the leading propo- 400. Darwin's sition of which is, that man is descended immediately from theory of some species of monkey, and remotely from one of the lowest "reproved

evolution

More natural to assume that the monkey is descended

from man, than the contrary

the common sense of the human mind, that on presentation to any unsophisticated intellect it is at once rejected and spurned with indignation. This proposition, so universally deemed insulting to humanity, forces upon us the conviction that it can be entertained only by a mind whose common sense has first been outraged and silenced by the deadening influence of a cunning sophistry, a sophistry that, in this instance, has had a more general bearing on the human intellect from the fact that it has not been detected and exposed by scientists. The earnestness and seeming candor of the writer, in pressing and urging his peculiar views, have also exerted an influence over the minds of his readers that has had its effect in the adoption of this theory. A scientific proposition that to every unsophisticated mind appears manifestly absurd may be set down as being fallacious.

The true bearing and real tendency of Darwin's argument has not been suspected by scientists, not seen by himself. This tendency unquestionably is, to demonstrate, by the argument which logicians call a reductio ad absurdum, the fallacy of the whole system of European science. A system of science, on the principles of which a valid argument could be made in support of a proposition so utterly false as that of Darwin, stated above, must be radically and fundamentally wrong.

...

Any one who has taken a correct view of nature in the light of true science at once sees that there are no grounds there for Darwin's principal positions, and becomes convinced that his main proposition, as stated above, is futile in the extreme, is unreliable and unfounded.

Had Darwin contended that the monkey is descended from man, and that its present degraded form was the punishment inflicted for a neglect or nonobservance of an instinct of man's nature, he might have constructed a more plausible argument than he has done. He might have pointed to the condition of the Fuegian savage, – whose brutal appearance seems to have reconciled his mind to the notion of claiming the monkey as his progenitor, as one of the stages of this degradation to which he had been brought by a perversion of

his instincts, and, to some extent, by his inherited habits of reckless indulgence of passion, and also in some measure by the environment of savage life.

But this proposition, on reflection, would have appeared false; for it must be admitted that the vast scheme of creation was planned in the will of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, and that it is not allowed to his creatures to mar or to interfere materially with the details of "the work which God worketh from the beginning." He has endowed no creature with the power nor with the intelligence that would be required for such an undertaking. The world has all along been as God has appointed, and the course of nature will continue as he may direct, notwithstanding the shortsighted theories of would-be philosophers.

"materialism

Let the ridiculous doctrine of evolution, which is founded Evolution is on materialism, that is another term for atheism, and which founded on Darwin embraces and strenuously endeavors to bolster up in his and is anoth false theory, - let this doctrine be compared with the Mosaic term for account of the creation, and then let the student of nature determine if he will choose for his progenitors Darwin's pair of ring-tailed monkeys, or "Adam, the comeliest man of men since born his sons," and "The fairest of her daughters, Eve."

"atheism"

ment of

rather than

John Fiske, an eminent American philosopher and 401. Arguhistorian, not only enthusiastically accepted the theory John Fiske of evolution but stoutly maintained (writing in 1884) that the theory of that instead of its degrading mankind, as the writer just evolution quoted declares, it serves to prove that the perfection of elevates man is the object toward which all things have been degrades working for untold æons. The discovery by Copernicus densed) that the universe did not revolve about the earth served to alter profoundly men's views of themselves and their importance.

During the nineteenth century, however, a still greater rev

man (con