erful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive
peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our
civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the
best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some
joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are
disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less
advanced.

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view we
have suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity may
be traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenth
century. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of the
action of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until the
Crusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlier
attitude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In the
conquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerors
a new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare cases
of Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after the
Reformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more human
tolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find the
enlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier's
work in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the New
World. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which had
fallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic institution,
began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the great
humanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to
believe that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men is
unconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon and
Descartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, the
greater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates human
capacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop the
germs of humanity in the young and weak.

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenth
century; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderful
alike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise of
activities, national and international, for the betterment of the race.
Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slave
trade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest p