The Detroit times., 1915-10-15
The Higher Progress
~ Or. FRANK CRANE
Copyright. 1915. by Frank Crane)

Is there any relation between material
discoveries and spiritual? Does advance
in electrical science, or biology or astron-
omy, for instance, have any connection
with advance in political economy, law,
or the science of education?
The western world is marked by con-
tlnuous invention. You have to read the
daily newspapers, books are too slow,
and even monthly or weekly publications,
to keep track of the latest things in auto
mobile motors, x-ray apparatus, methods
OF isolating disease germs, telephones,
high explosives, submarines. and air
craft.
Some Of US can remember when the
telephone was a plaything, and it was a
curiosity when men talked from one
room to another, hundred feet apart,
over wire. Like an enormous mush-
room the telephone has grown, and is a
necessary part Of business life. And on
September twentieth the human voice
was transmitted by wireless telephone
from Washington to the Hawaiian
Islands, distance of 1900 miles.
Men fifty years old read Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea- as sort of Arabian Nights tale;
now undersea craft play an important
part in warfare. The trolley car, the cleo
trio light, and the motor car have also
come into general use within lifetime.
Have we made commensurate progress
in the working out of human relations7
That we have gone forward to some de-
gree is undeniable We do not throw into
prison for debt, nor burn witches, nor
hold slaves, nor countenance dueiling.
nor torture witnesses, nor prosecute free
thinkers, nor do any of lot of cruel and
unjust things that disgraced former
ages.
But there remain lot of amazingly
stupid followers.
The machinery Of our criminal laws
still continues the manufacture of GRIM
inals, thousands of prisons exist still
where outrageous and inhuman condi-
tons prevail, We still permit myriads Of
children to grow up without education,
inheritance laws still preserve the ac-
formulated profits of human exertion to
remain in the hands of persons who toll
not nor spin, competition still rules and
cooperation makes feeble Roadway, the
party system is still the best we can do
! in the administration of democracy.
aduterated and unwholesome foods still
still go about to regulate the conflicting
interests of wage-earners and employers
by the brutal way Of violence, by strikes,
lockouts, and boycotts.
! Worst of all, the state, our highest
unit of human organization, the chief ex-
preston Of our collective wisdom. seems
still committed to the plan Of arranging
international affairs by the amazing pro-
cess of numbering vast numbers of its
best citizens.
! Cannot human creatures who talk
$500 miles by wireless invent some other
means than wholesale slaughter for adj
justing their differences?
Cannot the ingenious minds that flash
thought by cable three thousand miles
beneath the waters, that send ponderous
trains whirling across the continent at
fifty miles an hour, that send passengers
in huge, luxurious hotels through storm
and wave from continent to continent.
that conquer yellow-fever, smallpox. and
cholera by antiseptic skill, that have
weighed and measured the stars and
probed the affinities of elektrons, cannot
these minds find out some other way of
enabling Briton and German and Russ
to live upon this pleasant earth but the
astounding bestiality of war?