Besides these, we have such cases as those of criminals banished to various penal colonies, from whose descendants has been developed a better morality; and of pirates, like those of the Bounty, whose descendants, in a remote Pacific island, became sober, steady citizens.

Thousands of examples show the prevalence of this same rule--that men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.
Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most striking manner to this same upward tendency: the decline and destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly vitiated.

These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in, this development.

The crumbling away of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob--the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the monarchical to the constitutional epoch: all show that even widespread deterioration and decline--often, indeed, the greatest political and moral catastrophes--so far from leading to a fall of mankind, tend in the long run to raise humanity to higher planes.
Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology, Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs of the upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man upon our planet.
Nor have these researches been confined to progress in man's material condition.

Far more important evidences have been found of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual, and religious relations.