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THE CLIMAX OF CIVILIZATION

SOCIALISM AND FEMINISM

THE CLIMAX OF CIVILISATION

BY

CORREA MOYLAN WALSH

PUBLISHED BY

STURGIS AND WALTON CO.

THE CLIMAX OF CIVILISATION

BY
CORREA MOYLAN WALSH

*

New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1917

CB19 W3

COPYRIGHT, 1917, By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1917.

PREFACE

This little work was originally written as the introductory portion of a larger one to be entitled Socialism and Feminism, with an Introduction on the Climax of Civilisation. But the material grew too copious to permit of publication in a single volume, and out of proportion for publication as a single work in two volumes. Therefore it seemed advisable to break it up into its three component parts and publish them as three separate works. This mode of publication also recognises the fact that, though connected, these volumes are independent, and may be separately desired by readers interested mainly in one or in two of the subjects. Yet such readers are begged to bear in mind that each of these works was composed in connection with the others, and a single theme runs through them all as a binding thread.

Standing by itself, the present work is offered as a new exposition of the cyclical theory in the philosophy of history. It attempts to describe the course which all civilisations naturally run, and to locate our position in the cycle of our civilisation. This position is shown to be one near the top, or climax, and to contain premonitions of disintegration and decline. The purpose of the work is to point out these germs of decay, and to emphasise the need of guarding against fomenting and cherishing them. The two most comprehensive sources of trou-

ble are the subjects of the two succeeding works.

Because of its serving as an introduction to these other two works, a few preparatory remarks may here be added concerning the whole series. The work on Socialism comes next because dealing with the broader subject, which covers and includes the subject of the other. Yet the final work on Feminism has been more fully elaborated, because in our country it is the more obtrusive and menacing. Especially is its entering wedge, woman suffrage, an impending danger.

The two following volumes, then, perform the disagreeable task of cautioning against two things which are presented as

good, and which on account of their pretensions seem to be good. It would be pleasanter to believe that projects offering reform of existing evils would be effectual. Disillusionment before trial is disagreeable, once hopes have been aroused; yet disillusionment after trial, through failure when the aim appears within reach, will be much more — and in these momentous matters a thousand times more — painful, involving as they may national and racial disaster. A small present disappointment is incomparably less bad than a great future lamentation.

There is an old French saying that the means are more important than the end — more important in consideration; for it is easy to know what one wants, and the difficulty lies in learning how to get it. We all are aware of wrongs in the world around us, and we all desire improvement. Plans of improvement are easy to make; but all the consequences that would ensue if they were put into practice, it is not easy to foresee. It often is hard to tell why many specious plans should not be efficacious. Then people who are in a hurry ask why not? and adopt them because they cannot answer. It is the object of this series to answer this question with regard to two much-promising schemes — to give the reasons why their principles are not justified, and why their methods would

The connection between these two different subjects, which accounts for the treatment of them, if not in a single work, in a single series of works, is explained in the following pages themselves, both of this volume and of the other two. It may only be premised that they both exhibit a common defect. No social arrangement is right that has not the power of permanence in the world as it is. Something that might be permanent only in the world as it should be, deserves not to be adopted till the world is as it should be. Such are the two subjects here brought together. The world is old enough to have learnt much by experience, and to have established some things solidly. In every science (for nothing is a science till this feat is achieved) some things have been discovered that are unshakable. Yet there are persons who in geometry question the Euclidean axioms, in astronomy doubt the Newtonian law of gravitation, in economics deny the quantity theory of

value. The author is not a radical of this stripe, and in things broad and well-founded he is conservative, although he desires to be progressive in matters reasonable and unobjectionable for their results. The present introductory volume is a prelude intended to show that not all that glitters as new is new or golden, that not all reformation is melioration, and that not all advance or progress is forward or upward. In it the teaching of the past is used to reveal wherein the danger ahead of us lies. The other two volumes carry out the theme, and by analysis of the schemes offered attempt to prove that they would but lead us backward in the downward course previously run by older civilisations.

It is not asserted that the arguments presented in these three volumes cannot be met; but it is contended that it is better to try to meet them than to overlook them. Modification of opinions usually results from a discussion that tries to take all

possible points of view.

All of the first two volumes and most of the third was completed in the first draft before the war raging in Europe, which our nation has just entered, had begun. This calamity has necessitated a few alterations in words and a few additions of thought, but has required no modification in the general treatment. For the author was one of those who have long expected this war, and he was surprised less at its occurrence than at its delay. Occasionally some passages would not have been written exactly as they stand, had the work been planned after the commencement of the war. But it has not been convenient, and it was not necessary, to rewrite or reset them.

In conclusion a word of warning may be given, alike for this volume and for the two which accompany it, but more especially for the work on Feminism. In this series of works no euphemisms are employed. When there is need to speak of a spade, the name of the spade is spoken. The whole series is addressed more to men than to women, and certainly not to

children.

C. M. WALSH.

Bellport, Long Island, N. Y., June 4, 1917.

CONTENTS

LINIV. OF California

THE CLIMAX OF CIVILISATION

CHAPTER II.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION

More in particular, the subject may be examined from the points of view respectively of (1) the military art, (2) economics, (3) population, (4) morality, (5) the fine arts, lit-

TS

erature, science, jurisprudence, thought in general, (6) religion,

and (7) government.

themselves over the spoils. In either case there comes a period of long peace, liable, however, to be broken at any moment through the foolishness which much prosperity engenders in

some of the parties.

The improvement in weapons of attack had another effect within the states: it enabled the first acquirers of such arms—and in all early civilisations arms of metal, both offensive and defensive, were not abundant enough to "go round"—to subdue the rest of the community and to tyrannise over them. The few who owned these instruments of power, and kept them to themselves and their adherents—perhaps a conquering race—would rule the rest. They would seize the land, and their engrossment of the land would in its turn ensure to them the monopoly of arms. But when iron became more abundant and the extension of its use permitted a wider possession of arms, and the weapons of attack were improved sufficiently to break through the armour of personal defence, whereupon infantry became more powerful than cavalry, then the lower classes would rise nearer to a par with their rulers, and, seeing how indispensable are their services in war, would demand a share in the government, and would enforce their demand by actually possessing force enough to make it safer for the occupants to admit them than to continue to exclude them. The period of peace would be reached only after this approximate equality of power had clearly exhibited itself, and a fair balance of the forces of the different classes were established.

Also about as this period is reached, before or shortly after, a change is effected in the composition of the army. At first in all military states the army is composed of a trained militia of all the free citizens. Afterwards these are replaced by soldiers, whose characteristic is that they receive a soulde or pay, and become a profession. But when the competition of nearly equally large states is threatening, as in modern Europe, the professional army system is too weak, and the enforced militia system, or conscription, may be maintained even during the period of peace. Militarism has become an art, and like other arts, employs machinery, in the form of ballistic engines or artillery, a large supply of which must be kept up during

peace, to ensure safety from sudden attack, and the larger this supply needs to be, the quicker the attack can be delivered.¹

² For the influence of the varying superiority of the attack and the defence upon consolidation and decentralisation, see Brooks Adams, The

Law of Civilisation and Decay, 55, 70, 156, 184

^<sup>1Cf. Petrie: "The real fact is that great armaments are like great states, a needful condition of the new speed of communication. When it took two or three months to move an army from central Europe to England, we had two or three months to prepare; when it takes only two or three days we must be always prepared... Within a generation of quick transport being started, big armaments were found needful," op cit., 98.

specially fortifiable spots, where the defence can make itself strongest. These become detached and self-dependent, and lose the incentive as well as the compulsion of holding or of being bound together. In the general débâcle there sounds a cry like that in shipwreck of "sauve qui peut." The small sections, into which the large states split, sink back into a con-

dition of petty and miscellaneous strife and warfare

³ Maine, Ancient Law, 170.

mobile, circulation is rapid, and, everything being exchangeable for money, all values are measurable in the common de-

nominator of price.

according to one's possessions. Before, the relations between classes were determined by custom and consisted mostly in services; now all relations between free persons, except that between husband and wife (and this too tends to become so) are contracted for in monetary payments, as, for instance, the one already noticed between the government and the soldiers. Money, therefore, reigns as the prime mover and the one

general object of desire.4

In the ascending period, money growing in abundance from either increased production of the precious metals, or the employment of credit substitutes, or both, prices rise; and this favours the producers of commodities, who get continually greater returns on their original outlay of borrowed capital. Later, the mines giving out, or the class of those who have capital to lend getting into power and corralling the money supply, prices, through many fluctuations often purposely manipulated, gradually fall, and the causes of the fall are carefully nursed, whereby the possessors of loanable capital benefit at the expense of the producers. The corporation system, originally employed for religious, sociable, or eleemosynary purposes, is now put to service not only by industrialists but by financiers; and by large combinations of the last monopolies are formed, which, turned over to business-managers, crush out smaller rivals by unfair competition, and strive to stem the fall of prices, even to raise them, by purposely curtailing production. Such consolidation of capital goes on after the consolidation of the state has come to a stand. Now either the state or corporations manage everything, and individual initiative sinks to a minimum.

The persons who make their fortune in this easy way, try to solidify it by safe investments, which ultimately centre in land; so that a concentration of landownership goes on, the newly rich, whose number necessarily is small, purchasing large tracts from the many long-time owners of small portions, who are ruined through inability to compete with large-scale production. Yet large-scale production, when left in command

^<sup>4 Cf. Mill: "One of the effects of a high state of civilisation upon character is a relaxation of individual energy, or rather the concentration of it within the narrow sphere of the individual's money-getting pursuits," op. cit., 203.

This course receives still further encouragement. In the ascending period, at least in the beginning, it was by his own strength and influence that the individual possessor, the head of a family, aided by his sons and dependents, had to defend his property. Therefore, too, a man's property, at least, his landed estate, could not safely be divided, and so, where the people were wise, either it went to only one of his children, preferably his eldest son, as the one of greatest development and experience, or — a much less wise expedient — he kept down the number of his legitimate offspring. But already toward the end of the period it becomes the government which, by enforcing all the contractual rights of individuals, protects

^<sup>5 There have, of course, been peoples among whom even power itself, in the chieftainship or kingship, was divided among all the sons; but that practice always kept those peoples small and backward (unless one of the sons murdered all the others, which obstructed moral progress), and no great economic progress was ever made until that practice was abandoned.

the means only of subsistence and enjoyment, the natural law of succession divides it, like them, among all the children of the family; of all of whom the subsistence and enjoyment may be supposed equally dear to the father.

But when land was considered as the means, not of subsistence merely, but of power and protection, it was thought better that it should descend undivided to one," Wealth of Nations, III. ii. Adam Smith, however, did not bring out clearly the proper sequence of the two conditions and attitudes in a cycle of civilisation. The "natural" mode of distribution might have existed originally, had real estate then been owned in severalty; but as that was never the case originally, the necessary precedence of this mode is not made out. Adoption of private ownership of land, however, has preceded every advance toward a high civilisation, and the "natural" mode of distributing it may therefore have existed under barbarism, but this mode of distributing land likewise had to be abandoned, and the other adopted, before ascent could be made into civilisation. This other, therefore, is the prior mode in every cycle of civilisation; while the adoption of the "natural" mode, at the top of civilisation, is always the herald of descent.

⁷ Cf. B. Adams: "When wealth became force, the female might be as strong as the male; therefore she was emancipated," ob. cit., 31; cf. 202.

ing they are so and hence are equal to men; to which they are helped by the fact that many weak men are in a similar position of sham independence. This breaking down of old relations goes on with little hindrance during the long period of peace. The upper classes of the wealthy may now be the weaklings of society, while the really strongest men are among the lower; and the abundance of leisure and the indulgence in luxuries of sight and taste and touch on the part of the upper classes tends to enhance this inverted condition. Hence when the period of failing production sets in, the state being ruled by degenerates, disintegration hastens its pace, until at last the ignorant strong ones from the lower classes rise to the surface, where they quickly degenerate in their turn and permit the process to be repeated; or from outside, barbarians overthrow

them, who may in time be the beginners of a new cycle.

(3) The influences that affect population run in an equally discernible revolution. In the turbulence of an incipient civilisation a free woman can hardly support herself without an individual male protector, and such a one is sought for her by her father and brothers, while every free man needs a wife to save him from the petty labours of the household, which it is his task to provide for and defend. There is thus a division of labour between the sexes, and a natural dependence of each upon the other. They need each other also on their children's account, whom, too, they need, the father needing sons to aid him when they grow up, and the mother needing in her domestic industries the help and companionship especially of daughters while they are young. For in such a period there are few means of laying by a store of provisions for old age; wherefore poor people need children to support them when old and feeble, and those who possess the only form which capital can then take, land, need children to work it and guard it, and to pass it on. Children thus being, in that period, useful members of the family, of little initial expense, and soon yielding a return and ultimately an indispensable prop, are welcome, and especially so if their value is enhanced religiously by ancestor-worship, which makes it a duty to have a successor,

^<sup>8 Cf. Goldwin Smith: "Woman does not in civilised countries need protection of the individual man, except a policeman or escort. But she does need, or may at any time need, the armed protection of the male sex as a whole," Essays on Questions of the Day, 2d ed., 1897, p. 206.

and also a further object of desire, since the father himself expects to be worshipped and to have his manes attended to after his death. Therefore, during this period, except for special reasons (also mostly of a religious nature) almost every one, especially among the upper classes, is married, and families are fair-sized, while the lower classes (the proletariat) are prolific like animals. Many children are produced, furthermore, because in the dearth of other kinds of amusement (the chase and warfare being the two principal ones), the pleasure of intercourse between the sexes holds a prominent place among the sources of happiness,—so much so, that more children are born than are needed, and the defective and superfluous

are allowed to perish.

o Cf. A. Alison, The Principles of Population, ch. I.

goes on continual increase of productiveness, permitting increase of population; and this proceeds well into the period of peace, at the commencement of which it advances with leaps and bounds.

For improvement in the means of transport, by enabling provisions to be brought from greater distances, permits the enlargement of cities, which is stimulated by the attractive power of the greater and cheaper amusements there to be found, many being supplied to the poor gratuitously, while the land in the neighbourhood, being high-priced also for purposes of recreation, cannot, beyond the range of truck-farming, compete productively with the cheaper land at a distance, and agriculture gives place to pasturage, and small farms to large estates. The cities suck up the labour of the country, and their sewage drains away the fertility of the soil. Taxes, spent in the cities, fall most heavily, in comparison with resources, on the rural districts, and while the cities grow in population and in splendour, the country is impoverished and depopulated, till at last the cities find themselves left high and dry, without support, on a soil saturated with filth; and then famine, pestilence, and the inroads of barbarians destroy them.

But ere this, the pressure of population upon its limits has, on the whole, for various reasons, been diminishing. For, when a high stage of civilisation is reached, with security of person and property provided by the state and its paid agents, the courts and the police, women no longer have the same need of individual male protectors, and they may now provide for themselves by their own labours, many doing so for a time at least, some throughout life. But especially, as we have seen, they may now in their own right own property, which they have either acquired by their own efforts or, more commonly, which has been bequeathed or donated to them by their fathers and husbands; and therefore unmarried they may be as well off as married.¹⁰ Men also may now have their household accommodations and other wants supplied by servants, or may find them outside in inns and taverns, hotels and restaurants, not to

¹⁰ In fact, one admirer of woman's independence has said that "a definition of civilisation might be framed as 'the ever-increasing possibility of the number of unmarried females that might exist in a community,'" O. T. Mason, Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, 210-11.

¹¹ It is of course an error to suppose these a modern phenomenon. From Herodotus, I. 105, it would seem that the Scythians suffered from contact with the depraved Syrians in a manner somewhat analogous to the way the French under Charles VIII. suffered from contact with the depraved Italians. See also the account of the death of Galerius in Aurelius Victor's Epitome, XL. 4.

exercise to one's own prophylactic corpuscles, lowers one's power of resistance. New diseases therefore come in, in spite of hygienic precautions. The consequent debilitation lessens the strength to bear the burden of a family. The result is, there are fewer families than there used to be in a given number of population, and the families themselves are smaller. To this change the old religion can offer little opposition, since it too has fallen into abeyance, and worship is but a spectacular formalism. Now wealth is the ideal, and because the fewer the children the more each will inherit, at best only one or at most only two heirs are desired; who may die and leave none.

(4) Morality also has its course. At first it is instinctive,

12 Cf. T. N. Carver: "The concentration of attention upon subsistence and enjoyment rather than upon nation-building, leads to an exaggerated insistence upon the rights of the individual, whereas the concentration of attention upon nation-building leads to a strong emphasis upon the obligations of the individual. Therefore there are two distinct types of leadership. One type tells the people a great deal about their rights, their wrongs, and their grievances, and very little about their obligations, except their obligations to themselves. The other type tells them very little about their rights, their wrongs, and their grievances, but a great deal about their obligations," etc. The National Point of View in Economics, in Supplement to The American Economic Review, March, 1917, p. 6. The whole address is admirable. Only the speaker, like Adam Smith (above, p. 23 n.), whom he quotes, does not seem to perceive that in the advance of civilisation the second point of view, as stated by him, and which he speaks of as "the new point of view," p. 5, is the first and the old one, and the tendency of things is for it to be replaced by the one which he describes as the first. For the nationalist point of view is most likely to be adopted by a primitive people hard pressed by its neighbours. At all events, it is necessary for it to be adopted by a people that is going to ascend in civilisation and make its way in the world. But having ascended and made its way and reached the top, a people is likely to abandon it for

to a more peculiar matter of social morality, in the marriage relations, the change takes the form of strict wedlock (at least among the upper classes) in the rising period, and of laxity of divorce (for every one) in the declining. At first, divorce was a misfortune for the wife, by which her immorality in compromising the family was punished, while adultery on the man's part was penalised criminally; but afterward, the wife having property of her own, divorce is no longer a punishment, but is used as a means to obtain release and marriage with the lover. When the lawmakers perceive this, that they are encouraging immorality, they alter the law and make divorce obtainable on lighter grounds. It is made easier, also, for the reason that otherwise fewer persons would enter the conjugal state.

There is also a more general change. Because of the need at first of contention, the virtues most dwelt upon, when intelligent observation was turned toward them, were the masculine virtues of fortitude, temperance, wisdom, and justice. But with the advent of the long peace and the coming into prominence of women, taking the place of those stern virtues another set of mild ones come to the fore,—the feminine virtues of patience, purity, faith, and affection. These were first taught among the subjugated and oppressed peoples, who stood in greatest need of them, and they pass from them to the lower classes of the dominant people, and work their way up with them, through a mass of selfishness and viciousness which percolates from above. There is a general softening of morals as well as a smoothing of manners,—indeed a feminisation of them. Before, there was much suffering and endurance; and everybody, being used to pain in his own person, was indifferent to it in others. Now there is more pleasure, and the sharing the joys of others discloses the advantageousness of sympathy; which, however, cannot develop without bringing with it the drawback of sharing their sorrows. Even vicarious pain becomes unendurable. Yet the painful spectacle of pain in others may be eluded by not looking at it.¹³

the particularist point of view — of the individual thinking most of enjoyment both for himself and for others. Then division takes place, consumption outruns production, children are brought forth in less numbers, so as to inherit more, or none at all, so that no inheritance need be left; and decline sets in.

18 Cf. Mill: "One of the effects of civilisation (not to say one of the

ingredients in it) is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea, of pain, is kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in their fulness the benefits of civilisation" ob. cit. 205.

14 Cf. Mill again: "The heroic essentially consists in being ready, for a worthy object, to do and to suffer, but especially to do, what is painful or disagreeable; and whoever does not early learn to be capable of this will never be a great character." ob. cit., 206.

