But whether the biologist be right or I, we agree that it is the constant obligation of the living generation to try to lift mankind toward whatever highest height the individual has reached or can reach--and it is not a local, a parochial, a provincial, or even a national obligation, but a world obligation, in this tele-victorian age--from generation to generation, from nation to nation. As Mr. Wells has put it, it is a dream not alone of "individuals educated," but of a world educated for the sake of all mankind. But long before Mr. H. G. Wells put before the world the suggestion of a fundamental world curriculum (it was even before the Great War had made the need more manifest), it came to me that the curricula of the elementary schools of the nations of the earth should be analyzed to discover just what each nation was attempting to teach its children through formal education, and then that the residuum, after the purely local matter was eliminated, should be synthesized into a single body of knowledge ("delivered to or invented by mankind"), which should embrace what the race as a whole seemingly thought it most vitally important to transmit out of its experience to those who were to follow. Once that were had, we should then call upon the greatest minds of the earth--the Enochs of to-day--to confer as to what this minimum for every child should be; for mere mental inertia, pride, prejudice, the force of habit and such causes have prevented that curriculum from keeping up with the accumulation of fundamental truth as it has been brought into the luminous circle of the knowledge of some, at any rate, of the race, from the encircling darkness. These pillars must stand in the clear sight of all the children of the earth, so that every child and youth may have advantage of all these race lessons and come to know them by heart (_i.e._, in their hearts), if there is to be progress toward a goal, which, if it were not beyond our present reach, would be a mean one, and if it were not ultimately attainable, would be Tantalian, for it is the law of progress that one generation shall stand on the shoulders of the one that went before. When the captive king, Croesus, was asked by the victorious king, Cyrus, why he went to war, he answered that he had been directed to do so by the oracle, and he then volunteered the remark: "For no man in his senses would prefer war to peace; since in peace the sons bury their fathers, whereas in war the fathers bury their sons." This is a biologic law, and it conditions intellectual and spiritual progress as well. The sons must bury their fathers not only by outliving them but by _outdoing_ them.