vancement of
science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to
the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of
the North will give me a good picture of what civilization has gained."

"What it has lost, you will say a little later," replied Ransom. "See here,
Roscoe--has it ever occurred to you that brotherly love, as you call
it--the real thing--ended when civilization began? Has it ever occurred to
you that somewhere away back in the darkest ages your socialistic Nirvana
may have existed, and that you sociologists might still find traces of it,
if you would? Has the idea ever come to you that there has been a time when
the world has been better than it is to-day, and better than it ever will
be again? Will you, as a student of life, concede that the savage can teach
you a lesson? Will any of your kind? No, for you are self-appointed
civilizers, working according to a certain code."

Ransom's weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a
questioning look in Roscoe's eyes, as though he were striving to look
through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision.

"If most of us believed as you believe," he said at last, "civilization
would end. We would progress no farther."

"And this civilization," said Ransom, "can there not be too much of it? Was
it any worse for God's first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand
other men, than it is for civilization's sweat-shops to slay twenty
thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars
and the things you wear? Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn't
it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the
name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial
supremacy kills more people in a day than God's first people killed in a
year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can
we call it civilization any longer? This talk may all be bally rot,
Roscoe. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is.
There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul
is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the
soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures
progress as God meant progress to be. I am saying this because I want you
to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them. You may
find up there the last chapter