We die, our world dies, only because we know no better, have thought of no way of preventing; but knowledge and human power are indeed synonymous, and I know of no end to either. But, as for those of us bound to die before we have learned how not to, and as for our children whose world may well vanish before they have thought of a way of saving it, we have always this solace--that we know we are facing the only way salvation can come from when our face is toward science. “For nature,” says Bacon, with his queer crooked smile,--“nature is only subdued by submission.” IX PROGRESS We little realize, until we have met them socially, how engaging the manners of cannibals can be. It is unfortunate that so many obstacles lie in the way of our making their better acquaintance,--they live so far out of town for one thing, and for another are so clannish a set that only occasionally is one of our sort welcomed to their inner circles. Yet when one who has had this fortune returns to tell about it,--which happens too rarely--we can see it has been a revelation to him and an enlightenment. There is that friend of our youth, Herman Melville, who about the year 1840 was entertained by the Merquesan Islanders--I swear that as I read him I find something very winning about the ways of these people. It is true they were what Melville calls “occasional cannibals”; but although cannibalism, however occasional, cannot win our entire approval (perhaps because, as Montaigne suggests, we have learned how much better it is to torment our enemies alive than to consume them dead) yet it is not wise or just to allow our prejudice against an odd local custom to blind us to so much that is fair in their lives.