15 We now have such doctrines as those taught by Cournot and Pearson

above noted, p. 8, n. 6

general equality of the sexes; for women are equal to men in the point of view now emphasised — the capacity to enjoy and to consume. Now more or less effort is put forth to bring these ideas into practice. In fact, the distinction between the rich and the poor was the last artificial distinction left in society, and this it is now the desire to abolish, and with it the great natural distinction between the sexes. Wherefore, with the breaking down of competition, there is less striving within each state as well as between states, until at last, with the diminution of production, especially if accompanied by exhaustion of the sources, a new period of hard times sets in, which generates strife again, but finds the more civilised peoples mostly unfit for it, and most likely to give way before the less civilised.

nounced: children are no longer trained how they should go, but are taught to use their reasoning faculties so that they may learn each for himself how he would go,—and consequently many are the aberrations incurred. An age of reason, it should be recognised, is not an age merely of the discovery and acceptance of truth: it is an age also of the invention of and running after innumerable errors. Among the new teachers are economists, who inquire what should be done for the improvement of material welfare; and those who have well stewarded their own talents here exert a profound influence, though mostly they stand discreetly in the background. Later, however, with the coming on of hard times again, these doctrinaires, who have been unable to ward off the accumulating evils, and perhaps have mistakenly or dishonestly assisted their advent, are discredited: science and learning recede; and now it may even happen that by men of deep emotional nature (the prophetic type) a new religion is introduced, which turns its back on the world, gives up the task of civilisation, and exalts the lower classes; and this—or in its default the old religion, revived and readjusted—soon degenerating into superstition, provides the basic ideas and customs for the last period at the bottom of the cycle, which shades insensibly into the beginning of a new one

(5) The fine arts, literature, and science are very slow of growth during the ascending period, and only break into flower near the approach of the culminating period. That art begins religious and ends profane, and that literary composition starts with poetry and proceeds to prose, are trite sayings. Jurisprudence runs a more gradual course through the whole cycle, and is known to progress from procedure by combat, or appeal to the deity, to procedure by evidence, or appeal to one's fellow men. Its course toward the end is a good sample of all. At first it is hard and fast bound in customs generally under religious sanction, with little authority in any one or in any body to alter it. But the expansion of the communities into states makes the old swaddling clothes

^<sup>16 In the lower ranks a similar change takes place. In the ascending period there is generally some sort of apprenticeship, in which the youngster is bound to service in return for instruction. Later, anything like bondage becoming insupportable, the father or the state pays for the youth's training, which is voluntary. The result is decline of craftsmanship.

a tight fit, and then an organ of expression is found, the old customs are abrogated, and now follows, especially toward the end of the ascending and throughout the culminating period, an extensive trial of new opinions in a long-continued stream of legislation. In fact, all advance is made by experimentation and the elimination of the unsatisfactory, men like nature needing to use selection among many variations. But many of the changes are not improvements, since they bring with them unforeseen consequences, and the people at last flounder in a mess which they cannot control. An end to the welter is sought, once for all, in a selection and collection of

laws that are to be final,—in short, in codification.

become scrappy, embodied more in magazines than in books, more in household ornaments than in public monuments. Of what tries to be really good, only the old is highly prized. Music, which may be forgotten and repeated in infinitum, now takes the first rank; and a mixture of all the arts is supplied in the opera. Ecclecticism prevails in everything. Only in architecture, city-planning, and gardening is there an ever increasing rivalry in display, between individuals, between cities, between provinces and nations. Their greatest magnificence and luxuriance comes late, supplanting the earlier fineness and grace. All through this period art is commercialised, and those who have the artistic faculty, instead of consulting their own cultivated sense of beauty, seek to make money by trying to please the multitude of rich and middlingrich purchasers, in whom the sense of beauty is deficient. It is an age of copyright, and of other guaranties of profit. Deterioration is a necessary consequence. When at last not only the old avenues but the new by-ways are run through till all that they contain is exhausted, art dies. The end of everything is habit, hardening into a new régime of custom, which may be the beginning of another cycle. The old codes become the new modes.

Science becomes recognisable in any high degree only a little before the culmination, to which it rapidly contributes. For the first period of custom is one of credulity along fixed lines, and is followed by a period of reason branching forth in all directions. Well known is an analysis of the course of thought into three epochs — the theological, the metaphysical, and the positivist or scientific. A fourth is forgotten — the skeptical. The theological and the metaphysical are but two halves of the ascending period; then comes the scientific, ushering in the culminating period. But before it, the metaphysical epoch was critical of the theological, and began the advance. The scientific period is critical of the metaphysical. Then at last criticism turns upon science itself, and the whole crumbles. When no further discoveries can be made, peo-

17 By Auguste Comte.

^<sup>18 It will be perceived that the theological period corresponds with ecclesiasticism, the metaphysical with aristocracy, the scientific with plutocracy, and skepticism with democracy.

ple tire of truths grown old, as they tired of the old errors. They now sink back into new errors like the old. This takes place in the declining period, and in the débris room is made for the theological (or personal) trend of human thought to

spring up again.

¹⁹ Cf. Ecclesiasticus, III. 21-4.

²⁰ Cf. B. Adams, op. cit., 105, 119, 129, 153, 186, 211, 217.

the old hierarchy or the leading men of the new religion that has won most following, the successful ones among many competitors, gradually assume, or re-assume, the functions of the former priests, and religion again rises as science and civilisation fall; for which reason religion is the strongest link between cycles, rising in the decline of one, and sinking in the rise of another.

At last the lower classes, winning education, arms, and a certain amount of wealth, for their inferior possession of all

which they make up by their larger numbers, come into power, overthrowing the others from their predominance, but, as each class did before, leaving them as parties, and only placing themselves at their side as participants in the government. This introduces the last half of the great division of the course of politics. We have now reached the culminating period of civilisation, with its manifoldness and complexity of occupations and interests. Enjoyment dissipates. Before, when there was little variety of recreation, the people took their amusement by meeting together and talking over their common affairs. Then concert was possible, and conspiracies of almost a whole class could be hatched, and revolutions could be planned and successfully executed. But later every one becomes engaged in seeking after his own pleasure, and finds it at most in small cliques of boon companions; for the meeting of even a whole town in a theater is merely to receive similar impressions, without any common action on their own part. Concert and united action, thereupon, become much less usual. The ascending period of civilisation is always marked by revolutions; the declining period is a long quiescence, disturbed only by occasional futile uprisings or riots that do more harm than good.

This last half of the great division of politics is further distinguished from the first half by the fact that now all classes rule all. The power of government reaches its maximum, and it is prepared to regulate everything. Affairs of state needing special officials, these are now chosen directly or indirectly by the people as their representatives and agents; or if any one of the old rulers is left, he is reduced to being regarded and treated and made to behave as such. These agents are paid by the people, with salaries, which are not so large as the emoluments the former rulers took to themselves; and their offices are now a public trust, not because they are solicitous so to view them, but because the people require it of them; and they do not rule in their own right or by divine or by natural right, but in the right of the ruling and ruled (the self-ruled) people, or by a conventional right given to them by all the classes. This condition has generally been called democracy, but mistakenly, since it is not the rule of the demos or lowest class, but the rule of all the classes, and

would be better called pantocracy. In such democracy itself (for the term is too habitual to be discarded) the most powerful of the old classes is that of the rich, upon which the others lean; and this class of the rich, or the three first classes in one under this name, though they prefer to look upon themselves as aristocrats, may even regain influence and power so great as to overbalance the rest, forming a state which is describable by the somewhat incongruous term of plutocratic democracy. Over against this condition, the demos proper may wish to get the upper hand entirely and entirely suppress the other classes. This movement is to-day known as socialism, though this term is more truly appropriate to our present condition, and what is so distinguished is democracy proper (in the literal sense); and sometimes for greater clarity, it is dubbed social democracy; which, in the full extent of its aspiration, has never existed, and, as we shall see further on, probably never will exist, at least not in our cycle of civilisation.

The democracy such as has existed and as now exists, or pantocracy, which rules by agents and makes laws by representatives of the whole people, always sets out with a multiplicity of representatives to whom the appointment or the oversight of innumerable other agents is entrusted, in the form known as republicanism. But as responsibility divided between many is diluted and tends to be little observed, the degeneration of republicanism works for the concentration of power in one representative, to whom is entrusted the direction of all the others. Under this one all-powerful individual all the classes are reduced to an equal position of inferiority, and other individuals can rise to power only as they win his favour or that of his favourites. This last stage can be reached only when the people at large are so unwarlike, and so distracted and divided by their several occupations and amusements, that a comparatively small army in the one man's pay can keep them all in subjection. And when once reached, it can in spite of its enormous and growing evils never be subverted from within the nation by the people, for the additional very good reason that the people have nothing to substitute for it. Previous degenerate rulers, as we have seen, because they were of a class, could be overthrown

and replaced by the better rule of a newly uprisen class, in a line of progress. But in a succession of single rulers representing a degenerate people, although any and every one of them on becoming degenerate may be pulled down by the people, or by the court, or by the army, he can be replaced only by another single ruler of the same sort, better perhaps at first, but with the same proneness to quick deterioration. Or the only rivaling power is that of the rising priesthood, who also tend to come under the dominion of one of their own number and either share in or get possession of the political power, and in either case augment rather than mitigate the evils that come from the rule of some men over others who are not strong enough to hold them to a strict accounting. Such is the despotism — cæsarism or imperialism, ultimately more or less mixed with hierarchism,— in which all republicanism and all civilisation has hitherto ended.

CHAPTER III.

COMPARISON OF CYCLES

THE typical cycles are necessarily written in an absolute form, from which actual cycles depart in greater or less degree. The subsequent cycles always retain something from the last period of the preceding, and therefore start from a higher level, which continues to be maintained all through. For example, in the typical scheme it could be said that the first period is one of status, which changes in the later periods to one of contract. In actuality there is nothing so absolute as this. In the classic civilisations the stage of contract reached was not so advanced as in ours, while on the other hand its stage of status was more complete than the corres-

ponding stage at the beginning of our cycle.

There is a difference also in the comparative duration of the successive periods. The earliest civilisations we know of, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, came to the last condition of despotism so quickly, and it continued so long, that it seems to occupy the whole of their history, though this may be due to the obscurity in which their origin is shrouded. In the later and better known civilisations of Greece and Rome the last period has been much shorter, except in the almost negligible Byzantine empire; and the preceding periods of the rule of priests and warriors under kings and in aristocracies, and of the rich in a republican form (the form of a commonwealth), were much longer. In those early and oriental civilisations the transitions from the primitive kings to the final despots seems to have been immediate, or through so short an intervening period of republicanism that this has dropped out of the record. More probably, the kings, who were primarily the chiefs among the aristocracy, by pandering to the people became the people's representatives and, subduing the aristocrats, came to be looked up to by all as masters. In the Greco-Roman civilisation not only the stages of kingship and

44

of imperialism were distinct both in time and character, but the intervening period of plutocracy and democracy was fairly long and prominent. In our own cycle of western civilisation the first period of kingship was still longer, and the period of republicanism already entered upon gives promise of being so well established that few persons dream of the danger of a demagogic and imperialistic despotism. And yet Europe has already had two examples of it, in Cromwell and Napoleon, like Sylla in Rome preceding Cæsar (or were they like the Greek tyrants in the midway position as after-gleams of the overthrown kings and fore-tastes of the succeeding autocrats?); and the contemporaneous civilisation in the east, until our own day, has seemed sunk in that kind of lethargy.

greater than its preceding rise. To this question history can give no answer. All we know historically is that hitherto there have been revolutions of civilisation and that the cycles in which it moves have themselves moved upward. Only inference from other known facts can influence belief with re-

gard to this movement in the future.

