for the evils have accepted in desperation. It is the
doctrine of pessimism, despair and wild unfaith in man. If it were
true that things were so bad as they are just because men were wicked
and because there never were good men enough to make them better, we
should not have any ground for hope for the future.

I propose to try and show you that the wickedness of our poor human
nature is not responsible for the terrible social conditions, so that
you will not have to depend for your hope of a better society upon the
very slender thread of the chance of getting enough good men to make
conditions better. Bad conditions make bad lives, Jonathan, and will
continue to do so. Instead of depending upon getting good men first to
make conditions good, we must make conditions good so that good lives
may flourish and grow in them naturally.

You have read a little history, I daresay, and you know that there is
no truth in the old cry that "As things are now things always have
been and always will be." You know that things are always changing. If
George Washington could come back to earth again he would be amazed at
the changes which have taken place in the United States. Going further
back, Christopher Columbus would not recognize the country he
discovered. And if we could go back millions of years and bring to
life one of our earliest ancestors, one of the primitive
cave-dwellers, and set him down in one of our great cities, the mighty
houses, streets railways, telephones, telegraphs, wireless telegraphy,
electric vehicles on the streets and the ships out on the river would
terrify him far more than an angry tiger would. Can you think how
astonished and alarmed such a primitive cave-man would be to be taken
into one of your great Pittsburg mills or down into a coal mine?

No. The world has grown, Jonathan. Man has enlarged his kingdom, his
power in the universe. Step by step in the evolution of the race, man
has wrested from Nature her secrets. He has gone down into the deep
caverns and found mineral treasuries there; he has made the angry
waves of the ocean bear great, heavy burdens from shore to shore for
his benefit; he has harnessed the tides and the winds that blow and
caught the lightning currents, making them all his servants. Between
the _lowest_ man in the modern tenement and the cave-man there is a
greater gulf than ever existed between the beast in the forest and the
_highest_ man dwelling in a cave in that far-off