yond a dozen-such people are not the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we do our children.

There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children, while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and corrupting them-what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man, desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the colored races suffer more the white man's exploitation, or their own native immaturity.

To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.

In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up hints where we can. In places like Massachusetts, where Negroes are allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and

steel. The Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that the subject races of the world have to get their education through hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!

Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the very answer we have been seeking-as to whether the race is permanently inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.

In the course of this argument we shall assume that the Christian or democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or class. We shall assume that the heritage of culture is a common heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall assert that they are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right to happiness.

CHAPTER LI

RULING CLASSES

(Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and what sanction it can claim.)

It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers. Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.

We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers; but very, very rarely does it happen that. the ruler is a wise man, or a friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off the head of Sir Walter Raleigh-and so on through a long and tragic chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt to be surrounded by a class of parasites and corrupt officials who are busy to thwart his will.

The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force, and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it. Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and self-indulgence, and the subject classes are plundered and driven to revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course

of time it succeeds, and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling class, sometimes a little better than the old, sometimes

worse.

How shall one judge whether the new régime is better or worse? Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction; but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.

I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American country-Guatemala, I think-which showed 130 revolutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much, some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang. Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace" revolutions.

But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then move backward nearly as far.

We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that change does not necessarily mean progress from

any rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge, and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the population than before the change took place?

You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico under Diaz had one of the most perfect of constitutions, and was in reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.

Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of written history we can trace a real development in human society. I think we can analyze the laws of this development, and explain its methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain. This task, the analysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to undertake.