As for the progression of cycles, in both these aspects there can be no doubt about the superiority of our European and American civilisation over the Greek and the Roman; and there is every appearance that the Greek and the Roman were superior to the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian; and that these were superior to what preceded them, there can again be

^<sup>1 His friend Hume was much more moderate in his calculations. But Hume held that cities could never exceed the size then reached by London and Paris of about seven hundred thousand inhabitants! See his essay on The Populousness of Ancient Nations (Hume's Works, Boston, 1854, iii. 478).

book-publishing by printing, in navigation, and in military appliances. Already then almost any one of the principal countries in Europe could have vanquished the whole of the Roman forces at sea and on land, while to-day so tiny a country as Denmark could march an army to Rome, if still defended as under Cæsar, as easily as Alexander invaded Persia or Cortez Mexico.

maltreated than in the Greek and Roman civilisation, is apparent from the fact that whole conquered peoples were not uncommonly transplanted to the centre of the kingdom, where they became the slaves of the monarch and were employed in immense gangs to build enormous palaces and temples, dragging huge stones under the whip like draught animals. But by the Greeks and Romans the condemned captives were parcelled out among the soldiers and sold by them to private parties, who used them for domestic or industrial purposes. Incidentally it may be remarked that this difference in the management of slaves is the reason why Greek and Roman architecture was not constructed on so massive a scale as the earlier, and therefore called for more attention to line and detail. Modern architecture runs still more to private than to public building, and to the use of flimsy material, paying less regard to permanence. Thus there is an advance toward individualism perceptible also through the course of the cycles: the earliest was in all its periods further removed from it than the Greco-Roman, and the Greco-Roman in none of its periods approached so near to it as we are doing.

Perhaps we may discern more of the elements of the early periods of each in the earlier cycles as wholes, and a movement of the general character of succeeding cycles in the same direction as the movement in each cycle. In the earliest cycle we know of, the power of the priests was all-pervasive; in the next, that of the warriors; in ours, thus far, that of the rich. They all went through all the four periods, but in Egypt civilisation never got fully out of the hands of the priests; and the Babylonian went only a little further. The Greek and Roman civilisation went on and fell fully into the hands of the warriors, but even when it reached the plutocratic stage, the warriors retained considerable power. Our modern civilisation has got almost fully into the hands of the rich, and it is beginning to appear unlikely whether it will get much beyond. Mill said that in the advance of civilisation, on account of ever increasing diffusion of property and intelligence, the power of individuals became less and that of masses greater.² He did not distinguish between the course within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the series of cycles within individual cycles and in the cycles within individual cycles and the cycles within individual cycles and the cycles within individual cycles and the cycles within individual cycles and the cycles are cycles within individual cycles and cycles are cycles within the cycles are cycles and cycles are cycles and cycles a

² Op. cit., 189, 194, 203.

this advance takes place up till the culmination. Also it has hitherto taken place in the series of cycles, as such advance went further in the classic civilisation than in what preceded, and it has gone further still in ours; for, for true democracy, the masses must be worthy and capable of exercising power wisely and justly; and whether they can reach that point in our cycle, is questionable.

CHAPTER IV.

OUR POSITION

Two questions suggest themselves. The one is as to where we of the present day and generation — we of Europe and America, we white men, the most advanced of us — stand in our cycle of civilisation. The other is as to where this our cycle stands in the progression of cycles. The latter question has already been answered in regard to the past; and in regard to the future we have seen it to be unanswerable with any certainty. Though it may come up and interest us again, it is a question of little importance. We are much more concerned with the former. This may be answered with tolerable assurance.

The answer, then, is this: We in our present stage of development are entering, or have already entered, the beginning of the culminating plane or swell of our cycle, having nearly reached the highest point of material civilisation, of which our society, on the earth it inhabits, is capable. To compare modern times with the ancient: we are about where Athens was in the fifth century, B.C., or where the Greek world at large was in the fourth, and where Rome was in the two centuries around and about the point whence we reckon the lapse of years. Some use will be made of this comparison further on in these pages.¹

The analogy of stages in our cycle with various ones in the past has often attracted attention. Some instances may be cited. Mitford found resemblance between the proceedings of the Thirty in Athens and of the Committee of Public Welfare in Paris, History of Greece, v. 62. Romieu, in his Ere des Cæsars, 1850, held that the European world was, when he wrote, in the same situation as the Roman was when it found relief and rest under Augustus; and he expected that Europe would find the same under a new Cæsar—Napoleon III., (see Flint, op. cit., 565). E. C. Stedman saw a likeness of the Victorian to the Alexandrine age, Victorian Poets, 205-6, as did also Draper, op. cit., ii. 367. Ritchie: "The age of the Sophists is the ancient equivalent of the age of the Enclyclopaedists," op. cit., 21. Pearson (hardly correctly): "It [the age of the Minnesingers] is the Periclean period of German development," Ethic of Freethought, 399.

^<sup>2 Thus Paul Jacoby already sees many signs that the civilised peoples of Europe have entered this period of épuisement and decadence, Études sur la Sélection chez l'Homme. Paris, 1904, p. 617.

In spite of a few evidences of our being, in some respects

well advanced in this culminating period, it is probable that on the whole we are only near its commencement; for there is prospect of considerable further material advance. The delightfulness of this prospect is often exaggerated, as we shall presently see; yet the advance is likely to proceed with little check and hindrance for some time, differently in different countries. And differently in different countries will be effected the setting in of the stoppage and of the decline, in some earlier, in others later, in some first through physical exhaustion of the land, in others first through moral exhaustion of the people. One thing we may be certain of: the advance of civilisation cannot go on without interruption forever. We also have reason to believe that the interruption is not many centuries ahead of us.

The superiority of our civilisation in a material way over all that has preceded, rests on our employment of the natural powers of heat and electricity; and our employment of these rests on our production of coal and iron and copper. Coal, indeed, is the ultimate basis of our material civilisation, wherefore ours has not improperly been denominated the Coal Age; because the mining, smelting, forging, and transportation of the metals requires heat in a quantity that coal alone can supply, and electricity not only needs copper for its generation and transmission, but is itself only a form of heat, so that our production of it equally (for nobody has recommended the use of lightning) depends on coal. It is true that waterfalls supply power that is convertible into heat and electricity or that may be directly employed, in never or only intermittently failing constancy. But the amount of power thence derivable is not sufficient to keep up civilisation at its present height. The winds are a too intermittent source of power. Then it has been suggested that the power wasted in the tides might be harnessed and applied in almost unlimited quantity. But this seems to be only one of the dreams of science.³ Wood as a fuel has, of course, long ceased to be sufficient.⁴ Another

8 A tidal mill existed so long ago as to be mentioned in Domesday Book,

according to Jevons, The Coal Question, 136.

^<sup>4 Jevons reckoned fifty years ago, when the production of coal in Great Britain was not a quarter of what it is to-day, forests covering two and a half times the area of the United Kingdom would be needed to furnish even the theoretical equivalent of the coal then annually produced, op. cit., 140.

product from the soil, reproducible every year, is alcohol derived most cheaply from Indian corn. But to supply this in quantity sufficient to yield the heat and power now supplied by coal, would take up so much land as to crowd out the proper provision of food. Lastly, the sun's heat itself, which may last for millions of years to come, it is hoped may be converted into power and concentrated again as heat where and when needed. This may be done to some extent in the tropics, but reliance on it is again only a pretty dream. Coal itself and its offspring, petroleum and natural gas, are the concentrated extract of the sun's heat supplied during a million years a million years ago. Its supply is a definite and in our time non-renewable quantity. Peat is a comparatively insignificant addition to it. Petroleum and gasolene, which are to-day superimposing a surface wave upon the tidal wave of quickened life, cannot hold out so long as coal itself. When the given quantity of coal is extracted from the earth and consumed, civilisation will not necessarily be placed back where it was before coal began to be used, as the world will continue to possess some use of the other forms of power just reviewed; but it will not be so great and prosperous as it now is and is likely to be in what remains of our era.

What, then, is the supply of coal under the surface of the earth within our reach? and how long will it last? These questions have been before the world for fifty years, and have received various answers. At least so long ago were they started in England as to England's own coal. Jevons then wrote his interesting work on The Coal Question (1865), in which he went over the whole subject. He accepted Hull's estimate that the British available supply (meaning the supply that could be found within four thousand feet below the surface) was eighty-three and a half billion tons. Then there were being mined every year in Great Britain about that number of millions of tons; wherefore, if this production were never exceeded, the British mines might last a thousand years. But the production had been going on at an increasing rate, averaging about three and a quarter per cent. annually, with prospect of continuing to increase and probably at nearly the same rate for some time, and afterward at a slower and slower rate. He inferred, in fact, that the British mines could not

6 See an article on The National Coal-Supply in the Quarterly Review,

⁵ Op. cit., 215.

July, 1905, p. 139.

In an article How long will our Coal last? in the Pall Mall Magazine, 1901, p. 396. Previously, in 1891, T. Forster Brown held that the increase would go on for a quarter of a century, maintain itself at a maximum for another quarter of a century, and then begin to decline, The Coal Question, in The Economic Journal, vol. i. no. 4, p. 666. And still earlier the authors of Coal: its History and Uses, edited by Prof. Thorpe, London, 1878, calculated that in sixty years from that date the output of coal in Great Britain would be eight times the then amount, and a certain rise of price of the most serious character would take place within that time, p. 319.

optimism prevails. Even the total exhaustion of the British mines has been contemplated with serenity. "In three hundred years we may bring our coal from China," said Mr. R. T. Moore in the Presidential Address before the Institute of Mining Engineers in 1909, notwithstanding that Jevons had shown that British trade needs the export of coal as the only heavy freight the British isles produce, to counterbalance the heavy freights of their raw imports; and if the heavy freight of coal were added to the import side, nearly half of the British shipping would sail in ballast. Factories are much more likely to go to the coal than coal come to the factories.

