lot of men, do not invalidate the hopes
of those who believe in the power of men to end for ever many of the
evils that now darken the world, who look to the reservoirs of human
possibility as a supply as yet scarcely touched, who make of all the
splendour and superiorities of the past no more than a bright promise
and suggestion for the unborn future our every act builds up, into
which, whether we care or no, all our achievements pour.

Many evils have been overcome, much order and beauty and scope for
living has been evolved since man was a hairy savage holding scarcely
more than a brute's intercourse with his fellows; but even in the
comparatively short perspective of history, one can scarcely deny a
steady process of overcoming evil. One may sneer at contemporary
things; it is a fashion with that unhappily trained type of mind which
cannot appreciate without invidious comparison, so poor in praise that
it cannot admit worth without venting a compensatory envy; but of one
permanent result of progress surely every one is assured. In the
matter of thoughtless and instinctive cruelty--and that is a very
fundamental matter--mankind mends steadily. I wonder and doubt if in
the whole world at any time before this an aged, ill-clad woman, or a
palpable cripple could have moved among a crowd of low-class children
as free from combined or even isolated insult as such a one would be
to-day, if caught in the rush from a London Council school. Then, for
all our sins, I am sure the sense of justice is quicker and more
nearly universal than ever before. Certain grave social evils, too,
that once seemed innate in humanity, have gone, gone so effectually
that we cannot now imagine ourselves subjected to them; the cruelties
and insecurities of private war, the duel, overt slavery, for example,
have altogether ceased; and in all Western Europe and America chronic
local famines and great pestilences come no more. No doubt it is still
an unsatisfactory world that mars the roadside with tawdry
advertisements of drugs and food; but less than two centuries ago,
remember, the place of these boards was taken by gibbets and
crow-pecked, tattered corpses swinging in the wind, and the heads of
dead gentlemen (drawn and quartered, and their bowels burnt before
their eyes) rotted in the rain on Temple Bar.

The world is now a better place for a common man than ever it was
before, the spectacle wider and richer and deeper, and more charged
with