es of all, little can be done by insisting that life has higher
uses than work and accumulation. While among the most powerful of
feelings continue to be the desire for public applause and dread of
public censure--while the anxiety to achieve distinction, now by
conquering enemies, now by beating competitors, continues
predominant--while the fear of public reprobation affects men more than
the fear of divine vengeance (as witness the long survival of duelling
in Christian societies); this excess of work which ambition prompts,
seems likely to continue with but small qualification. The eagerness for
the honour accorded to success, first in war and then in commerce, has
been indispensable as a means to peopling the Earth with the higher
types of man, and the subjugation of its surface and its forces to human
use. Ambition may fitly come to bear a smaller ratio to other motives,
when the working out of these needs is approaching completeness; and
when also, by consequence, the scope for satisfying ambition is
diminishing. Those who draw the obvious corollaries from the doctrine of
Evolution--those who believe that the process of modification upon
modification which has brought life to its present height must raise it
still higher, will anticipate that "the last infirmity of noble minds"
will in the distant future slowly decrease. As the sphere for
achievement becomes smaller, the desire for applause will lose that
predominance which it now has. A better ideal of life may simultaneously
come to prevail. When there is fully recognized the truth that moral
beauty is higher than intellectual power--when the wish to be admired is
in large measure replaced by the wish to be loved; that strife for
distinction which the present phase of civilization shows us will be
greatly moderated. Along with other benefits may then come a rational
proportioning of work and relaxation; and the relative claims of to-day
and to-morrow may be properly balanced.--H. S.]
UNIVERSITY ELECTIONS.
The late election for the University of Cambridge had an ending which
may well set many of us a-thinking. That Mr. Raikes should have been
chosen by an overwhelming majority rather than Mr. Stuart means a good
deal more than a mere party victory and party defeat. Combined with
several elections of late years at Oxford, it is enough to make us all
turn over in our minds the question of University representation in
general. The facts taken altogether l
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