⁸ Transactions, vol. xxxvii, p. 455.
9 The Coal Resources of the World, Toronto, 1913, vol. i, p. xviii

very different results, the former the minimum, the latter the maximum. With the above data, if the production and consumption continued to double, as they have been doing, every twenty years, the supply would not last one hundred and fifty years. But if the increase were of a hundred million tons every year (a rate that will soon be reached), or a billion every decade, the supply would last three hundred and sixty-five years; or if the increase were half that amount, the supply

would hold out for five hundred and ten years.

cess will be slow but steady, yet exposing each country to the possibility of a sudden catastrophe. Our material civilisation will decline as coal gives out — in England first, then in Germany, then in America; and it will last longest in China, in the possession of what people or race we know not. For long before coal gives out, its allied products, petroleum and natural gas, will have been exhausted; and without coal it will little matter whether the mines of iron and copper and other metals hold out or not, as it will not be possible to work them on anything like the large scale on which they are now worked and which our civilisation demands. Only of aluminum the production may perhaps be continued indefinitely, with the aid of water-power, but in no great quantity, and not supplying the place of iron. One other metal, in a different category, the production of which does not require much fuel, gold, will also in advance of coal be no longer found within our reach in any part of the earth. Its production will begin permanently to fall off probably well within fifty years from now; and our financiers may perhaps be able to block the introduction of any better kind of money, so as to enjoy the appreciation of the commodity in which they deal.

Here then, beside the moral reasons which will occupy us again, is a physical reason for expecting our material civilisation before long to reach its highest mark, when its material resources reach theirs. To us of the present generation who shall not experience it, it is not an immediate personal concern how soon the climax of our civilisation be attained and the consequent decline set in. It suffices to know that it must take place before many more generations have come and gone. Like preceding civilisations our civilisation is doomed to decay and to disintegrate; and the beginning of this doom is not

far away.

The same considerations show also that, materially viewed, our cycle of civilisation is to be the greatest this world shall ever witness; for our civilisation has extended its range over the whole earth and is busily engaged in extracting and using up all the stores of minerals which nature has cached near enough to the surface to be within the reach of man. For the same reason that our existing civilisation must decline, the next civilisation will not be able again to attain such material

greatness. The previous cycles ended when the parts of the earth which they covered were exhausted. But our civilisation, to repeat, is covering and currying the whole earth, and little is likely to escape it. On the other hand, however, it would be presumptuous for us to declare our culture to be the best that nature can produce, and nothing interferes with the view, intrinsically probable, that the next cycle of civilisation may rise to, and perhaps culminate in, a moral condition as far superior to ours as ours is to the ancient. The very fact that it will not be able to approach ours in material prosperity may aid it to compass such moral superiority. Thus from both these points of view we have a not improbable answer to the

second question asked at the opening of this chapter.

¹⁰ Worlds in the Making, 51-63.

they will be more careful about their own surroundings. All effort, however, is at present directed toward cheapening transportation and communication. We have already conquered the air sufficiently for a pastime and for use in war. Many hope that flying may come into general use. Yet if all could fly like birds, it would go hard with civilisation; for nobody would stay at home to work, but all would flit about picking up what they could find in the way of fruit. Who indeed would delve into the earth, or swelter in a factory, if they could leap into the air and betake themselves elsewhere? Civilisation would never have begun, had nature provided us with wings; and if men provide themselves with their equivalent, civilisation may end. The salvation of civilisation rests on the fact that aviation can never become general; for if it were only as safe and easy as automobiling, capital would be still more dissipated in it; and if there be none of it, the world will not suffer. People will then talk of our holocausts of airmen as the Greeks fabled of Dædalus and Icarus. After all, happiness does not depend on such things; for, as Horace tells us people had found out in his day, black care mounts the horse behind us — or gets into the car with us; and a materially lower civilisation in the future may be happier than ours, especially if it be more just and virtuous.

Yet a declining civilisation, used to things which it must give up, can never be so happy as a rising civilisation. Therefore the prospect of a downward turn of civilisation after passing a climax, has never pleased, and to it many have resolutely shut their eyes. Now-a-days much more popular is the opposite view, that our existing civilisation is an exception to the rule which has held in the past, and that it will advance for ever, or at least no tottering is in the present outlook. Our scientific men are especially elated, flattering themselves that they, by guiding the plutocrats in the application of capital, are to be the creators of an entirely new era. "We are in reality but on the threshold of civilisation," wrote Lubbock fifty years ago. 11 There is a theory even, which has been dubbed "the law of acceleration," that progress is ever gaining more and more speed; which is thought to be proved by the consideration that human beings have lived on the earth for some hundreds of thousands

¹¹ Pre-historic Times, 600.

¹² Cf. N. Angell, The Great Illusion, 197, 220. "The theory of geometrical progression" it is called by Morris Hillquit, Socialism in Theory and Practice, 109; cf. Engels in Marx's Capital, iii. 308 (Kerr's ed. of Moore's, Aveling's, and Untermann's translation, Chicago, 1906-9).

¹³ E.g., Lassalle believed in the dawning of a new era in 1848, to be followed by sunrise in a few decades, Arbeiterprogramm, 1862, (Gesamtwerke, Leipzig, vol. i. pp. 187, 200).

^<sup>12 Woman and Labour. So also the socialist and feminist August Forel, The Sexual Question, Marshall's translation, New York ed., p. 501.

¹⁶ S. N. Patten, Theory of Social Forces, 1896, pp. 48, 75ff. (Giddings prefers to call them "an effort economy" and "a reward economy," Principles of Sociology, 406n.) More recently, in 1912, Patten seems to shove

school of thought, the past has been an age of warfare and destruction—a reign of militarism; and the future is to be an age of peace and construction—of industrialism. This change is the advance which Herbert Spencer, following Comte, who followed Saint-Simon, believed in; and his view seems to be generally accepted. The future is also, in Maine's distinction, to be an age of contract, the past having been one of status. We are already beyond the threshold and in the vestibule of this new era, and the advance further into it is inevitable.¹⁷

The theory is glittering, but unfortunately it is false. The world has several times before passed from a condition of status to a condition of contract, from a period of warfare to a period of peace, from a state of militarism to a state of industrialism, and in every instance the latter era ushered in the decline and fall of civilisation. The error seems to owe its rise to the habit of treating antiquity as one whole and of contrasting it as such with our present times. In antiquity there was much fighting: therefore the whole of antiquity was an age of warfare. To-day (till recently), there has been much peace, in the continuance of which few doubted till the present rude disturbance: therefore the present and the future have been considered an age of peace. To-day, again, industrialism is at hand. In the past, militarism was rampant. How great the difference! Out of the past also looms up the great Roman empire, and that was one of militarism, and in consequence deserved to fall; whereas our age, devoted to the arts of peace, deserves to endure, and will endure. No error could be more egregious. The Roman empire was not a military empire. The Romans were a race of conquerors, and the empire was their conquest. Still, during the period of its

also pleasure into the past, and to place us at the entrance into a third stage of "creative economy," The Reconstruction of Economic Theory, 92. It would seem, in fact, as if it would have to create coal and iron and a few other things, if it is to last to the end of the world, unless this comes soon.

¹⁷ Cf. Mrs. Gilman: "the inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilisation," op. cit., 73. This is but the re-appearance of an idea once laughed down, but perhaps irrepressible. "As improvements have long continued to be incessant," wrote Godwin more than a hundred years ago, "so there is no chance but they will go on. The most penetrating philosophy cannot prescribe limits to them, nor the most ardent imagination adequately fill up the prospect," Political Justice, B. IV. ch. xi.

¹⁸ Pliny, Nat. Hist. III. xxiv. (or xx.).

¹⁹ What follows was written before the outbreak of the present war in

Europe, and it is left unchanged

^<sup>20 W. S. Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome, 316. This writer further says: "It is usual to speak of the Roman imperial army as very large. As a matter of fact it was extremely small for its task of beating back the Picts in Britain, the Germans on the Rhine and Danube, the Parthians and Persians on the Euphrates, the negro tribes in Nubia and the Moors in Africa, as well as for holding in quietness the prov-

then, to say that the Roman empire was military and that Europe to-day is industrial. The truth is that modern civilisation has, fortunately, not yet entirely entered the industrial stage, which the Roman entered under Augustus. We in the United States have perhaps already entered it. The English in their isolation have approached next to it. But Europe as a whole is not yet out of the state of militarism; for no one nation there has yet subjugated the rest. And when Europe and America do get fully immersed in the state of industrialism, they will merely be running into the last stage which was traversed by Rome, by Greece, by Persia, by Babylon, by As-

syria, by Egypt.

inces," 315n. In the interior, "peace had become the normal, the expected thing. Military drill was seldom taught now in the gymnasium," 317.

Our civilisation differs from the ancient principally in degree: everything now is better, finer, greater, stronger, more extensive, swifter in detail, slower in the mass: as a whole our civilisation is on a higher plane and a larger scale. Disparagement of it in comparison with the ancient is obtainable only by the same error of contrasting our present complex state near the turning point toward decline with the primitive period of simplicity and ascent.²² Reversely, overpraise of it

^<sup>21 Bibliotheca Historica, III. 12. Varro likewise advised that plantations should be worked by slaves of different nationalities, De Re Rustica, I. 17, 5.
²² As done, for example, by Forel: "While in former civilisations the rich man regarded a multiplicity of wives and children as a condition or cause of his wealth and also as its results, in our modern civilisation the number of children diminishes with the increase of prosperity. Children

have ceased to be as formerly a source of wealth; on the contrary, they occasion much expense for their education," The Sexual Question, 333, cf. 433. This ignores the whole latter halves of ancient civilisations.

But our duty is plain: we must exert ourselves to retard the decay to which the very period we have entered of peace, of prosperity, and of enjoyment (now momentarily interrupted), is the inevitable precursor. Decay may be fated, but its date is not fixed. That depends on us: we may hasten it, or put it off. We greatly deceive ourselves if we think that every change we make is progress. It may be regression. Or rather, instead of progress upward, it may be progress downward — down the slope after leaving the level at the top. We need, therefore, to study the signs of regression or decay as they have exhibited themselves to us in the past. Our schools and colleges teach the history of Greece and Rome chiefly in their rise. Academically, their rise is much their most interesting period. But much more important in its moral lessons for us is the study of their fall. By its aid, perhaps, we may avoid some of their mistakes.

CHAPTER V.

