of their fellow-creatures, because-for one thing-they have not the power to do so. And they have lost the power to do so, because such a general skepticism has come to pervade the community that the dogma of exclusive salvation has become discredited. The decline of persecution has therefore been determined solely by intellectual causes, and does not indicate any improvement in the average character or advance in the ethical knowledge of mankind.

In this view there is some truth, but it is so mixed up with error that the total statement is of little worth. That the growth of skepticism, or increasing lack of certainty about transcendental opinions, has had much to do with diminishing religious persecution, is not to be denied. But that the average persecutor is a man whose horrid actions are dictated by an unselfish interest in the welfare of his fellow-men, is a much more questionable proposition. It has not been customary to credit religious bigotry with such lofty motives,-if motives prompting such atrocious actions can at all properly be called lofty,-and we do not find Mr. Buckle disposed to be particularly lenient in his judgment of individual persecutors, whatever general statements the supposed exigencies of his theory may have led him to make. When he comes to treat of the bigoted Scotch divines of the seventeenth century, he is only too ready to charge them with moral perversity as well as with intellectual ignorance and obtuseness. This is very inconsistent; but inconsistency can hardly be avoided when one starts with such a singularly halftrue theory as that which Mr. Buckle propounded.

Mr. Buckle's fundamental error lies in the attempt to assign distinct parts to elements of human nature that in reality cannot be separated. For didactic or school-room purposes it is well enough to consider separately the intellectual and moral faculties of man. But when we come to examine concretely any actual group of human phenomena, it is hopelessly futile to try to consider intelligence and moral disposition as working separately, or to assign to each its kind and amount of effects. In point of fact they never do work separately, but their combinations are so manifold and intricate that the disentangling of effects becomes impossible. When we look at things rather than words, we see that every complex question of morals is largely also a question of intelligence, and conversely. For example, let us consider what political economists call the "effective

desire of accumulation." As a rule all men desire to make money, or to increase their general control over the circumstances which make life comfortable or pleasurable; but the effectiveness of this desire is very different with different individuals, and it is immeasurably more effective in the case of civilized men than in the case of barbarians. The savage cannot be made to work to-day in anticipation of wants that are not actually felt at present; but the civilized man will even devote a hundred or a thousand dollars' worth of labor every year to ward off the mere possibility of a loss by fire which is by no means likely to occur. This tendency to provide for future contingencies is at the root of what is called the "effective desire of accumulation," and it furnishes one of the most conspicuous of all the distinctions between civilized men and savages. The progress of mankind in civilization has been to a large extent identical with the growth of this tendency. But, now, how far has this been an intellectual, and how far a moral progress? On the one hand, it may be argued that the ability to labor and to economize to-day in anticipation of future contingencies is an index of self-control or of power to resist momentary temptations; and in so far as this is true, the increase of the "effective desire of accumulation" is an index of the degree to which civilized men have risen morally above the dead level of savagery. But, on the other hand, it is undeniable that such a purely intellectual faculty as imagination has a great deal to do with this ability to anticipate future emergencies. A savage does not work to-day in order to keep the wolf from his door next winter, because he cannot frame in his mind an adequate picture of what next winter is going to be. The temptations of to-day he vividly realizes; but of the needs of next winter he can form no mental image distinct or vivid enough to determine his actions. So with the careless, improvident man-who is to that extent a barbarian-in civilized society. No honest man would ever voluntarily run up a bill, to be paid on the uncertain chances of his income six months hence, if he could adequately represent to himself, in imagination, the discomfort or even misery which after six months the bill is liable to produce. I am not speaking now of such pecuniary obligations as are sometimes thrust upon persons by circumstances over which they have no discoverable means of control. I refer only to such obligations as are commonly incurred in civilized society through

excess of unproductive expenditure, or what is currently known and stigmatized as "extravagance." The results of extravagant expenditure, especially as connected with the system of "living upon credit," form a very large proportion of the miseries by which modern society is afflicted: if all the secrets of society could be laid open for inspection, we should perhaps marvel at the amount of unhappiness which is traceable directly or indirectly to this cause. Yet the reckless assumption of pecuniary obligations does not ordinarily originate in dishonesty of intention. There can be no doubt that it ordinarily originates in mental incapacity to form a distinct and accurate conception of the future results of to-day's actions, coöperating with that comfortable assurance that things will somehow or other come out right, which nearly all men persist in cherishing. The lazy belief that in some unspecified way things will so adjust themselves as to prevent the natural consequences of a wrong or foolish act, is a very common fallacy, upon which George Eliot is especially fond of commenting. This belief, which is responsible for so much imprudence and for so much crime, is itself the product of defects that are partly intellectual and partly moral. It arises partly from a slothfulness of temper which shrinks from the discomfort of dealing with unpleasant facts, and partly from inability to think out complicated relations of cause and effect. Thus deeply and widely inwrought with every phase of the moral power of resisting temptation, is that purely intellectual power which we may call "representativeness"—that is, the power of forming distinct and vivid mental pictures of circumstances which have not yet begun to exist, or are at any rate remote from us at the present moment. Other things equal, the man who has this power of "representativeness" most fully developed is most likely to exhibit self-control amid the myriad temptations of life. Yet in spite of the highly composite character of the process by which the habit of selfcontrol is reached, the result is a purely ethical result-a result which we estimate solely with reference to its bearing upon the welfare of society. And accordingly, when we praise a man for prudence and self-control, we rightly feel that we are paying tribute rather to his moral character than to his intellectual capacity.

