possible to bring about these physical changes without effecting at the same time vast social changes. The men who invented the stationary and locomotive steam engine, and the men who have since then harnessed both steam and electricity to all sorts of ends, have produced social changes by the side of which those produced by Alexander, Cæsar, and Napoleon are insignificant. And the same process is going on as long as applied science goes on, whatever we may think about its worth. But, I repeat, while social change, thus brought about, represents an indispensable condition of progress, it does not present a guarantee for progress. The latter depends upon deliberate human foresight and socially constructive work. Hence we have, first of all, to change our attitude. Instead of congratulating ourselves upon its presence and certainty as a gift of the gods, as we have been wont to do, we have to recognize that it is a human and intentional product — as much so in principle as a telephone or irrigation or a self-binding reaper, and as much more so in fact as the factors upon which it depends are more complex and more elusive:

The doctrine of evolution has been popularly used to give a kind of cosmic sanction to the notion of an automatic and wholesale progress in human affairs. Our part, the human part, was simply to enjoy the usufruct. Evolution inherited all the goods of Divine Providence and had the advantage of being in fashion. Even a great and devastating war is not too great a price to pay for an awakening from such an infantile and selfish dream. Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production. It is not a wholesale matter, but a retail job, to be contracted for and executed in sections. I doubt if the whole history of mankind shows any more vicious and demoralizing ethic than the recent widespread belief that each of us, as individuals and as classes, might safely and complacently devote ourselves to increasing our own possessions, material, intellectual, and artistic, because progress was inevitable anyhow.

In dwelling upon the need of conceiving progress as a responsibility and not as an endowment, I put primary emphasis upon responsibility for intelligence, for the power which foresees, plans, and constructs in advance. We are so overweighted by nature with impulse, sentiment and emotion, that we are always tempted to rely unduly upon the efficacy of these things. Especially do we like to intrust our destiny to them when they go by eulogistic names—like altruism, kindliness, peaceful feelings. But spite of the dogma which measures progress by increase in these sentiments, there is no reason that I know of to suppose that the basic fund of these emotions has increased appreciably in thousands and thousands of years. Man is equipped with these feelings at birth as well as with emotions of fear, anger, emulation, and resentment. What appears to be an increase in one set and a decrease in the other set is, in reality, a change in their social occasions and social channels. Civilized man has not a better endowment of ear and eye than savage man; but his social surroundings give him more important things to see and hear than the savage has, and he has the wit to devise instruments to reinforce his eye and ear the telegraph and telephone, the microscope and telescope. But there is no reason for thinking that he has less natural aggressiveness or more natural altruism or will ever have than the barbarian. But he may live in social conditions that create a relatively greater demand for the display of kindliness and which turn this aggressive instinct into less destructive channels. There is at any time a sufficient amount of kindly impulses possessed by man to enable him to live in amicable peace with all his fellows; and there is at any time a sufficient equipment of bellicose impulses to keep him in trouble with his fellows. An intensification of the exhibition of one may accompany an intensification of the display of the other, the only difference being that social arrangements cause the kindly feelings to be displayed toward one set of fellows and the hostile impulses toward another set. Thus, as everybody knows, the hatred

toward the foreigner characterizing peoples now at war is attended by an unusual manifestation of a mutual affection and love within each warring group. So characteristic is this fact that that man was a good pyschologist who said that he wished that this planet might get into war with another planet, as that was the only effective way he saw of developing a world-wide community of interest in this globe's population.

I am not saying this to intimate that all impulses are equally good or that no effective control of any of them is possible. My purpose is, in lesser part, to suggest the futility of trying to secure progress by immediate or direct appeal to even the best feelings in our makeup. In the main there is an adequate fund of such feelings. What is lacking is adequate social stimulation for their exercise as compared with the social occasions which evoke less desirable emotions. In greater part, my purpose is to indicate that since the variable factor, the factor which may be altered indefinitely, is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the application of intelligence to the construction of proper social devices. Theoretically, it is possible to have social arrangements which will favor the friendly tendencies of human nature at the expense of the bellicose and predatory ones, and which will direct the latter into channels where they will do the least harm or even become means of good. Practically this is a matter of the persistent use of reflection in the study of social conditions and the devising of social contrivances.

I have already said that the indispensable preliminary condition of progress has been supplied by the conversion of scientific discoveries into inventions which turn physical energy, the energy of sun, coal and iron, to account. Neither the discoveries nor the inventions were the product of unconscious physical nature. They were the product of human devotion and application, of human desire, patience, ingenuity and mother wit. The problem which now confronts us, the problem

of progress, is the same in kind, differing in subject-matter. It is a problem of discovering the needs and capacities of collective human nature as we find it aggregated in racial or national groups on the surface of the globe, and of inventing the social machinery which will set available powers operating for the satisfaction of those needs.

This is a large order. But it is not, with reasonable limits, one hopeless to undertake. It is much more within the bounds of legitimate imagination than would have been, five centuries ago, the subjugation of physical nature which has since been achieved. The chief difficulty lies in the primary step; it consists in getting a sufficiently large number of persons to believe in its desirability and practicability. In spite of its discipline by the achievements of physical science our imagination is cowardly and irresponsible. We do not believe that study, foresight and planning will do for the human relations of human beings what they have done for our relationship to physical

nature.

We are living still under the dominion of a laissez-faire philosophy. I do not mean by this an individualistic as against a socialistic philosophy. I mean by it a philosophy which trusts the direction of human affairs to nature, or Providence, or evolution, or manifest destiny that is to say, to accident rather than to a contriving and constructive intelligence. To put our faith in the collective state instead of in individual activity is quite as laissez-faire a proceeding as to put it in the results of voluntary private enterprise. The only genuine opposite to a go-as-you-please let-alone philosophy is a philosophy which studies specific social needs and evils with a view to constructing the special machinery for which they call.

So far I have avoided any contrast of the so-called progressive attitude with the so-called conservative attitude. I cannot maintain that reserve any longer. While, in general, the opposite of the progressive attitude is not so much conservatism

as it is disbelief in the possibility of constructive social engineering, the conservative mind is a large factor in propagating this disbelief. The hard and fast conservative is the man who cannot conceive that existing constitutions, institutions, and social arrangements are mechanisms for achieving social results. To him, they are the results; they are final. If he could once cure himself of this illusion, he would be willing to admit that they grew up at haphazard and cross-purposes, and mainly at periods quite unlike the present. Admitting this, he would be ready to conceive the possibility that they are as poor mechanisms for accomplishing needed social results as were the physical tools which preceded the mastery of nature by mind. He would then be free: not free just to get emotionally excited about something called progress in general, but to consider what improved social mechanisms or contrivances are demanded at the present day.

All this, you will say (and quite justly), is very general, very vague. Permit me, in concluding, to give a few illustrations suggested by the present international situation, which may make my conception a little less vague. A friend was in Japan at the time when the war broke out. He remarked to an acquaintance, who happened to be the United States consul in the town where he was, that he supposed he would have no difficulty in getting an American draft cashed. His friend replied: On the contrary; he himself had had to spend almost two days in getting even a government draft cashed. My friend proceeded to generalize from this incident. He said in effect that in commerce we are proceeding upon an international basis; commerce depends upon a system of international credit. But politically we are doing business upon the basis of ideas that were formed before the rise of modern commerce

upon the basis

of isolated national sovereignty. The deadlock due to this conflict could not continue, he surmised; either we must internationalize our antiquated political machinery or we must make our commercial ideas and practices conform to our political.