THE CAUSES OF DECAY

The causes of decay are physical or material, and moral or social and economic. The physical causes set bounds to the culminating period; the moral originate within that period and help to bring on its end. The physical causes consist in the exhaustion of the sources whence material wealth is obtained; the moral, in the exhaustion of the energies of men, whereupon they may cease to extract wealth from its sources even before these be exhausted, or may fail to foresee and prevent or retard that exhaustion, or may neglect to supplement it by dis-

covery or conquest of new sources.

Exhaustion of the sources of wealth is twofold, according to the nature of the sources; for some are stores, such as quarries and mines, of minerals which when once extracted cannot be put back, and others are stores of elements contributing to the growth of vegetable substances, which may be perpetually returned to the soil whence they came in the refuse of their consumption, in which case there is restoration of the fertility of the soil; or which may not be so returned, in which case the fertility of the soil itself may be gradually depleted. This alternative is most prominent in the case of quickly reproduced or annually fruit-bearing plants. Intermediate between these and mineral stores are the stores of slowly reproduced wood in forests, which when once cut down cannot be replaced for the generation who consumed their wood, and which yet are different from mines, since they can be renewed after forty or fifty years by the slow upgrowth of other trees on the same soil. Deforestation, however, is often made without permission of such regrowth, and this exhaustion of the stores of minerals.

The final exhaustion of unreplenishable stores cannot be

prevented. At best it can be protracted by economy in the use of the products and avoidance of waste. In particular countries it may be compensated by obtaining new sources elsewhere by exploration and conquest. But in the world at large there can be no such compensation. Here sometimes the exhaustion of one article may be compensated by discovery of some other article that may serve the same purpose; but to this also an end must come. Some articles, such as stone serviceable for building, are said to be inexhaustible, because they may outlast others that render them serviceable. We cannot quarry stone without metal tools, so that exhaustion of metals is of more concern to us than the exhaustion of stone serviceable for building. The supply of clay for brickmaking may also be practically inexhaustible in certain regions; but if the bricks can no longer be economically transported, their supply will be exhausted in most places. Yet some minerals, such as salt, are supplied in quantities absolutely inexhaustible by man.

Exhaustion of the soil is in all cases preventable, and therefore whenever it takes place, it is due to improper management. One of the first and most frequent instances is the deforestation of the hill-sides whence flows the rain-water that fills the streams. This results in washing away the top-soil from the slopes and in flooding and devastating the lowlands and carrying away their top-soil also, or ruining them by deposits of sand or gravel. For only the top-soil of the earth is good for vegetation. In this during ages have been collected and serviceably combined the half-score of elements necessary for the tissues of plants. Of these, six are inexhaustible, but four are not. The exhaustible four are nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and sulphur. Of these again two may be easily resupplied from elsewhere by men, and two not. Thus nitrogen may be fixed in the soil by the action, as we know, of bacteria in the roots of leguminous plants; wherefore rotation of crops is necessary, as was early found out by agriculturists, though they did not know the reason. Sulphur also, beside being replenished in rain, is easily supplied from gypsum. But potassium and especially phosphorus require to be returned to the earth in fertilisers, and the only fertiliser that is inexhaustible is manure, which comes from the soil itself. This return to the soil of its own

elements is sometimes neglected through gross carelessness, but the omission takes place regularly in two cases: when a country exports a part of its agricultural produce to other countries, in which case, however, the other countries may gain for their soil what the one loses; and when a part of the agricultural produce of the country is consumed in cities and instead of being returned to the country as manure is drained away into the sea as sewage, and wholly lost, except for a little return coming from fish consumed in the country.¹

^<sup>1 See Herbert Quick's On Board the Good Ship Earth, Indianapolis, 1913, chapters 4, 5, 26, 27.

of their resources. This generally took place first at the centre and spread outward, compelling the making of conquests further and further away, until the power of expansion was weakened to equality with the outside powers of resistance. The Roman empire is a good example of this. Italy became exhausted first, and the exhaustion went out toward the rim where alone, all around the empire, remained activity in acquisition and production, until at last the hollow shell crumbled, and the old empire continued only in its northeastern portion, while new civilisations arose in the south-east and in the north-west.^2a

Long periods of great material prosperity have thus always led, and it would seem must always lead, to exhaustion; for even though the soil be well husbanded by a careful agricultural and municipal economy, there must always come a time when the mines which supply the indispensable means of a high material civilisation will give out. Of course it is possible for the exhaustion of the mines of a country to set in at any time. But if this happens early in its ascending period,

28 Recently V. G. Simkovitch has revived an idea of Liebig's, that the fundamental cause of the fall of the Roman empire was the exhaustion of the soil (this itself, for instance, being the cause of the concentration of landownership in latifundia, because more and more land was needed to support the farmer), Rome's Fall Reconsidered, Political Science Quarterly, June, 1916. And E. Huntington supplements this by a still more recessive theory, that the exhaustion of the soil was caused by an (adventitious) "progressive dessication" due to climatic changes (record of which he discovered in the rings of the redwood trees in California), the process happening to begin about 250 B.C. and after some variations culminating in the middle of the seventh century A.D.: Climatic Changes and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Feb., 1917 (and see his Civilisation and Climate, New Haven, 1915, esp. p. 227). But the depopulation went further than was required by the exhaustion. This is plain, for instance, from Dio Chrysostom's account of the depopulation of Euboea in the second century A.D., political and military disturbances largely contributing (in his 7th Oration, see especially §§ 11-13, 34-7). Cf. also, for conditions in Syria, Theodoretus, Epist. 48. The sizes of the latifundia, moreover, outran the amount needed to support the owners, who were rich men. The Romans might have met the oncoming exhaustion by improvements in agriculture or retrenchment in expenditure: instead, they preferred to conquer more land from their neighbours, and by greater levyings to exhaust it also, until the circle became too large for them to support. Then, when the outsiders broke through, they found the land more or less restored to fertility after lying fallow so long. By the eighth century a considerable part of Italy was reforested, according to Muratori, cited by Robertson, History of Charles V., i. Note 5.

The moral causes of decay are more important, because they help on or retard the physical. Thus the mines within the Roman empire were mostly worked to the bitter end, but on the frontiers many had to be abandoned before they were exhausted, through the Roman inability to defend them. Wherefore some, such as the copper mines of Spain, have been reopened and are still worked to-day; and in other cases, with our superior methods there is a little gleaning even of their refuse, as in the silver mines of Attica. On the other hand, the exhaustion of the agricultural and industrial resources of Italy was almost entirely due to moral causes. As

already indicated, these causes originate in the culminating

period which precedes the decline

reintroducing the old evils of superstition, especially if it have

a young and vigorous people to serve as its instrument.

In this survey of the tendencies of high civilisation we see the consequences especially of two great evils — the lessening of effort to reproduce wealth, and the lessening of effort to reproduce men. For the task of civilisation is twofold, consisting of the duty to improve the society in which one's lot is cast, and of the duty to propagate one's race throughout all time. The former requires strife and striving, competition and strenuous exertion; the latter, desire, or at least willingness, to support others. Abandonment of the one leads to diminution of work, and ultimately to poverty; of the other, to deterioration of the race, and to weakness; of both, to the dissolution of society. Both, again, are due to general discouragement, which itself is due on the one hand to surfeit and on the other to discontent, and altogether to loss of incentive. Having a common cause, they appear together in the culmin-

ating period of civilisation.

As for the first evil: On the material side the discouragement leads to slackening of competition. The advance of civilisation in the ascending period we have seen to have proceeded through struggle and to have attained its end by combination. That was military and political struggle and combination, and the time always arrived when less was to be gained than lost by continuing the contention, whereupon an era of peace ensued. Now the same process runs on through agricultural and industrial struggle to agricultural and industrial combination. Large fortunes are accumulated by single individuals, and invested in land or in financial enterprises; and in addition large combinations are formed, which seek and often obtain the monopoly of some branch of industry. These procure excessive gain by paying low prices for what they buy, which reduces production, and by charging high prices for what they sell, which reduces consumption. Among their expenditures is the wage of labour, and this wage they try to lower, while the labour obtained for it they try to augment. In reply, the labourers also combine for resistance, and by forming a monopoly of the labour supply they try to raise wages and to diminish labour. On each side greater gain is perceived to be obtained by working to-

gether in agreement and harmony; and here the state is compelled to step in and regulate the relations of capital and labour, and every regulation more or less impedes activity. Meanwhile, between the upper millstone of the few great capitalists, who can employ unfair competition in the exchangemarket, and the nether millstone of the labourers, who can be controlled only by the great employers, the middle classes suffer danger of being crushed out, and of leaving the extremes of wealth and of poverty in confrontation with each other, between whom the combat will be mortal. Meanwhile, as an expression of these tendencies, socialistic ideas have appeared, advocated by the labouring classes and their abettors, who would go further in the leveling process of democracy and break down the last remaining distinction, that between rich and poor; for that between the sexes they will ignore as a matter of course. The distinction between rich and poor they would break down avowedly to raise all to wealth, but with the more likely result of reducing all to poverty. The coming of the lower classes into power permits the more or less injudicious execution of socialistic ideas, introducing mediocrity and eventuating in distress.

As to the second evil: The burden of high civilisation, as we have seen, imposes long preparation in youth, and thus compels postponement of marriage to a later age. At the same time the comforts and pleasures of high civilisation give opportunity for amusement in youth, and thereby lessen the urgency of the pleasure of marriage: young people of both sexes wish rather to taste first the enjoyments of promiscuous flirtation at least, if not of some other kind of promiscuity. When they do marry, less need is felt of children, since children are no longer a help: on the contrary, they are a burden, or an inconvenience, consuming the father's resources and the mother's time. On the wife's part, moreover, the pains of parturition being increased through the enervation consequent upon indulgence, there is added unwillingness to suffer them more than once or twice. There is competition, also, of other amusements, and means are discovered and knowledge of them disseminated for enjoying the marital intercourse without result or for obviating it. Hence the tendency is to both fewer and smaller families. This leads to the diminution and ex-

tinction of the lines of the persons so behaving. It begins always in the upper classes, and thus produces upper-class suicide; which means the falling away of the leaders and the unloading of the burden of civilisation upon the lower classes, whose ancestors did not produce it and who are less fit to carry it on. It spreads to the middle classes, which we have just seen are subject to other, to economic, causes of extinction. At last, through the non-observance of the distinction between the sexes and the employment of women in industry like men, it reaches the lower classes, and then there is racesuicide, or a tendency to it, till it is arrested by the end of the civilisation which caused it.

