es of civilized
society at the present time? Undoubtedly they are monogamy,
anti-slavery, and democracy. All people now are more nervous than
anybody used to be. Social ambition is great and is prevalent in all
classes. The idea of class is unpopular and is not understood. There is
a superstitious yearning for equality. There is a decided preference for
city life, and a stream of population from the country into big cities.
These are facts of the mores of the time. Our societies are almost
unanimous in their response if there is any question raised on these
matters.

Medieval people conceived of society under forms of status as generally
as we think of it under forms of individual liberty. The mores of the
Orient and Occident differ from each other now, as they apparently
always have differed. The Orient is a region where time, faith,
tradition, and patience rule. The Occident forms ideals and plans, and
spends energy and enterprise to make new things with thoughts of
progress. All details of life follow the leading ways of thought of each
group. We can compare and judge ours and theirs, but independent
judgment of our own, without comparison with other times or other
places, is possible only within narrow limits.

Let us first take up the nervous desire and exertion which mark the men
of our time in the western civilized societies. There is a wide popular
belief in what is called progress. The masses in all civilized states
strain toward success in some adopted line. Struggling and striving are
passionate tendencies which take possession of groups from time to time.
The newspapers, the popular literature, and the popular speakers show
this current and popular tendency. This is what makes the mores.

3. War and Progress[343]

Let us see what progress means. It is a term which covers several quite
different things.

There is material progress, by which I understand an increase in wealth,
that is, in the commodities useful to man, which give him health,
strength, and longer life, and make his life easier, providing more
comfort and more leisure, and thus enabling him to be more physically
efficient, and to escape from that pressure of want which hampers the
development of his whole nature.

There is intellectual progress--an increase in knowledge, a greater
abundance of ideas, the training to think, and to think correctly, the
growth in capacity for dealing with practical problems, the cultivation
of the power t