ge will make men wise. It was easy in the old days to rely on the
belief that human life and conduct would become perfect if men only
learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most political speculators
used to sketch a perfect polity which would result from the complete
adoption of their principles, the republics of Plato and of More,
Bacon's Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should consciously
realise the purposes of God, or Bentham's Utilitarian State securely
founded upon the Table of the Springs of Action. We, however, who live
after Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not expect
knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfection. The modern student of
physiology believes that if his work is successful, men may have better
health than they would have if they were more ignorant, but he does not
dream of producing a perfectly healthy nation; and he is always prepared
to face the discovery that biological causes which he cannot control
may be tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on education
now argue that he can make perfect characters in his schools. If our
imaginations ever start on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by
remembering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, and that
we have no more right than our kinsfolk to suppose that the mind of the
universe has contrived that we can find a perfect life by looking for
it. The bees might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, and
of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the best ordered hive.
And yet they might learn that no greatly improved organisation was
possible for creatures hampered by such limited powers of observation
and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. They might be
forced to recognise that as long as they were bees their life must
remain bewildered and violent and short. Political inquiry deals with
man as he now is, and with the changes in the organisation of his life
that can be made during the next few centuries. It may be that some
scores of generations hence, we shall have discovered that the
improvements in government which can be brought about by such inquiry,
are insignificant when compared with the changes which will be made
possible when, through the hazardous experiment of selective breeding,
we have altered the human type itself.

But however anxious we are to see the facts of our existence without
illusion, and to hope nothing without cause, we can still draw