^<sup>4 Where natural selection was most active, the actual families were not necessarily large. Thus Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, had twelve children, but only three grew up.

⁵ Soranus, De Gynaeciis, I. xxviii. 81. Plutarch, in his Life of Lycurgus, says the Spartans used wine for this purpose. Soranus criticised this treatment as injuring those who survived. But he lived in the late degenerate

days of Greece.

⁶ And we of these later days, so act. Recently, during the winter of 1915-16, in New York, there was considerable criticism, and some talk of prosecution, of a couple of parents who let their monstrous offspring die, instead of having them saved by surgical operations for lives of invalidism and semi-idiocy. Doctors make their living by keeping people alive, and so are inclined to discourse about the sacredness of human life. But many of the laity and also a few doctors came to the defence of those concerned in these cases, and they were left in peace. This may perhaps be the beginning of a change in our views, or at least a recoil from extravagant absurdity.

⁷ Deleterious selection may appear variously, often mixed in with beneficial selection. A plague may weed out the weak and delicate, but it may have other effects. Thucydides remarked that in the plague at Athens the most virtuous perished through exposing themselves to infection in at-

tending the sick, 11. 51 (5).

and hardiest came back. But in the late warfare only the strongest and bravest are admitted into the armies, and these

are destroyed.8

Civilisation as a process may be distinguished into two kinds—a "traditional and acquired," which is peculiar to man, and a "racial or inherent," an improvement in breed.9 The former is all that body of ideas, customs, institutions, standards of desire, etc., handed on from generation to generation, and ever developing, ever growing, till at last, as we have seen, in its complexity the burden becomes almost too heavy to be carried further. The other ought to accompany it, as its basis, since a greater burden needs greater strength to support it. And no doubt there is such adaptation in an ascending race. But in the general run this advance in any breed of animals is naturally slow. It has been questioned, for instance, whether the most advanced races of men to-day are in any appreciable measure superior to the Greeks of the days of Pericles. But the Greeks of those days were superior to our Celtic and Germanic ancestors, and if we to-day equal the ancient Greeks, it shows ascent in our line. Artificial selection, as in the breeding of domestic animals and plants, may cause greater celerity of advance, but always with a tendency to quick reversion, unless diligent care be taken to keep up the excellences obtained, by constant weeding out of the revertive specimens. In the ascending periods of civilisation there is

10 A. R. Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress, 13, 21, 32.

11 Ignorance of this is shown, for instance, by Henry George in his bold and bald assertion that "human progress is not the improvement of human nature: the advances in which civilisation consists are not secured in the constitution of man, but in the constitution of society," Works, i. 560. cf. ii. 2.

^*The harmful influence of standing armies upon "the breed" was noticed by Franklin, in 1783, as reported in the 3d edition of Romilly's Memoirs, i. 455. Cf. also Darwin, Descent of Man, 134 (New York ed.); and Spencer, Study of Sociology, 196-7. Otto Seeck in his Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt calls attention to the fact that the citizensoldiers of the Roman republic had wives and children, and kept up their breed, but the professional soldiers of the Roman empire were not allowed to marry and left no legitimate children, and the fighting breed died out, i. 253-4. Nor must the effect of actual warfare be overrated. In all wars the population, at least on the side of the vanquished, are exposed to great hardships, to which the weakest succumb. After many destructive wars there has been a speedy resurrection of the people, due to the disproportionate survival of the strong and the intelligent: so Seeck, ib. 284-6, cf. 252.

such weeding out, and a constant application of natural selection, almost as effective as artificial selection, since (in spite of some exceptions ¹²) the instinctive customs of the people favour it. But with the arrival at success and the quiet of enjoy-

ment, this process slackens, and finally is reversed.

Galton wisely despaired of a change for the better coming about of itself, or being effected by a mere general enlighten-

^<sup>12 Such as ecclesiastical celibacy and the inquisition, noticed by Galton in the work to be cited, pp. 357-60.

ment.¹³ Perceiving that specific instruction to this end needs to be given, he founded a school of what he called eugenics, or the science of good breeding. His followers have systematised his views, and emphasised the danger of "reversed selection." ¹⁴ This reversal of natural selection now taking place,

18 He had not the foolish optimism of W. R. Greg, who, in 1874, following him, in his Enigmas of Life, although he added a physiological principle (adapted from Spencer) of "a tendency of cerebral development to lessen fertility," p. 103, cheerfully wrote that "a reply to these objections is simply this:...True culture, as it spreads,—the influence of a really enlightened civilisation, in our age and country,—ought to [and will, 138, since it requires only a "reasonable" amount of intelligence, 107] have a double operation: in the creation, on the one side, of a class of healthy and educated and laborious, but no longer stinted poor, whose redundant fertility will be controlled at once by greater providence and more developed brains, and, on the other side, in the growth of wiser and more right-minded superior classes, estimating more truly the vital essentials of a happy and worthy existence, less fearing a social fall, and less ambitious of a social rise, less straitened and less deterred from marriage than at present, and therefore both positively and relatively more prolific. The problem of progress may thus be successfully wrought out, in perfect conformity with the physiological laws we have assumed, by the mitigated fecundity of the multitude in proportion to their culture and social elevation, and the simultaneously augmented fecundity of the ranks above them, as they learn the true philosophy of life," 143-4. It is easy to make pleasant predictions, but thereby the prospect of their fulfilment is little furthered. Greg himself says "human tenderness is a sad disturber of human intelligence," and "a large part of the business of the wise is to counteract the efforts of the good," 178. But will the wise, who look to the public at large and to the future, be able to counteract the efforts of the good, who attend to the feelings, the sentiments, and the happiness of existing individuals? It would seem that nature aims rather at a succession of one people after another rising to civilisation and making room

14 E.g., Saleeby: "Directly the social conditions become too easy, selection ceases, and it is as successful to be incompetent or lazy or vicious as to be worthy. The hard conditions that kept weeding out the unworthy are now relaxed, and the fine race they make goes back again. Finally there occurs the phenomenon of reversed selection, when it is fitter to be bad than good, cowardly than brave — as when religious persecution murders all who are true themselves and spares hypocrites and apostates; or when healthy children are killed in factories whilst feeble-minded children or deafmutes are carefully tended until maturity and then sent into the world to reproduce their maladies. . . When a primitive race is making its way by force, selection is stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, stupid are expunged from generation to generation. As civilisation advances, a higher ethical level is reached: all true civilisation tending to abrogate and ameliorate the struggle for existence. The diseased and weakly and feable minded are no lenger left to near the complex strength waves the nearly tended by Modern and the second of the content of the content of the second of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content of the content

they urge, must itself be reversed. The unfit whose unfitness is hereditary and transmissible must be taken care of, indeed, charitably, by society; but society must see to it that they do not breed further, the return for state aid must be renunciation of parenthood (not necessarily, by abstinence, say those who incline to Neo-Malthusianism, but by preventive measures, and if necessary by sterilisation). Also those of the unfit who are provided for by their own families, or who inherit fortunes, as well as those who live precariously or predatorily, must be impressed by public opinion, or checked by positive regulation, likewise to avoid propagating their incapacity. There must be no killing of the weak, which is nature's way of selecting; but there must be prevention of their propagation. Some would go so far as to recommend state aid and encouragement for the continuation of the species by those who are fit. Society, if not government itself, must show some concern about marriages. For all this the study of heredity must be prosecuted, much assistance having already come from the labours of Mendel. Some eugenists, of course, go too far, and ascribe all decay of civilisation to the reversal of selection as its sole cause. If and find

ture for unfitness: they are allowed to survive and multiply. A successful race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race that is fighting for its existence cannot. But in reality no race can afford this absolutely fatal process.—There is thus a real risk involved in the accumulation of acquired, traditional or educational progress. Not only does it tend to abrogate or even to reverse selection, but it serves to disguise the consequences of this abrogation. . . We may be congratulating ourselves upon our progress, upon our knowledge, our science and art, our institutions, legal and charitable, whilst all the time the breed is undergoing retrogression. . . Under reversed selection . . . the race degenerates rapidly; and if it be an imperial race, its empire comes crashing down about its ears. All empires and civilisations hitherto have involved the partial or complete arrest or reversal of the process of natural selection; and the racial degeneration which necessarily ensued has been the cause of their invariable doom," Parenthood and Race Culture, 306-7.

15 Cf. Saleeby, 26-30. He even objects to the sentiment expressed in the

Officiously to keep alive."

16 So Saleeby: "I advance this [the reversal of selection caused by traditional progress or civilisation] as the reason why history records no enduring empire," 308. He admits, however, alcoholism and some other "racial poisons" (the term is his own, 237-8) such as syphilis, to be among the "causes of true racial degeneration," 318. But D. S. Jordan finds the one sole cause both of reversed selection and degeneration in war: the

the one sole remedy in their recommendation, which they seem to think will be sufficient,— or at least they think it indispensable; ¹⁷ which may well be true, unless natural selection can be restored. But traditional civilisation does run on, through its own momentum, even after the people are decayed,— as witness the Byzantine empire; because its neighbours have delayed giving it the push which topples it over. And when institutional civilisation has become corrupt, even a revival of a good breed might not be sufficient to restore it to health. The new superior race would need to have the knowledge of what they ought to do, and also the will to do it. The latter especially might be lacking, if, instead of being developed by the hard knocks of natural selection, they were produced by the careful nursing of gentle artificial breeding. Yet no one can doubt but that eugenics will be a powerful aid to prevent further decay, if we still have the wisdom and the will-power to apply it. If we do not, and if it be as Utopian as Darwin believed it, ¹⁸ perhaps a future cycle will be able to do what we cannot. ¹⁹ Meanwhile, therefore, we may proceed.

cause, he says, of the glory of Greece passing away "was the one cause of all such downfalls—the extinction of strong men by war," War and the Breed, 141; cf. "Had they [the Romans] held aloof from world-conquering schemes, Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down to our day," 131-2. Yet all his references are to the many petty civil wars of the Greeks and the few great civil wars and proscriptions of the Romans. These indeed rooted out the best—the leading men in those peoples, and left the cringing and cowardly; and were followed later by another reversed selection in the persecution of the Christians, the martyrs being the best among them: see the chapter on "Die Ausrottung der Besten" in Seeck's Geschichte, especially in the 3d edition.

