y appear unwilling to admit that the race has really
made any evolutionary progress. Even scientific men have sometimes
expressed doubt whether the world is growing better. In a newspaper
interview an English scientist was quoted as saying a few years ago that
the race is just as wicked today as at any time within recorded history.
But if he was correctly reported it must have been a hasty expression of
opinion which a little deliberation would have led him to revise. It is
true that things are still bad enough but they are certainly enormously
better than they were some centuries ago. To say that the world is full
of crime and violence proves nothing; nor does even the fact that a
civilized nation has reverted to the wartime practices of savage life
furnish real ground for a pessimistic view. What we have to do in
determining whether there has been any racial progress in morality is to
take as our standard of measurement something that tests the collective
conscience. How does the world of today view war and how did the world
in the day of Caesar regard it? There is plenty to shock us now but the
very fact that it does shock us is the best evidence of moral progress.
Atrocities were expected and taken as a matter of course some centuries
ago. They are not the rule now but the rare exception and those guilty
of them are likely to make their name a by-word among nations. Well
within the era of recorded history the usages of nations' condemned
prisoners of war to become slaves for life. Now the rule is to feed and
clothe them and at the close of the conflict to send them home. A simple
thing like public sports may be used as a measure of public morals. They
show what the collective conscience approves. In these days there is
very little of brutality in public sports. Professional pugilism still
lingers, but barely lingers, in the most enlightened nations. In less
progressive countries like Spain and Mexico bull fighting is popular.
That is about all we can say against modern popular entertainment. But
if we look backward to the Roman period we find a cruelty in public
sports that is comparatively shocking. Gladiators were compelled to
fight to the death and offenders were devoured by starving wild beasts
and it all made a Roman holiday. Such "sports" would, of course, be
utterly impossible anywhere in the world today. But at that time they
were matters of course in the life of the world's greatest empire. The
fact that the