The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1913-05-21
IS MANKIND
 IMPROVING ;?

Sharer with Darwin in the creation of the doctrine of natural selection, and preserving in extreme old age. with apparently no dirninution, the intellectual Vigor and the power of forcible expression which character1z ed him in his prime, it was natural that Alfred Russe1 Wallace, on the ad- vent of his ninetieth birthday, should have been approached by many inter viewers, asking him for some message to the world. The message he gave to one of these journalists related to no less a question than that of his es- tirnate of the whole moral and intel lectual condition of mankind in the present day, as compared with past ages. And it's essential purport was contained in a single sentence "I have come, to the general conclusion, he said, that there has been no advance either in the intellect or morals from the days of the earliest Egyptians to the kee1-1aying of the latest Dread nought.''
 That this was no random utterance was evident enough. In point of fact, he was at the time engaged upon a book, Social Environment and Moral Progress,' which has now been issued, and which maintains the thesis then announced, and more. To attempt to appraise it's announcements on past and present, and it's proposals for the future, would be to pass judgment on all the deepest questions of life and so- ciety, of economics and ethics. But the book, like the interview before it, is sure to attract widespread interest; and it seems worth while, therefore, to analyze the significance of his chief proposition and to examine the char acter of his argument.
 In the first place, then, the asser- ton itself does not mean what many Ui11 take if n When MT. Wallace speaks of morality not having improved, he refers to no ob- jective standard, but to those 'inher- ent and unchangeab1e" qualities that constitute what is truly Character" :" as distinguished from the external acts which we may perform, or from which we may refrain, out of regard to the demands of the society around us, and for the sake perhaps of win ming praise or honor or worldly ad- vancement. But with this understand ing, we imagine that there are few thinking people who will be greatly startled to hear that morality has made no advance. Not many of us are in the habit of p1urning ourselves on being intrinsically better than our ancestors; we do not hatter ourselves that we are 1rmer in adhering to the standards of to-day than they to those of their own time and place. If to the red Indian the torture of an en- ennY is to be imputed as a virtue, if to the account of the medieval sol dier burning and pillage and rape are to be charged as the mere exercise of passions nobody expected to be held in check, if the barbarities of the slave trade are not to be accounted as hav- ing been morally worse two hundred years ago than are such evils as hap pen to-day to excite a corresponding degree of reproduction, and so on all along the line, then most of US will be quite prepared to admit that the world has not progressed morally. From the dawn of history, and before, there were manifested probably just about the same varying degrees of devotion to whatever were the accepted standards and ideals of the time and place, as are witnessed in our own day.
 Dr. Wallace's arraignment of exist ing conditions is, however, by no means confined to the maintenance of this comprehensive but negative the sis. He pours forth denunciation af- ter denunciation, with the ferver and scorn at once of a prophet speaking to a goddess generation and of man of science addressing an minimizing and ignorant world He goes far be- yond the assertion that the world is