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THE CHALLENGE OF FACTS

that he never feels ready to close the case and advance to a decision. There are so many components whose value he can only measure approximately that he cannot feel sure of his result.

This state of things, however, is precisely made to fit the sentimentalist. Here we have before us social diseases, and we see a great number and variety of social phenomena which are disagreeable and shocking to our sensibilities. Some of them are appalling. In the city of New York and in any other great city, we can find representations of every grade of barbarism from the bottom up. We think of the primitive man as a strange creature of passion and impulse, but there are social groups amongst us consisting of persons who have grown up without discipline and who are similarly primitive and barbarous. About all of civilization which they have caught is the fashion of wearing clothes. The primitive man made women do all the work; but there are plenty of men in modern civilized society, especially in the great cities, who do the same. We can find slavery, caste systems, serfdom, and feudal relations represented in scarcely disguised forms in the midst of any great city of to-day. We can find fetishism and every other form of religious superstition represented; likewise polygamy, polyandry, and every other form of sex relation. It has been said that the human animal runs through, in embryo, the whole biological development from which the human race has sprung and contains within himself all that development in an accumulated form. Something of that sort is true about society; our society to-day contains fragments of the whole history of civilization, accumulated and consolidated into the great existing fabric.

Hence it is a great mistake to think that we have left