tat LITTLE CLOUD. T HE position of the Western world, looked
at as it can be looked at during a lull in politics, is a very singular one. Apparently the grounds for a sanguine forecast are more numerous than at any time since the Reformation. There is general peace in Europe, to begin with, and peace which is guaranteed both by the increased defensive capacity of all States, and by the genuine anxiety of their rulers to maintain it. They are afraid of playing for such enormous stakes as war would place upon the table. The attitude of those rulers towards their subjects has become more forbearing, and though all the white peoples of the world are not yet free, there are none among them whose general and deliberate opinion does not sway action, and especially the making of laws. Municipal life, torpid for centuries. has awoke to such fierce activity that economists warn citizens that improvement is costly, and may be checked in no long time by a cycle of municipal bankruptcies. Religious persecution has become light and bearable, for though the Jews still seem to smart under direct oppression, the injustice under which they suffer is not wholly due to their rejection of Christianity. Nobody persecutes the agnostics of any other race. The wealth of the white world, which is the source of physical comfort, is increasing by leaps and bounds, and though its distribution is most imperfect, the classes at the base of the structure are obtaining a larger share. It is years, sixty at least, since a general diminution in their comfort has been perceptible, and, which is a better fact still, the thought of those who think, including nearly all rulers, is sedulously turned towards an improvement of their condition. The idea that painful poverty is part of a divinely appointed lot for those who work with their hands, which during the life of men still living was a conviction with the upper classes, if it exists, is no longer expressed in public, and has little influence on affairs. Poverty is recognised as an enemy of well- being, and the only limit on wages is the economic one that the ploughman cannot have the whole of the crop, because the price of all he uses, and the profit of the distributor, without whom his toil is vain, must be de- ducted first. Though the painful diseases have not dis- appeared, anresthetic science, and an abhorrence of torture which has seized upon the West with the force of a religious idea, have diminished pain to a degree which only old doctors and experts in criminal law are able fully to per- ceive. There are still epidemics, but the general health of the West has so improved that an immense majority pass through middle life without disease, that in some coun- tries, England, for instance, stature and weight have visibly increased, and that "the faculties" last so late into old age as seriously to interfere with the prospects of the young. The observation of Nature has become at once intense and systematic, and as a result of that observation applied physics have modified for the better many of the conditions of life. The com- munication of thought is now almost as rapid as thought itself, while the transmission alike of persons and of things has become easier, swifter, and less dangerous in a proportion which we may fairly describe as twentyfold. The- enormous impediment which darkness once pre wilted to human energy has within living memory bCSfl almost entirely removed, and as the laws which govern electricity are better understood, may be dispersed altogether. The world is still uninstructed, but the obstacles to education arising from human will are fast being removed. The ancient prophecy that "men shall run to and fro in the earth, and knowledge shall be increased," is, in truth, fast attaining realisation, and so far both the running and the new intelligence have tended to make men happier. Those who deny it are ignorant of what the masses of white mankind only a century ago still had to endure.
There is ground, too; for believing that if the white men will but move on steadily the rate of improvement may even be accelerated. One grand difficulty of the past, the insufficiency of useful products, is being rapidly obviated. The world is being searched for more pleasant things, and with the new facilities for intercommunication the search is well rewarded. As regards food, indeed, always the first of human preoccupations, the world has been pooled, and where absurd laws do not interfere bread is now so abun- dant and so cheap that the age-long ascendency of those who by owning the soil controlled its production is threatened, and will probably disappear. It is more than probable that the speed of human transit, and the inherent power of the instruments used by man to lighten toil, will be enormously increased—a new and lighter accumulator of electricity would effect that at once—while it is possible that the fertility of the earth itself, the locked treasure- house of all things, may be materially increased. The energy of white mankind, relieved of many superincumbent weights, has been developed beyond precedent, and the highest men of science see dimly that even man's power of thinking may be enlarged by a comprehension of laws as great as gravitation which are still hidden from his ken, but the filmy veil of which shows an inclination to dis- appear. The "rolling back of the heavens" in the fifteenth century on which thinkers and rhetoricians have so often dilated would hardly expand man's conceptions more than an accurate and fairly full comprehension of the nature and properties of the all-pervading though invisible sub- stance which we have agreed to call the ether.
In the midst of all these facts and prospects men remain silly, and a new and serious danger bewilders all who can think. The white world may fling its future away for the gratification of its spites and greeds. The nations have become conscious of each other, and they snarl. The fierce jealousies, the fiercer greedinesses, the distrusts fiercest of all, which in history are seen to have divided the dynasties, now divide the peoples. Each is as angry when it sees another gain anything as a dog when it sees a bone in another dog's mouth. Each thinks itself injured when another is enriched, and, what is worst of all, each believes in its heart that every other is plotting astutely and carefully to deprive all rivals of that which they possess. The new hunger for comfort, the new know- ledge of the external world and the riches it contains, unite with the new freedom and rapidity of intercommuni- cation to produce a hatred of rivals at least as strong as the ancient hatred of races or religions. Great nations are ready to fight to the death for trausmarine acquisitions, for privileges of trading, and above all for profitable monopolies. Governments are forced to "interfere," usually with menace, to secure concessions for their sub- jects. The popular papers are full of profits about to be pilfered away. The more popular the representative the ,more angrily he pleads for objects which, in plainer language, are large profits to be reaped by his constituents. If the State buys anything abroad he is furious ; if it is indifferent to a foreign tariff he is in despair; if it does not prevent a rival railway he asserts, and almost believes, in treachery in his rulers. It is impossible for him to believe that the claims of others may be well founded, and the imputations in which he indulges resemble nothing so much as those of priests against heretics or scholars against each other in the Middle Ages. In short, while the Govern- ments are tranquil the peoples hate each other to the point at which the maintenance of peace becomes daily a more difficult performance. The spirit infects all countries alike, even Great Britain, usually so free in her inner pride from any impulse either of envy. or apprehension ; and if it cannot be allayed there will in the end be war. And war in Europe or with America, now fully included in the circle of jealousies, would mean the disappointment for half the century of all the hopes with which it begins, the waste of the new resources upon competitive and skilful killing, and the diversion of all powers of thought from ponquests over Nature to conquests over each other. Everything, in fact, in the time is propitious except the nature of man, which in its new freedom from the pressure of suffering is allowing the freest play to some of his meanest instincts. So far as safety and progress are con- cerned, the world has gained little by the exchange of • Royal ambition as the driving force in politics for popular jealousy and greed.
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