He is metaphysical or historical, and classical He does not seem to have

to earth he lights in the wrong place. mythological where he ought to be where he ought to be statistical. the faintest glimmering that a few simple facts, like those so lucidly set forth by Prof. Harris in the June number of the Forum, exhibit the folly of his land-tax scheme as a cure for the poverty of the poor. Whether the exemption of one-half to two-thirds of the property of the country as at present taxed -on the ground that improvements should not be taxed-will not throw the whole burden on the other half, he does not stop to inquire. And further, whether this half, consisting of the bare land in any community, is owned, outside of our great cities, largely by farmers and others of moderate means, he does not consult the necessary documents to find out; and still further, whether his grand assumption that land values are so enormously increasing that they are sapping the foundations of our industrial prosperity, was not merely a figment of his imagination, in marked contrast with the actual facts, he gives no sign of having considered at all. But Prof. Harris shows from indisputable facts and figures that the value of land has not increased so fast, either in this country or in England, as that of other property. In view of these facts what sort of a panacea is this confiscation land-tax project to the average farmer of the country?

Mr. George may wonder some day why his ingeniously wrought out land-tax scheme collapsed. It was impossible for several reasons. In the best sense of the word the Americans are the most conservative people on earth. A surface view presents certain heterogeneous elements, noisy, demonstrative, and more or less dangerous. But this is a small and constantly vanishing factor. The poor immigrant, often ignorant and bigoted, and sometimes vicious, finds himself in the midst of new environments, and sooner or later takes on the responsibilities of American citizenship; he educates his children; he buys a piece of land and builds a home; henceforth the roots of his life are planted in American soil. All his interests centre here. What headway with this class even, will any confiscation scheme

This class is buying land

make, wherever it is made known? and building houses in every State. Every cabin built is a new bond to keep the peace. With these bulwarks reared all over the land, there is no surer defense against all revolutionary measures, and they make anarchy impossible. While we are looking these heterogeneous elements disappear and lose themselves in a homogeneous nationality, bound together by every tie that makes home sacred and a spot to be defended. The country has no surer defense than its working classes. A portion will be misled for awhile, but the common sense of the masses will not suffer themselves to be led into danger when self-interest gives the cry of warning.

No intelligent reader who has grasped the substance of the foregoing statement will jump at the illogical conclusion that the writer has advanced a single sentiment against the interest of the masses, or is indifferent to their welfare. Just the op

posite of this is true. He is conscious that no higher service can be rendered to them than the exposure of Utopian schemes and visionary theories that turn public attention from correct methods of inquiry, and wastes honest effort in building upon a false foundation; and they can learn no grander lesson than that they can have no mightier ally than the simple truth. A mechanic for more than twenty years of early life, he has been identified with all their interests and counts himself as one of their number. He speaks from personal knowledge of their wants, their limitations and their aspirations. His public life has led him to the dwellings of the poor, whose condition and habits of thought he learned from experience and not from theories made to fit a groundless hypothesis. He has studied the industrial problem from a higher standpoint than class interests, or sectional rivalries, or national jealousies afford; and the widest outlook only strengthens his faith that a growing intelligence, which makes the working-classes sharers in all the good life has to give, will make them the strongest bulwark society can have for its defense. David N. Johnson.

ARTICLE XXII.

Evolution and Ethics.

ETHICS is concerned with the moral nature of man, its genesis, development and phenomena - moral feelings, sentiments, character and conduct; specially concerned with right and wrong, conscience, duty, obligation, and responsibility.

What has Evolution to say upon this subject? Has it thrown any light upon it? added anything to what was known before its advent? is it friendly to morality, or otherwise? does it re lease us from any duty, or what has hitherto been considered such? Does it encourage anything the ages have condemned?

In a previous number of this QUARTERLY (October, 1887) we have heartily assented to the theistic theory of evolution which leaves us logically free to believe that God has not only been immanent in all the past development of the earth and the life upon it, but at times He has been transcendent, helping the evolution to climb heights otherwise inaccessible. With this theory only, as we think, are the facts and phenomena of the ethical nature consonant. Häckel, a German evolutionist of the materialistic school, declares man to be a mere automaton, a part of nature and a slave to its laws; that the widespread dogma of the freedom of the human will from a scientific point of view is a popular delusion; that man is, after all, only a most highly developed vertebrate animal, and all aspects of human life have their parallels or lower stages of development in the animal kingdom.1 If man is merely a highly developed animal, utterly without moral freedom, he is incapable of an ethical thought or act.

