Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd.

  • Benjamin Kidd
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    where the old things, material and social as well as political, have passed away, and in which the experience of the past is no longer a reliable guide. The marvellous development of practical science, the revolution in industry which it has effected, the application of steam and electricity on an immense scale to machinery, the enormous extension of railways, telegraphs, and other means of rapid communication, the development of commerce to a degree never before imagined, are amongst the wonders of the present age. They are only the earnest apparently of the future. Even a superficial acquaintance with the means and methods of modern science can hardly fail to leave the conviction that no limit can be set to the possibilities of even the near future, and that the achievements of the past, extra- ordinary as they have been, are not improbably destined to be eclipsed at no distant date. But it is the more slowly ripening fruits of the industrial revolution which arrest attention. Social forces new, strange, and altogether immeasurable have been released among us. Only one hundred years ago, nations and communities were as distant from each other in time as they were at the Christian era. Since then the ends of the world have been drawn together, and civilised society is becoming one vast highly organised and inter-dependent whole—the wants and requirements of every part regulated by economic laws bewildering in their intricacy—with a nervous system of five million miles of telegraph wire, and an arterial system of rail- ways and ocean steamships, along which the currents of trade and population flow with a rapidity and regu- larity previously unimagined. The old bonds of society have been loosened; old forces are becoming extinct; whole classes have been swept away, and new classes
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