men. One of the most striking illustrations of the power of influencing conduct by persistent presentation of an idea is found in the advertising methods of vendors of patent medicines. The land is deluged with notices in newspapers, with pamphlets and pictures sent to hundreds of thousands of persons through the post-office, and almanacs are given away by the million. These notices are served up in sensational form, seasoned with wit, spiced with pungent threats of death, puffed with glowing promises of health, fortified by the certificates of clergymen and lawyers and other persons whose opinions on such subjects are not those of experts. Some of these medicines are good; some are harmless; others are deadly poison and made of cheap whiskey and bitter weeds; but persistent advertising produces widespread belief in their virtues, and millions of dollars annually are spent upon them in witness of the sincerity of these beliefs. Those who survive live at least long enough to give their testimony and their photographs, and the dead are silent. Processes. Conduct is formed by influences directed to L secure habitual choices. The will is the man, and oft-repeated volitions in a given direction shape the will. Thoughts which occupy consciousness tend to become exclusive, and acts which are steadily accompanied by pleasure and satisfaction are most. apt to be repeated. Society can secure conformity to its standards by interesting the citizen in its ends and by investing duty with memories of enjoyments. Reluctance is overcome by offering higher satisfactions or more intense pleasures. Take for an illustration the raising of money for a great exposition or for an emergency fund in time of financial distress. People who are already aroused head the list with liberal subscriptions, and others are "whipped into line" by appeals and threats, which are as effective as bludgeons. The air is filled with the project; the newspapers give space to nothing else; unbelievers are silenced by rebuke or sarcasm; the stingy are cajoled, bribed, flattered, honored, according to the demand of the moment. Advantages are painted in vivid colors, losses are concealed. Contagion takes charge of the enterprise, and at last all congratulate themselves on the grand achievement. Other devices of education, the school, the platform, the press, are subsidized or employed to propagate a belief. Witness the introduction of temperance teaching in the public schools of many states, and instruction as to the effects of tobacco and other poisonous substances. It is an educational device to secure social control, to enforce an idea. The kings of England sought to mould public opinion by "tuning the pulpit" in the ancient times of union of church and state. The preacher is still, in spite of newspaper competition, one of the educative agencies in the formation of a social policy. Reformers have always sought to set ministers talking, Sunday after Sunday, upon their theme. The Devices of Coercion. - Social control is secured not only by instruction and persuasion, that is, by the production of conviction and personal choice, but also by devices which constrain action even in the absence of consent of will and judgment. It must be admitted that the dividing line between educational and coercive devices is not very distinctly marked, but we can readily distinguish extreme cases of each kind. For example, so long as John Brown sought by speech-making to persuade the American people to abolish slavery he was an educator; but when he placed himself at the head of a little army and invaded a state where slavery existed as by law established, he passed from an educative to a coercive device. It is the difference between inviting an intruding boy to descend from an apple tree and throwing stones at him to make his position uncomfortable and dangerous. Coercion is of all degrees of stress and pressure, and is applied in all organizations: in family and school by bribe or censure; in the factory by threat of discharge; in the state by police and prison. The Device of Suppression. -Suppression is the most summary process. A head that is full of rebellion must be cut off. That is "capital" punishment. In former ages it was the most popular and reasonable form of correcting eccentricities of conduct. It was very fashionable in England not very long ago. Fine ladies and gentlemen went to a hanging as we go to an exposition. The high roads were ornamented with the dead bodies of persons who liked not the golden mean of regularity. So-called witches confessed the sins of other people and died for their own. Dissenters were fortunate if they escaped with whipping and banishment. Murderers, thieves, traitors, rich Jews, and dreaming pilgrims like Bunyan were treated to similar diet. Our reasonable tolerance and our power of discrimination have somewhat improved in these bright days of science and philanthropy, but we are not yet beyond the need of prisons, asylums for those unfit to become parents, and other modes of eliminating the waste products of the civilizing process. The genius of government is persistently seeking ways of extirpating human weeds, of breaking the line of inheritance of qualities and characters which disturb society. The method of extirpation has narrow scope. It does not produce order, but merely gets rid of the most troublesome factors of revolt. The worst use we can make of a human being is to hang him, if it is possible to do anything else with him. The