inistration. Looking down from an eminence not far from Philadelphia
upon a wilderness which is now in the heart of that huge industrial
society where population presses on the means of life, even the
cold-blooded and cynical Talleyrand, gazing on those unpeopled hills and
forests, kindled with the vision of coming clearings, the smiling farms
and grazing herds that were to be, the populous towns that should be
built, the newer and finer social organization that should there arise.
And then I remembered the hall in Harvard's museum of social ethics
through which I pass to my lecture room when I speak on the history of
the Westward movement. That hall is covered with an exhibit of the work
in Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts
and diagrams tell of the long hours of work, the death rate, the
relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of the poor of all
Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that center of American
industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter
my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington
leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the
forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men, "carving a cross on the
wilderness rim," were struck by the painted savages in the primeval
woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars,
Poles and Sicilians struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and
live a brutal and degraded life. Irresistibly there rushed across my
mind the memorable words of Huxley:

"Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit
a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal
nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate
to express the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large
improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human
family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the
winning of a greater dominion over Nature, which is its
consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion,
are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of
Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation,
among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of
some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as
a desirable consummation."

But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to
realiz