hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as between man
and man because of past discrepancies in environment, opportunities, and
education) could be equalized by a system of teaching that aimed to
furnish that mental and physical training hitherto absent.

Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very
shortly this became the firm conviction of the great mass of men, and
the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are
equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized,
state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that
made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between one
man and another.

In another respect, however, the superstition of mechanical evolution
played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets
nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while
undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from
degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the
rocket rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures,
even so must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to
greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human
history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and
then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood,
or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the
annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable,
unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes
a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to
incipient or crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain
dream of manifest destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of
the primary gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of