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Show fHE ClTlZEft 7 THE D 0 WNTR ODDEWMT T N an amiable attempt to prove that 4 men should be. internationalists Mr. H. G. Wells, prophetic scientist and Englands spinner of fairy tales of science, goes back 800,000,000 years He is not quite sure of this number. There is ample room for dispute. For example, he himself is not certain whether one period was 66,000,000 years or 660,000,000 years. But, of course, it is a mere trifle if you have imagination and desire to prove some-thin- g in the cause of internationalism- We ascertain the authorB purpose to his Introduction in his ''new work, The Outline of History," in which he is to tell the story of the earth from the time the sun flicked it off as a spark down to the present day. He has written his Outline to be published in fortnightly installments, about twenty of them, we are informed in the announcement by George Newnes, Limited, of London. The first installment is presented in thirty-tw- o pages of text and leaves one hungry and thirsty for more that is to say, if one likes fairy stories. There are three distinctive features to a fairy story. It is fantastic, it is fascinating, and it is untrue. One of the most bewitching fairy stories of our times is that which tells us, over and over again, of the great age of the earth, the evolution and annihilation of the creatures that once inhabited it, the evolution of the creatures that still inhabit it and especially the evolution of man the one thinking animal. -- scars left have been the SO ondeep the English mind by the that the leaders of thought are most powerful ally of is evolution. Democracy has no place in the survival of the fittest. Nietsche saw this and developed from it his doctrine of the superman who should be a counterpart of those animals that fought for and The great blonde attained survival. beast was to use his power and intelligence as certain species of animals, in prehistoric ages, used theirs, to maintain supremacy over the lower orders. THE It is in this sense that evolution is aristocratic. Certainly it teaches the very opposite of the brotherhood of man. War was the common state of all creatures who inhabited the world before man. It is the law of the wild today. And yet Mr. Wells tries to derive from these prehistoric sources some comforting theory that will persuade man to accept and practice brotherhood. He may range the dreadful deeps of the prehistorii, he may paint with the sunset flashes of his imagination the struggle of gigantic reptiles and birds, he may trace the origin of man to ratlike ancestors, and in the end prove many things except his own theory. war striv- ing to formulate some philosophy which will persuade men to be brothers in truth and in fact, to abandon war and live together in gentleness and harmony. Men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle follow the eerie light of spiritualism. Mr. Wells, being much of a materialist, seeks to prove his thesis by demonstrating the material origin of man. Early in his introduction he indicates his plan and purpose: "War becomes a universal disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its cradle and sinks the foodships that cater and the neufor the tral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but in a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together in with nothing harmonious but narrow, selfish and conflicting na-rf- r tionalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift toward conflict and destruction. non-combata- now plain to the man in the street Cur internal policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind iB as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations." nt This trtuh, which was apparent to that great philosopher, Kant, a century or more ago it is the gist of his tract upon universal peace is prove the of man without finding the slightest sanction for brotherhood. The materialist who happens to be a junker in Germany or a lord in England will smile and say: Fate has placed me in this position of prestige; has made me a superman and 1 will cling to my good luck. There is. neither God nor any other superior power to dispute my sway. Why should I admit that my slave is my brother? I am the stronger by reason of my position and Materialism may . everything in the materialistic concepeven if tion of history, or you trace the beginnings back 800,000,-00- 0 years, teaches me to claim my own happiness wherever I can find it, even to the exclusion of the happiness pre-histor- y, of less forunate beings. in PERHAPS one is not justified by a single installment; indeed, let us hope that Mr. Wells may be able to emerge triumphantly from his dilemma in succeeding chapters. But confining oneself to what seems to be the theory as connoted by the initial chapters, one is led to suspect that the author will get deeper into the mire as he goes along. Internationalism as we see it today is an aristocratic theory. Lenine and By F. P. Gallagher Trotzky are not preaching, but repudiating, democracy. Their idea is to establish the