thing like public sports may be used as a measure of public morals. They show what the collective conscience approves. In these days there is very little of brutality in public sports. Professional pugilism still lingers, but barely lingers, in the most enlightened nations. In less progressive countries like Spain and Mexico bull fighting is popular. That is about all we can say against modern popular entertainment. But if we look backward to the Roman period we find a cruelty in public sports that is comparatively shocking. Gladiators were compelled to fight to the death and offenders were devoured by starving wild beasts and it all made a Roman holiday. Such "sports" would, of course, be utterly impossible anywhere in the world today. But at that time they were matters of course in the life of the world's greatest empire. The fact that the race has evolved morally and that the collective conscience marks a higher point on the ethical thermometer than in the past is too obvious for argument. Now, how is that evolutionary progress to be accounted for? It will not do to say that the Christian religion has wrought the change because, splendid as are the teachings of the Christ, the world has not accepted them and shaped its civilization by them. If it had done so the world war would have been impossible. Not only have the so-called Christian nations wrangled and fought over commercial spoils through all their history but class has been arrayed against class and every gain in either personal liberty or economic improvement has been wrested by force from those who profited by the misfortunes of others. In other words, the particular improvements that should have been brought about by religion were compelled, not freely volunteered. All religious teaching helps but, allowing all we reasonably may for the influence of Christianity, we are still unable to account for the change in the common conscience of the race, an evolutionary gain that has been going steadily on since long, long before the coming of the Christ. How then shall we account for it? If the hypothesis of reincarnation is sound the progress of the race in morality becomes simple. The majority of the great groups of souls that constituted the civilized nations in the time when Rome was mistress of the world have had several incarnations in that time and in each sojourn on the astral plane have had the severe lesson of the painful reaction from cruelty to others. Thus does nature gradually change the cruel man to the merciful man. In every incarnation the soul grows more humane as well as more intelligent. All of the lessons learned in any incarnation are carried forward into the next life, and thus compassion grows until there is ultimately perfect sympathy with all suffering. Both the progress of the soul and of the race are comprehensible from the viewpoint of reincarnation.