that it would so educate the nations in the peaceful arts that, at no distant day, they would resolve to learn war no more, so that Astræa, if she were so minded, might return to the plains of earth and find nothing to remind her of the conflicts and bloodshed which, according to the poets, had caused her to take her flight. If things could have gone just as the early economists wished and hoped, something like this might have come, or be about to come, to pass. They thought that commerce was going to shake off its shackles, that trade was going to be free, and that the mutual benefits which it would bestow would, year by year, strengthen the feeling of friendship between nation and nation. They did not foresee such a revival of the prejudice-breeding protectionist system as our eyes have witnessed, or the greed for colonial acquisitions which it has introduced into the world. They magnified unduly the rôle which reason was going to play in the affairs of men, and made inadequate allowance for the measureless floods of popular ignorance which popular education would disengage and set into activity. Still, their dream was no discredit to them, and one of these days, after a greater lapse of time than they counted on, it may come true.
But what trade has not yet accomplished, and does not, as things are at present, seem in the way of accomplishing, another force is silently laboring to achieve. That force is science. It is cosmopolitan by nature; something more than the world even is its parish. We all remember the story of Goethe, who, when the Revolution of July, 1830, broke out in France, and was creating commotion and trepidation more or less throughout Europe, was so absorbed in thinking of the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire over the theory of development, which had become acute just at the same time, that he completely mystified a friend who had come to see him by talking with the greatest excitement about the intellectual crisis when the friend was thinking of the political one. It seemed to Goethe an enormous descent to come down from the level of a great scientific and philosophcal problem to a mere question as to the precise form of monarchical government which was to prevail in a certain country. To him the protagonists on the world's theater were not the Polignacs, the Periers, or the Metternichs of the hour, but the leaders of thought and the representatives of science. Goethe has been accused of lack of patriotism; but we may put it to his credit that he was free from those sentiments of rancor toward foreigners which constitute so large a portion of the patriotism of the majority. In his predominant interest in large intellectual questions he was a type of the better mind of the future, and pointed forward to the time when science would become a missionary of peace and concord to the jarring nations.
Two generations have passed since then, and science has made advances which, could he have lived to witness them, would have filled the great German with gratification and delight. That it is sensibly drawing the nations together there is no doubt. Scientific workers in every field of research are stretching out, across seas and continents, hands of friendship and help to their fellow-workers in other lands. Literatures are national, broadly speaking, but science is necessarily international. There is but one set of natural laws for the universe; and, broadly speaking again, the method of science is one. It fol-