Hellwald, an enthusiastic evolutionist, insists that the struggle for existence and the right of the stronger is the only basis of morals, and that the word morality should be banished, as void of meaning, from scientific writings, and that all attempts to raise men to an ideal state is hypocrisy.2

1 Schmid's Theories of Darwin, pp. 237-8.

2 Harris' Philosophical Basis of Theism, p. 477.

Nor can the deistic evolutionists of the school of Mr. Darwin give a good account of the origin, development and facts of the ethical nature. We do not object to his hypotheses that man is remotely descended from the ascidian, a marine hermaphrodite of the mollusk order, that from him came the fish, from the fish the amphibian, thence the reptile and the bird, thence the mammal of the marsupial order; from the last the placental mammals, and thence the ape, from whom, or a near relative of his, at a later period proceeded man, "the wonder and the glory of the universe." 3 On the physical side we are certainly related to every creature beneath us, and Mr. Darwin's theory explains this relationship as well as any, and we may accept it, if not proved, as yet a good working hypothesis. There are eminent evolutionists, however, who deny that the psychologic development of the inferior creatures up to man has followed the same law as that which has ruled in

the physical. "We seem to find," says Mr. Mivart, "a perfect harmony in the double nature of man, his rationality making use of and subsuming his animality, his soul arising from direct and immediate creation, and his body being formed at first, as now in each individual, by derivative or secondary creation, through natural laws" 4 Mr. A. R. Wallace, high authority on this subject, holds that "near the beginning of the tertiary period an unknown cause began to accelerate the development of intelligence in the then existing anthropoid being."

Admitting that the human body has been evolved from those of the lower creatures, we are not forced to accept the dogma that the human soul to its summit has been developed out of the mental furniture of the brute. Still comparative psychology reveals much in the lower creatures which they have in common with ourselves, appetites, passions, affections; much also in the domain of the intellect. The brute has memory and reason, though he is not a rational being. Between brute and human intelligence, however, there is a chasm which evolution unaided seems incapable of crossing. If we admit as true Mr. Spencer's statement, "it cannot be consistently as8 Descent of Man, I., 204. 4 Genesis of Species, p. 331.

serted that there is any essential difference between brute reason and human reason,' we may affirm that there is such a difference in the quality and quantity of that faculty, we cannot conceive how the one could be evolved from the other. It is absurd to suppose that an ape under any circumstances could discover the law of gravitation, think out the nebular hypotheses, construct a steam engine, form any idea of the life of his ancestors, or govern his conduct with reference to the welfare of his posterity. Nor can we conceive how any normal addition could be made to his mental stock which would enable him to do this.

But if we admit that the brute is our intellectual ancestor, must we regard him as our moral progenitor? Does he possess a moral nature, or the rudiments of one? Is man in the ethical sense simply a developed brute, as many evolutionists affirm? That a brute is not a moral being all agree. He does not know the difference between right and wrong, nor can he learn it. He has no conscience, no sense of duty or responsibility. We do not hold him accountable for his conduct, do not censure him for doing what in us is wrong. We never say

he could have resisted his temptations. He follows his instincts, his appetites, and if restrained from either, it is through affection or fear. "A moral being," says Mr. Darwin, “is one capable of comparing his past and present actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower creatures have this capacity."5 On the other hand man is characteristically a moral being. There is no tribe or race of men, it may be safely asserted, who do not recognize a difference between right and wrong, and an obligation to do the one and avoid the other.

"Confining ourselves rigorously to the region of facts and carefully avoiding the territory of philosophy and theology." says the eminent anthropologist, Quarterfages, "we may state without hesitation that there is no human society, or even association, in which the idea of good and evil is not represented by certain acts, regarded by the members of that society or 5 Descent of Man. Vol. I. p. 85.