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Steam communication has united modern peoples faster than all religions, joining land to land in bands of iron, and the biting edges of the nations must wear smooth under the wheels. A Russian railroad track comes to the edge of Germany, with a different gauge from the German road which continues it, but the railroad is stronger than Czar or Emperor, and makes ultimately for peace.

Our constantly increasing facilities for communication are social functions, evolved in the human race on natural lines, and they bring different character and conduct long before the popular mind has understood their meaning and consciously adopted their results. As an effect of changed conditions our conduct to-day is at the grade required by steam and electric communication; but as far as that conduct springs from personal judgment and will we are still in the sailing-vessel period, some even in that of the slave-rowed galley.

Every line of social evolution makes for peace to-day, for smooth and rapid growth of international agreement; but our personally modified conduct, resting as it does on very ancient ideals and traditions, still drives us into war. Man’s personal conduct has never, as a whole, been up to the level of his socially evolved conduct. Note how the development of industry and commerce lifted and lightened Europe, leading on to peace, to education, to freedom; and how all the while the dominant ideals and conscious efforts of the same people were all for war, its highly prized glories and its supposed gains. See, when learning began to lift its head as a great social factor in those dark ages, how the proud knight still boasted that he could not read or write—mere priestcraft, much beneath him. Quite late in English history it was held derogatory for the nobility to spell well, these baser arts were for their inferiors. In more recent times we can see as plainly how the advance of women, their fuller education and general development, a most important step in social evolution, has been as earnestly opposed by the great majority of persons, acting under the dominance of long-held lines of hereditary ideas and superstitions.