of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of
morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age--the crown of
the Renascence in England--with that of the present day. The capital
advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our
thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the
'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better
organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its
drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but
the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all
such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change
which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought
about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of
intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would
outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing
up a world's balance-sheet.

It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an
'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action.
Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs
from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is
with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he
has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he
becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to
idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure
spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate
projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us
and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage.
As to progress, the largest general ideal which can affect man's action,
it is only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought to grips
with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He was standing,
somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled, before it, when the war, like an
eclipse of the sun, came suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse
has been found an invaluable time for studying some of the problems of
the sun's nature and of light itself.

One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress,
Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which
is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct.
He took the theory of