is whether there is sufficient knowledge,
sufficient ability, and sufficient will-power to approximate them. In
other words, shall humanity complete the trail of life, go on higher
and higher grounds where are set the standards or goals to be reached;
or will humanity rest easily and contentedly on a low level with no
attempt to reach a higher level, or, indeed, will humanity, failing in
desires for betterment, initiative, and will-power, drift to lower
levels?

Groups, either tribes, races, or nations, may advance along given lines
and be stationary or even retarded along other lines of development.
If the accumulation of wealth is the dominant ideal, it may be so
strenuously followed as to destroy opportunity for other phases of
life. If the flow of energy is all toward a religious belief that
absorbs the time and energy of people in the building of pyramids,
mausoleums, cathedrals, and mosques, and taboos the inquiry into nature
{19} which might yield a large improvement in the race, religion would
be developed at the expense of race improvement.

_Change Is Not Necessarily Progress_.--It is quite common in a popular
sense for people to identify change with progress, or indeed to accept
the wonderful changes which take place as causes of progress, when in
reality they should have taken more care to search out the elements of
progress of the great moving panorama of changing life. Changes are
frequently violent, sudden, tremendous in their immediate effect. They
move rapidly and involve many complexes, but progress is a slow-going
old tortoise that plods along irrespective of storm or sunshine, life
or death, of the cataclysms of war or the catastrophes of earthquakes
or volcanoes. Progress moves slowly along through political and social
revolutions, gaining a little here and a little there, and registering
the things that are really worth while out of the ceaseless, changing
humanity.

Achievement may take place without betterment, but all progress must
make a record of betterment with achievement. A man may write a book
or invent a machine at great labor. So far as he is concerned it is an
achievement, but unless it is a good book, a good invention, better
than others, so that they may be used for the advancement of the race,
they will not form a betterment. Many of the changes of life represent
the results of trial and error. "There is a way that seemeth right" to
a nation which may end in destruction.