Popular education is one of the distinctive features of the era. The duty of the state to make provision for it, and to that end to exert on occa sion an authority overriding the authority of the parent, is generally recognized. The aim is to place the faculties of every child in train of equipment, and to create a militia of science and culture from whose ranks the regular force may constantly be recruited. The proper development, not of the intellect alone, but of the physique, is kept in view, assuming that what moral health will not ensue from health of mind and body may be supplied by the home, or, in its special way, by the Church. Formerly, the Church claimed entire control of the province of education, but within the three centuries there has been so much question as to what is the Church that the state and the people have relieved it of the charge, and left it to a degree of independence on its own part under which, in its various forms, it has thriven wonderfully. It began in Judea on the voluntary system, and is at length coming back to it, with results that speak in the clustering spires that rise so thickly throughout the land side by side with the schools. The battle of the creeds is no longer fought with secular weapons. Catholic and Protestant can scan with equal eye the scarred stump of the Smithfield stake or the long-deserted torture-chamber of the Inquisition. Both are fain to preach tolerance: it is wholesome for both. The religious sentiment is ever existent in man, and may—nay, must- be appealed to by both through the medium of his intelligence. Their ancient idea of atheistic science is a delusion. Science will never reach the line where religion begins. When the two clash, it must be in the guise of mere theory on the one side and superstition on the other.
Meanwhile, schools of theology abound and increase, as well as schools of science. The aggressiveness of the Church expends itself in attacks upon immorality of all kinds at home and upon the debased superstitions of semi-civilized and barbarous races abroad. In both these fields its value as a civilizing influence is unmistakable. In new countries it has usually been piloted by the trader, but in some regions—new in the sense of being hitherto untried, as the Levant, for example—it has accomplished, to all appearance, more in the way of enlightenment than has yet been achieved through the operations, direct and indirect, of commerce. Real education was unknown there until introduced by missionaries. In the islands of the Pacific also this class of devoted men have attested their worth as civilizing agents. They have there counteracted, so far as was permitted by the feeble power of moral resistance possessed by the natives, the destructive effect of collision with the intelligence and energy, selfishly exerted, of a superior race.
In following the missionary and the merchant around the globe we are brought to another of the great features of the modern movement, the wondrously augmented commerce which has united in relations of interest all nations. Regions which figured on the maps when many of us were schoolboys as "unknown" have been made to give up their secrets. The last of them, Equatorial Africa, is in process of penetration by railways and steamers. That crux of generations of geographers, the source of the Nile, is settled. Every part of the earth capable of being the habita tion or of contributing to the convenience or luxury of man is at his com mand. The world is one great mart, all its products " in sight," all its
merchants "on 'change." Chance has been nearly eliminated in the transmission of commodities, and of intelligence in reference to them. Demand and supply closely balance each other. The chances of the seasons, of war, or of other casualty are reduced to a minimum in their effect on general trade by variety in sources of production. Failure at one point is checked by redundance at another. Civilization, multiplying wants, has at the same time multiplied the means of gratifying them. New arts are accompanied by new materials so closely that it is sometimes diffi cult to say which of the two comes first. A gum from the trackless forests of South America supplies numberless fabrics for luxury and use. A con tinent at the antipodes, scarce a century known, sends sheep and cattle to feed and wool to clothe the British people. Increasing millions of inhab itants require for their homes, factories, and counting-rooms more ample, cheaper, and better light; and petroleum seems to rise from the depths of the earth to furnish it. The treeless and freezing steppes of Central Asia call for both light and fuel, and the same singular liquid stands ready in over flowing volume on the shores of the Caspian. The harvests of India sup plement those of Russia and California. Coal, the PriMUM mobile of industry, is unearthed in unexpected places, often precisely where it is most required. But there is no need of any extended allusion to the mul tiform and unexampled development of modern commerce. It has been the pride of the nations to exhibit its results in competitive expositions. We are made familiar with it by incidents and objects of daily observa tion, each of them, and still more the aggregate, unknown a century or two ago. For one item Brazil, a wilderness barely known when coffee was first introduced into Europe, now ships that berry, no longer a rare luxury, but the regular diet of the cottage, in annual bulk equal to the entire tonnage of all mercantile fleets at that period. Tea, a twin novelty in the eyes of Pepys, supports a similar marine. The impulse in this way given to their industries has enlisted in the cause of order and peace the most backward and unenlightened peoples. The Dyak has found head hunting unprofitable, and for a like reason the Malay has abandoned piracy—both of them, of course, under a little wholesome pressure. Slaves have ceased to be the leading article of African export, and almost while we write the Russian advance along the Oxus and the Attrek has liberated thousands of Persian slaves and given the Turcomans better employment than kidnapping, the Circassian slave-trade having been pre viously abolished by the same power. The empire of Aurungzeb, no longer torn by ceaseless civil war and the outrages and exactions of a host of petty tyrants, is peaceful and prosperous under a single control. China derives corresponding advantage from a contact with the "outside bar barians" which she did her best to repel. Seemingly unapproachable, by reason of her mere bulk, to reform from without, she is slowly improv ing her ancient polity on modern lines, and meanwhile sets less populous and more arrogant Europe a very fair example of internal repose.