alternatives of capital punishment and banishment are control or education. Order is a Condition of Progress, not merely preserving Past Gains. The problem of a bicycle is twofold, keeping the balance and moving forward. The rider cannot do the one without doing the other at the same moment. If he does not preserve his equilibrium, he comes to a full stop; if he thinks to rest in order to keep his balance, he falls. He preserves his balance precisely because he is moving forward. Society is also a "moving equilibrium.' The ship of state does not respond to its rudder unless it is sailing. Momentum and guidance are parts of one life and cannot be separated. This consideration opens the theme of our closing chapter, as that is intended to reveal an endless vista of possible achievements, a boundless horizon whose margin fades forever as we move. 2 B CHAPTER XVII Social Progress "He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation, that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision; that man by this very opinion declares, that he is yet far short of truth. The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge."— MILTON. "Have patience,' I replied; ourselves are full "His soul is still engaged upon this world Man's praise can forward it, man's prayer suspend, For is not God all-mighty?"— R. BROWNING. "The life of a soul is sacred in every stage of its existence, as sacred in the earthly stage as in those which are to follow. Each stage must be made a preparation for the next; every temporary advance must aid the gradual ascending progress of that immortal life breathed into us all by God Himself, as well as the progress of the great Entity— Humanity · which is developed through the labor of each and every individual. "God has placed you here upon this earth. He has surrounded you with myriads of fellow-beings whose minds receive aliment from your own, whose life is fecundated by your own. In order to preserve you from the dangers of isolation, He has given you desires which you are incapable of satisfying alone, and those dominating social instincts which distinguish you from the brute creation, in which they are dormant. He has spread around you a material world, magnificent in beauty and pregnant with life; a life- be it ever remembered — which, though it reveal itself by divine impulse, yet everywhere awaits your labor, and modifies its mani festations through you, increasing in power and vigor in proportion to your increased activity. “God has given you certain sympathies which are inextinguishable. Such are pity for those that mourn, and joy for those that rejoice; anger against those who oppress their fellow-creatures; a ceaseless yearning after truth; admiration for the genius; enthusiasm for those who reduce it to beneficial action upon mankind; and religious veneration for those, who, failing to achieve its triumph, yet bear witness to it with their blood, and die in martyrdom: and you deny and reject all the indications of your mission which God has thus clustered around you, when you cry anathema on the work of His hand, and call upon us to concentrate all our faculties on a work of mere inward purification, necessarily imperfect, nay impossible, if sought alone. "Does not God punish those who strive to do this? Is not the slave degraded? Is not one-half of the soul of the poor day-laborer (doomed to consume the light divine in a series of physical acts unrelieved by a gleam of education) buried beneath its animal appetites, in those blind instincts which you name material? "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty,' has been declared by one of the most powerful apostles the world has known, and the religion he preached decreed the abolition of slavery. Who that crouches at the foot of the creature can rightly know and worship the Creator? Yours is not a Religion. It is a sect of men who have forgotten their origin, forgotten the battles which their fathers fought against a corrupt society and the victories they gained in transforming the world which you despise, O men of contemplation! "The first real, earnest religious Faith that shall arise upon the ruins of the old worn-out creeds will transform the whole of our actual social organization, because every strong and earnest faith tends to apply itself to every branch of human activity; because in every epoch of its existence the Earth has ever tended to conform itself to the Heaven in which it then believed, and because the whole history of Humanity is but the repetition-in form and degree varying according to the diversity of the times of the words of the Dominical Christian Prayer: Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.' 66 6 Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.' Let these words better understood and better applied than in the past-be the utterance of your faith, your prayer, O my brothers! Repeat them, and strive to fulfil them. "Workingmen! Brothers! When Christ came, and changed the face of the world, he spoke not of rights to the rich, who needed not to achieve them; nor to the poor, who would doubtless have abused them in imitation of the rich; he spoke not of utility nor of interest to a people whom interest and utility had corrupted; he spoke of Duty, he spoke of Love, of Sacrifice, and of Faith; and he said that they should be first among all who had contributed most of their labor to the good of all. "And the words of Christ, breathed in the ear of a society in which all |