Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, and having ignored the solution which is advanced in this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced to such desperate resorts as phrases like this: “The point at which the energy of advance is exhausted”--a mere meaningless phrase; and even such an explanation as that through “mere weariness of spirit the community resigns itself to ... stagnation.” One is inclined to throw up one's hands and ask--Do you, then, who deny the Lamarckian theory, suppose that the fresh children come into the world with this “mere weariness of spirit”? Has this been observed in children? Is there anything conceivable that has been less observed in children, in all times and all places? And if that be so, what kind of explanation of decadence is this? =Science and industry.=--Lastly, in a series of fine passages, Mr. Balfour offers us some hope in the help of science. Politics, says our ex-Premier, too often means “the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers, for another”: a Daniel come to judgment. We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.” And our cause of hope is “a social force, new in magnitude if not in kind ... the modern alliance between pure science and industry.” To this I answer a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of industry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and the means by which that may be effected. “Science and industry,”--yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the making not of machines but men. _The products of progress are not mechanisms but men_, and one may now ask, What is the industry whose products can be named in the same breath with the men and women who shall yet be produced by the supreme industry of race-culture? CHAPTER XVII THE PROMISE OF RACE-CULTURE “The best is yet to be.”