Such being the inextricable complication of intellectual and moral processes, even in such a comparatively simple case as that

of "the effective desire of accumulation," we need not expect to be able to deal satisfactorily with such a complex affair as the persecuting spirit without taking into the account both intellectual and moral factors. And in taking both into the account, it must be borne in mind that what we have to say about the one is necessarily incomplete until mentally supplemented by what we have to say about the other.

The diminution in the intensity of the persecuting spirit and the diminution in the atrocity of its manifestations, alike furnish, when duly analyzed, an excellent illustration of the intellectual and moral advance of mankind from a state of bestial savagery toward a state of refined civilization. Let us consider first, for a moment, the diminution in the atrociousness of the overt acts by which the persecuting spirit has manifested itself; and afterward let us proceed more thoroughly into the consideration of the underlying causes of the temper of mind which has led men to persecute one another.

In the lowest stages of human progress which the comparative study of institutions has revealed to us, there are no great political aggregates of men covering large areas of country, supporting themselves by complex and multifarious kinds of industrial activity, and bound together by varied community of interests, guaranteed by laws based on the common consent of all. Viewed in relation to what we now know about the antiquity of the human race, a society like this must be regarded as quite a late and elaborate result of the slow process of civilization. In broad contrast to anything of this sort, we find mankind in their primitive condition-such as we may still find it partially exemplified in the institutions of savage races-existing only in little tribes, supporting themselves almost entirely by predatory occupations quite like those by which bears and tigers support themselves, and perpetually fighting with each other for the possession of the hunting-grounds that insure their means of subsistence. In this primitive bestial state of society, there is nothing like a normal state of peace. The nearest approach to peace is a state of armed truce. Warfare between tribes goes on chronically, the injury which one inflicts upon another being compensated only by some equivalent injury inflicted in revenge. As all the foreign policy of a given tribe may be thus summed up in perpetual murder of men, so its internal industries may be mainly summed up in the perpetual slaughter of animals that serve for food.

Every man is primarily a butcher. To kill something prime necessity of life. The direct infliction of death or of cal suffering is the principal daily occupation of all the me of the community; and as a correlative effect of all this, the ity to meet death or to endure physical suffering without ing is one of the attributes of a hero that society prizes. highly. The most complete instance of a society of this so has acquired historic fame is that of the Iroquois of New in the seventeenth century. But there is no doubt that, in respects we are now considering, our own Aryan ancestor conquered and settled Europe were substantially like th quois.

Now, in such a state of society as this, it is obvious tha will inflict pain without the smallest compunctions and upo small provocation. The feelings with which we regard the needless infliction of physical suffering would be unintelligible to them. To such men death and torture ar mon incidents of life, which no more interrupt the even te their ways than ours are interrupted by railway acciden man born in such a state of society expects to meet a death, as is shown by our own Norse progenitors, who, re it as disgraceful to die in one's bed,-and an end which was willing to encounter himself he might readily be supp be willing to inflict upon others. In this way, I think, the ive cruelty which characterized the persecutions of the Ages is completely explained. When we read of the fr tortures inflicted upon Arabs, Jews, and Protestants Inquisition; when we remember the fiendish outrages perp by the Spanish armies in Holland and by the Imperial ar Magdeburg; when we recollect that in Spain an auto-da one of the most imposing ceremonies of the Church, and t the marriage of Philip II., burning heretics served as torches, we are at first inclined to exclaim that such c could never have been. In human nature, as we know it mean and bad as it too often is, we do not seem to find a like a parallel to such horrible cruelty as this. It has be that we need but to imagine the state of mind which att a similar course of action to Eternal Justice, and conceiv part and parcel of the essential order of the universe, to all this explicable. No doubt the self-same ingenuity whi displayed speculatively in theological descriptions of t