power of the proletariat If they succeed we shall simply have a new aristocracy. The worker will be the strongest and the fittest to survive. The manual laborer will be an aristocrat and the thinker the school teacher will be the slave. In fact, we see some such condition in our own country today. Here the manual laborer is commanding higher wages than the educator. The laborer buys pianos and talking machines, while the educator sells his old clothes to buy a smoke. No doubt that is a mere passing phase of democracy readjusting itself to new conditions, but it is of the warp and woof of the internationalist theory as we see that theory in action. Men, under Lenine and Trotzky,. are not to be brothers. On the contrary, those who can assert their strength, whether by physical or intellectual means or both, are to dominate the world. The. 'weak, as of old, are to go to the wall, just as the weak czar, for example, went to the wall when confronted by the new Russia which was striving to set up the aristocracy of the proletariat ACCORDING to Mr. Wells mankind on the earth in much the same manner as did the other creatures, and if this proves anything it proves that he is brother to the horse or the monkey, or even to the ancient plesiosaurs, dinosaurs and pterodactyls. The ancestors of the human race, he says, seem to have been all obscure little beasts of the size of mice and rats, more like a downtrodden order of reptiles than a distinct class. These little beasts did not develop into men until long after the reptiles had become extinct. As a matter of act, he says, lions of years elapsed between mil- the vanishing of the last great Mezozoic reptile and the first appearance of man upon this earth. Discussing the probabilities with that freedom of spirit which comes to the man of unfettered imagination who roams at will in a prehistoric world of his own creating, Mr. Wells shows with what appears to him sufficient conclusiveness that under the most favorable circumstances Adam could not possibly have lived more that 40,000,000 years ago, while there is a gap of several million years between the ratlike ancestors and man himself. Why not 400,000,000 or or 400,000,000,000,000 years? It proves nothing. Suppose that orthodox mentality held in so much contempt nowadays should suggest to Mr. Wells that there are no traces of man on earth longer ago than 15,000 years. Certainly the downtrodden ratlike ancestors were not men, nor were the thousand and one other intermediate varieties of ancestors men. 400,-000,000,0- 00 is the most distinctive fact history of the world? It is the difference between man and the animal the mind of man. Human history begins only with the appearance of the mind. All before that is interesting, but negligible in what it teaches with reference to human relations. How long ago did the thinking mind appear? The materialist, when asked that question, will begin to babble about 40,000,000 years and 800,000,000 years, but there are no traces of the mind of man anterior to a few thousands or let us say for the sake of being on the safe side a few hundred thousand years ago. At some time in the process of evolution the human mind appeared and the instant or the aeon in which that occurred the first man came into existence. iWhat his ancestors were ratlike or batlike or monkeylike or lobsterlike makes little difference. The men of Greece seem to have had minds just as clear, just as powerful as our own in every way equal to our own. Going back into the Cimmerian nad Egyptian darknesses we find the human mind equal to our own How mysterious, baffling! There is not the slightest sign of evolution in the mind. The only progress . is the result of the operation of mind on the world around it. No. rat ever so much as made a jackknife; no dog ever built a doghouse. How long would it have taken our men ancestors that is to say, men endowed with our minds to invent written communication? Each one may hazard a guess,, and my own is that it would have taken them more nearly a few months than millions of WHAT -- years. hundred THREE about there 250,000 people in what is now the United States; today there are 100,000,000. We can see man kind diminishing numerically with astounding rapidity toward the original man. Five thousand years ago there was only a handful of men in Europe. If there had been millions we would have found traces of them. Even our search into prehistoric formations does not reveal to us the presence of millions of men. On the contrary, while there may have been numerical progression and retrogression, the earliest records' seem to indicate that the thinking man began his existence only a few thousand, or at farthest, a few hundred thousand years ago. We can form a theory of social relations only by considering, not ratlike ancestors, but the thinking man. years ago Sometime, somewhere the mind was created in the body of man. Materialists would have it that mind is simply a product of matter. The theists are inclined to believe that the mind was a special creation and was lodged in the body of man (Continued on Page 18.) |