With sufficiently long experience you would indeed be bound to conclude that while the diverse elements that bear upon the life of men, including the characters of men themselves, were changing, yet they were not changing at the same pace. Things multiply, they grow, they learn, they age, they wear out and they die at different rates. An individual, his companions, his implements, his institutions, his creeds, his needs, his means of satisfaction, evolve unevenly, and endure unevenly. Events do not concur harmoniously in time. Some hurry, some straggle, some push and some drag. The ranks have always to be reformed. Instead of that one grand system of evolution and progress, which the nineteenth century found so reassuring, there would appear to be innumerable systems of evolution, variously affecting each other, some linked, some in collision, but each in some fundamental aspect moving at its own pace and on its own terms. The disharmonies of this uneven evolution are the problems of mankind. 2 Suppose a man who knew nothing of the history of the nineteenth century were shown the tables compiled in the _Statistical Abstract of the United States_ for the period from 1800 to 1918: He would note that the population of the world had multiplied two and a half times; its total commerce 42 times; its shipping tonnage more than 7 times; its railways 3664 times; its telegraphs 317 times; its cotton production 17 times; its coal 113 times; its pig iron 77 times. Could he doubt that in a century of such uneven changes men had faced revolutionary social problems? Could he not infer from these figures alone that there had been great movements of population, vast changes in men’s occupation, in the character of their labor, their wants, their standards of living, their ambitions? Would he not fairly infer that the political system which had existed in 1800 must have altered vastly with these new relationships, that customs, manners and morals appropriate to the settled, small and more or less self-contained communities of 1800 had been subjected to new strains and had probably been thoroughly revised? As he imagined the realities behind the tables, would he not infer that as men lived through the changes which these cold figures summarize they had been in conflict with their old habits and ideals, that the process of making new habits and adjustments must have gone on subject to trial and error with hopefulness over material progress and yet much disorder and confusion of soul? 3