ce that attitude which with us is habitual--standing on
tip-toe in eager expectancy, sure that tomorrow some new and unheard of
truth will be revealed.

New inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge--even before the
eighteenth century all these factors were under way. Then a new factor
entered which has played a powerful part in substituting a progressive
for a static world: new social hopes. The medieval age had no
expectation of a better social life on earth. Charity was common but it
was purely individual and remedial; it did not seek to understand or to
cure the causes of social maladjustment; it was sustained by no
expectation of better conditions among men; it was valued because of the
giver's unselfishness rather than because of the recipient's gain, and in
consequence it was for the most part unregulated alms-giving, piously
motived but inefficiently managed. In the eighteenth century a new
outlook and hope emerged. If man could pioneer new lands, learn new
truth and make new inventions, why could he not devise new social systems
where human life would be freed from the miseries of misgovernment and
oppression? With that question at last definitely rising, the long line
of social reformers began which stretched from Abbe de Saint-Pierre to
the latest believer in the possibility of a more decent and salutary
social life for human-kind. The coming of democracy in government
incalculably stimulated the influence of this social hope, for with the
old static forms of absolute autocracy now broken up, with power in the
hands of the people to seek as they would "life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness," who could put limits to the possibilities? The medieval
age was gone; the modern age had come, and its distinctive note was
progress, with new inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge and new
social hope.

It would be a fascinating task to watch these interweaving factors at
their work and to trace their commingled influence as slowly their
involved significance became clear, now to this man and now to that. The
best narrative that has been written yet of this epochal movement is
contained in Professor Bury's volume on "The Idea of Progress." There one
sees the stream of this progressive conception of life pushing its way
out as through a delta by way of many minds, often far separated yet
flowing with the same water. Some men attacked the ancients and by
comparison praised the modern time as Perrault d