explosive and
temporary, harmony rises slowly but dominates the final chord.

Like the great common purposes of science, the common tendencies of
human action have in recent years suffered some eclipse through the
bustle of our activity and the multiplicity of its detail. The colours,
too, of a conflict of any kind are so much more vivid and arresting than
the quiet and monotonous tones of a long piece of harmonious and
co-operative work. The labours of such a bureau of international effort
as is described in Chapter X appear to our pressmen and publicists so
little interesting that they are practically ignored, and the results of
scientific congresses, being of a highly specialized kind, are left
perforce to those who can understand them. Yet it is precisely in these
things, if our diagnosis is correct, that the most characteristic
features of the age are to be found. For in them and in similar
movements we see united the two fundamental human traits from which we
started, reason and sympathy: reason winning triumphs over nature,
sympathy realizing itself at last in a community of men devoting their
powers to mutual aid. 'Idle dreams', it will be said, as we hurl more
and more millions of our best youth to destruction by the most highly
developed resources of science. Yes, but the same nations were only
yesterday celebrating the services of Pasteur, Virchow, and Lister to a
common humanity, and will do so again to-morrow or the day after.

It is in truth one of the most poignant features of the tragedy in which
we are manfully and rightly bearing our part, that the community-sense
in the world had never been so highly developed, or found so many
channels in which to diffuse itself, as just at the moment when the blow
fell. The socialist movements in all civilized countries have always had
this as a leading motive; comrades and poor among themselves, these men
have always been eager to stretch out a hand to those of like mind
abroad. And in the last chapter we saw how among Christian communities
throughout the world there has been in recent years a growing
approximation. Neither the cause nor the effects of such forces can die
away. They will reappear when the storm has passed and rebuild the
wreck.

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received
no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a
detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and
pow