The practical man believes in what may be called the pendulum theory of history; he sees in social movements a mere oscillation, a motion to and fro, without any real progress. As for the misery and vice in which the vast majority of mankind are plunged, that is eternal and inevitable.

The Meliorist believes, on the contrary, that there is a cure for these things, slow but certain, and that it lies, like a concealed treasure, in the sympathetic and rational impulses of man's nature, which may be developed to so triumphant a dominion that they will finally subdue the savage and sensual instincts, even if they do not altogether destroy them. “Education is the sum of habits.” This, then, is the theory upon which reader and writer must agree, for the sake of argument. It is, in fact, the theory of evolution.

Evolution! the word awes us. We are like children frightened at our own shadows; like the shepherd on the Brocken, who mistakes his own exaggerated image on the clouds that sweep over the mountain-summit, for some angry spirit of the storm. There will come a time—it is close upon us—when the cloud image will cease to mean for us a spirit more powerful than ourselves.