nt sympathies,
won by experience in the pre-human time and in the early life of man,
has led to the institution of a barrier which makes further advance a
matter of difficulty--one which, in the case of most peoples, binds them
firmly to the past, arresting their sympathetic development at a point
which it had attained when their laws were framed. This is, indeed, the
position of nearly all the peoples except those of our own Aryan race.

When the conditions of a people are fortunately such that they may
continue their sympathetic growth, they proceed to carry onward the
process of sympathetic enlargement, modifying their laws to suit the
gains in understanding which come with this growth. It may be noticed
that the development takes place most readily where the rules of
conduct are embodied in statute law; for this law, being the evident
result of human action, is manifestly alterable in a way that cannot be
taken when the prescriptions are supposed to rest on divine commands.
Under such conditions of statute law men are freer to advance than they
can possibly be where the rules of action are in the form of revered
precepts, such as guide the peoples who are accustomed to base their
action on the books which they esteem as sacred. Endowed with this
element of freedom, the peoples of our own Aryan race--and,
fortunately, the most advanced of all its varieties, the
English-speaking part of the folk--have, by the divine impulse towards
moral advancement, been led to make a great extension of the
sympathetic motives. The first step in this direction seems to have
been towards the mitigation of the horrors of war, which of old meant
the slavery or slaughter of the prisoners. Under the dictates of the
developing spirit of mercy and without written law, these brutal
actions have been limited until the dogs of war are allowed to rend
only in the hour of battle. In this day the man who slays the wounded
or robs the dead is esteemed an outlaw. The same beneficent motive was
next extended towards human slaves. In this matter English people led;
and to them it was almost altogether due that this evil has come nearly
to an end except among the Mohammedans, who are bound as in chains to
their sacred books and cannot win their way to progress through
statutes. In a like manner, in the care of the poor, of prisoners for
debt, and even of malefactors, our English folk on both sides of the
Atlantic have led in the ongoing towards a high