which to-day constitutes so threatening an obstacle to
racial progress. There are millions of men in Europe and America to-day
whose whole mental equipment--despite the fact that they have been
taught to read and write--is far more closely akin to the average of the
Upper Period of Barbarism than to the highest standards of their own
time; and these undeveloped or atavistic persons have on the average
more offspring than are produced by the more highly cultured and
intelligent among their contemporaries. "Race suicide" is thereby
prevented, but the progress of civilization is no less surely
handicapped. We may well believe that the cosmopolite of the future,
aided by science, will find rational means to remedy this strange
illogicality. In so doing he will exercise a more consciously purposeful
function, and perhaps a more directly potent influence, in determining
the line of human progress than he has hitherto attempted to assume,
notwithstanding the almost infinitely varied character of the
experiments through which he has worked his way from savagery to
civilization.

Ethical evolution.

All these considerations tend to define yet more clearly the ultimate
goal towards which the progressive civilization of past and present
appears to be trending. The contemplation of this goal brings into view
the outlines of a vastly suggestive evolutionary cycle. For it appears
that the social condition of cosmopolite man, so far as the present-day
view can predict it, will represent a state of things, magnified to
world-dimensions, that was curiously adumbrated by the social system of
the earliest savage. At the very beginning of the journey through
savagery, mankind, we may well believe, consisted of a limited tribe,
representing no great range or variety of capacity, and an almost
absolute identity of interests. Thanks to this community of
interests,--which was fortified by the recognition of blood-relationship
among all members of the tribe,--a principle which we now define as "the
greatest ultimate good to the greatest number" found practical, even if
unwitting, recognition; and therein lay the germs of all the moral
development of the future. But obvious identity of interests could be
recognized only so long as the tribe remained very small. So soon as its
numbers became large, patent diversities of interest, based on
individual selfishness, must appear, to obscure the larger harmony. And
as savage man migrated hither a