Most of us have enough widespreading love to be--for instance--quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly, to children or to animals.

I say nothing about the indirect tortures which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit.

Were these first flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to life--and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in this, only a reasonable growth--then, new paths of social discharge would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past.

To us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than they were to the men of earlier centuries.

We see their gradual defeat in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance, every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over which our obligations to other men obtain.