tury the genius of its greatest scientific romancer saw it end in the
anthropophagous antics of the Time Machine. So far from evolution
lifting us above the idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least
with a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the case of
the American negroes, it may be remarked, it does at any rate permit the
preliminary course of roasting them. All this materialistic hardening,
which replaced the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing
evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race,
or rather that there was really no such thing as the human race. The
South had begun by agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The
South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the emancipation of
monkeys.

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years.
Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with
the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far
more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson
than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen
Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the
age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil
Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a
consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the
old mystical doctrines of equality. He 'did not care whether slavery was
voted up or voted down.' His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care
very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln
exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not
much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I
am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular
mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical
ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of
indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what
some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a
sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the
slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt
whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition
was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other
reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes
and