We have all been made familiar with the achievements of the Victorian Era, but we have not seen, we have not been shown, the other side of the shield. On the intellectual side our race has done wonders in mastering the elements and harnessing the forces of nature, with the effect of bringing the world together in a way undreamed of 50, Years ago. Two, generations back nations and tribes stood behind their own borders, more or less self-sustained and self-centred. Take England for example. According to Mr. Monypenny Disraeli was the only Victorian statesman who could take a covtinental standpoint, and_ yet according to Sir Ramsay Muir this least insular of British politicians described tha Colonies as '"millstones about our necks." But now through the advance of science and invention old boundaries are rolled up like a scroll. The peoples of the earth are inseparably one, knit together by the bonds of industry. commerce and finance. So it happens that the heads of Western democracies are preoccupied not a little with oil-wells beyond the Caspian, or the deposit of sear birds on the rocks of the South Pacific, while the centre of Europe lives or dies according to the way whispers go in Wall Street or Threadneedle Street.
That represents our new environment, and we have to adjust to it our moral og well as our mental attitude. We have made our demands on Nature, and Nature has responded by providing a new social medium. But while boasting of our gains we have failed to study ithe other side, we halve failed as it were to foot the bill. This ow environment makes in turn its demand upon our character, and by virtue of the law of evolution itself human society has to make a moral advance.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.