ABSTRACT
In the occasional intervals when the world is quiet, men quickly take for granted those first and last things which in the ages of disorder are matters of life and death. The second half of the nineteenth century was such an interlude and in the culture of the western nations elemental security was thought to be so firmly established that its principles were almost completely forgotten. The recognition that all men are persons, and are not to be treated as things, has arisen slowly in the consciousness of mankind. The Golden Rule, sometimes in its positive form but more often in the negative form, has been enunciated among many peoples widely separated in time and space. The great reaction in the latter part of the nineteenth century was ushered in by men who had little use for the traditional ideas in which the inviolable essence of the human personality was affirmed.
