; I am for progress." This, logically
stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle
whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor
morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education."
This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let
us give it to our children."

Mr. H.G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-sighted man, has pointed out in
a recent work that this has happened in connection with economic
questions. The old economists, he says, made generalizations, and they
were (in Mr. Wells's view) mostly wrong. But the new economists, he
says, seem to have lost the power of making any generalizations at all.
And they cover this incapacity with a general claim to be, in specific
cases, regarded as "experts", a claim "proper enough in a hairdresser
or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of
science." But in spite of the refreshing rationality with which Mr.
Wells has indicated this, it must also be said that he himself has
fallen into the same enormous modern error. In the opening pages of
that excellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he dismisses the ideals of
art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is
going to consider men in their chief function, the function of
parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a "tissue of births." He is
not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory
heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The
whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least
before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious
shirking. What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled
what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a
problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked,
"What is the use of a hammer?" and answered, "To make hammers"; and
when asked, "And of those hammers, what is the use?" answered, "To make
hammers again". Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the
question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the
rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question
of the ultimate value of the human life.

The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one.
As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we
have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion,
pat