¹⁷ Saleeby: "Our redemption from the fate of all our predecessors is to be found only in eugenics—the selection of the best for parenthood," 318. G. B. Shaw: "Nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations," in the Sociologi-

cal Papers of the London Sociological Society, 1904, p. 74.

19 It may be said, in a general way, that one of the important means for keeping down population (with some tendency to weeding) in antiquity was infanticide; in modern times a corresponding means is abortion; and in the future it may be contraception. But abortion does little weeding; and contraception of itself will not do any, but rather the opposite, unless wisdom guide it.—Of course the example of the breeding of domestic animals is so plain that it could not escape the ancients, and so, long before Galton, there was at least talk about, though little investigation into, the science which he has named. Thus beside the well-known lines of Theognis (183-96), and Plato's Republic, 459A-461E, see also Ocellus

Both the physical and moral causes of decay sum themselves up and manifest themselves in one great evil, which increases with advancing civilisation till it destroys it. This is what Ferrero calls "excessive urbanisation," which he considers the disease that killed the Roman empire.²⁰ For it is the concentration of population in cities, and their devotion to

Lucanus, De Universi Natura, IV. 13-14, and Soranus, I. ix. 34, x. 39, 40. Moreover, there was practice of it also, but imperfect, and with imperfect results. Thus Plutarch tells us, in his Life of Lycurgus, that the Lacedaemonians not only made their women strong, but sometimes put out their wives to vigorous companions. Yet their arrangements produced no eminent men except warriors. Diodorus Siculus, XVII. 91 (4-7), and Quintus Curtius, IX. 5, describe a people in India among whom marriages were regulated according to the beauty of the bodies of the aspirants, and the offspring (as at Sparta too) could be reared only if approved by a commission appointed for the purpose (cf. also Strabo, XV. p. 699). But it did not prevent them from surrendering to Alexander without a blow.

²¹ Ferrero, 93.

are the cure? Have we even the desire? It may be, but it also may not be. It may be that we prefer to consider only ourselves, and to let the future take care of itself.²² This, however, is not our duty.

²² As directly advised, e.g., by W. J. Robinson, in his work on The Limitation of Offspring, New York, 1915: "Somehow or other I have always been of the opinion that if we deal intelligently with the present we can safely let the future take care of itself," 29; and again: "If we will take care of the present the future will take care of itself," 89. In the matter before us Forel believes everything will be well; for he thinks the improved means of communication have brought about "a transportation of town to country and of country to town," in which bringing together "of the two modes of life" he sees "the dawn of salvation in the future," The Sexual Question, 329. He overlooks that it is precisely these improved means of transportation that have enabled the cities to grow so enormously, and leave in them a larger and larger residue who never get away to the country, or for so short a time as to have little influence upon their lives.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DECAY OF ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS

ALL the evils we have described are found in accounts of ancient civilisations, and are discovered in greater detail, the more we learn of their conditions. Of the very earliest peoples that have risen to a high culture, our knowledge, though unsatisfactory, is indeed mostly of their declining and low stationary periods; of the so-called classic states our knowledge goes back to a portion of their ascending period and covers the whole of their culminating as well as of their declining periods. On the other hand, of the modern Germanic and Slavic nations of Europe we have complete information starting from the commencement of their rise and reaching toward their culmination; but not yet open to us is more than a forecast of their decline.

In China and India still survive, in the decayed and stationary state, civilisations which may perhaps date back to the earliest times, having seen perhaps but one cycle. They have continued so long because of the prodigious populations of those lands, which has rendered it impossible for any of their neighbours, though conquering, to destroy them. For thousands of years those peoples have remained in a decrepit stage of individualism, every one looking out for himself and his own salvation, in various combinations with regard to the petty affairs of life, but leaving public affairs to a few rulers, despotism being the common end, without patriotism, without national aspirations. The more compact Japanese are now making a new start. Similarly in the west of Asia the Persians had two cycles; for it was those who went down into the Mesopotamian plain that inherited the decay of the Babylonian civilisation, while those who remained in the hills formed the nucleus for a revival, and perhaps may now be preparing for a third. In Arabia a semi-civilisation has languished for millenniums, for an opposite reason to that accounting for

the lethargy of India and China, in that this country is too sterile either to sustain a large population or to attract invaders. Upon the stimulus of a new indigenous religion, at a time when all the rest of the world was sunk in decay, its tribes started to form a new empire, and went forth and subdued other peoples, and made converts, such as the Turks, who continued their conquests for a while, only to fall into irretrievable degeneracy, after the hollowest and briefest civilisation the world has witnessed.

^<sup>1 II. 35.

^{31. 27.—} Nymphodorus Syracusanus ascribed these inversions to Sesostris for the purpose of making the men effeminate, to keep them from revolting, in Mueller's Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, vol. ii. p. 380.

^<sup>4 As maintained by E. Simcox in her Ancient Civilisations, i. 200. Yet she quotes from the Maxims of Ani: "The wife talks of her husband, and a man of his trade," 202.

⁶ Cf. Ch. Letourneau, L'Évolution du Mariage et de la Famille, 221

Budge, op. cit., iv. 2; v. 16

priests. The empire fell into decline, and after several centuries the priests, having lost power, called in the Nubians, who subdued most of the country. One of their kings, it may be noted, abolished capital punishment.⁹ The whole land was the property of the king, the priests, and the warriors, all the rest of the population being tenants; and the occupations and professions were hereditary.¹⁰ The warriors being comparatively few, mercenaries had to be hired. Subsequently the country was conquered by the Assyrians, later by the Persians, and lastly by the Greeks and the Romans; and has

never again been autonomous

About the peoples in Mesopotamia still less need here be said. The Sumerians and Babylonians, and the Chaldceans as well, were original settlers in the plain, the founders of its civilisation, from whom the Assyrians were an offshoot. The Medes and the Persians came down from the mountains, and carried on the civilisation they found already developed. A striking similitude exists between the relation of the Babylonians to the Assyrians and that of the Greeks to the Romans; for in each set the former brought the arts and sciences to the more warlike latter, and falling before, rose again after them. There, at least in later times, the land was owned in large sections, women had property, marriage settlements were common, and divorce was easy. The lesson taught by these peoples is thus summarised by Rawlinson of the Assyrians: "With much that was barbaric still attaching to them, with a rude and inartificial government, savage passions, a debasing religion, and a general tendency to materialism, they were, towards the close of their empire, in all the ordinary arts and appliances of life, very nearly on a par with ourselves; and thus their history furnishes a warning—which the records of nations constantly repeat—that the greatest material prosperity may co-exist with the decline—and herald the downfall—of a kingdom." 12

With Greece and Rome are we mostly concerned, because

12 The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, end of the

Second Monarchy

o Ib. vi. 117, 130, 132, after Herodotus, II. 137, and Diodorus, I. 65.

¹¹ Already in Hammurabi's code, consisting of 282 paragraphs, 68 are de

¹⁸ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. iii, between notes 49 and 50.

^15" Nunc natimur longae nacis mala: szevior arm

Luxuria incuhuit." Sat. VI, 292-3.

leonic régime, which similarly exterminated the fighting spirit and ushered in a period of peace, whereupon the nineteenth century far surpassed its predecessor in art, in literature, in

science, and in wealth.

16 Cf. Horace:

Cuncta manus avidas fugient heredis, amico Quae dederis animo. Odes IV. vii. 10-20. See also Sat. II. iii. 122-3 and Ep. II. ii. 190-1. first man in Naples. Men are worth, he is made to say, what they have, and honours are paid to them accordingly. He was proud, too, of his ignorance, and wished to have engraved on his tomb that he had not frequented the philosophers; which is equivalent to saying he had not had a college education, and did not regret it. People now-a-days, Petronius makes another of his characters say, admire a lump of gold more than a statue by the greatest master. As time wore on, high offices came to be rated according to the size of their salaries or of the fees they brought in, and on gravestones we find inscriptions to the effect that the defunct was a hundred, a two hundred, a three hundred thousand sesterce man. We to-day also are wont to think that the well-known saying "Make money — honestly if you can, but make it" is an American witticism. Yet it comes from Horace. Money, Horace also said, must be got first of all, virtue being of secondary importance. And Juvenal added that money does not reek, whatever be its source, since nobody inquires where you got it, so long as you have it. That it is odourless, had already been hinted by Vespasian. Yet to a few, at least, the nose was delicate. As

A phenomenon accompanying this outburst of plutocracy was the appearance of women in politics. For some time past the old restraints upon women had been relaxing, and the old household industries were falling into desuetude.²⁴ As long before as toward the end of the third century B. C. the old customary relations had so far broken down that a law (the Oppian) was needed to restore some of the earlier simplicity.

¹⁷ Satyricon, cc. 71, 77, 88.

¹⁸ While this was writing, a New York newspaper published a full-page account of a certain scientist under the caption "One of America's hundred-thousand-a-year men." This sum in dollars is several times larger than the largest the ancients boasted of.

^<sup>19 Ep. 1. 1. 05-00.

^<sup>21 Sat. XIV. 204-5, 207. ²² Suetonius, Vespasian, 2

^<sup>23 Thus, at least in Greece, somewhat earlier in a corresponding period, Crates, the best of the Cynics, advised that not all gifts should be received, as it was shameful for virtue to be supported by wickedness: see Mullach's Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum. ii. 338.

²⁴ A notice of this change, at least among the upper classes, consummated by the middle of the first century A. D., may be seen in Columella's De Re Rustica XII Practation

²⁴a Livy, VIII. 18, XL. 37.

²⁶ Tacitus, Annals, I. 69, XII. 37

²⁸ Tacitus, Annals, III. 33-4

youthful son Nero to the throne, sat behind a curtain off the chamber where the senate deliberated, to keep tab on their proceedings.²⁹ Female influence continued to grow, as civilisation declined, till Elagabalus, imitating Caligula, who had raised his horse to the consulship, placed his mother in the senate, and set up another senate, of matrons, over which she presided; ^29a and at last in the utterly degenerate fifth century, while Placidia was administering the West as regent, Pulcheria, after a contest with Eudocia, was proclaimed Empress of the East and sat on the throne in her own right and raised thereto her consort. Similar phenomena had previously appeared in the last days of the Hellenic power, which ended in Egypt in the hands of a queen of ill fame; and in Judea the meddling of women at the court of Herod is well known.

Of course in both these civilisations the advent of women to power was in consequence of the transfer of property to them from men, who thereby weakened their own position. Aristotle noted that as a result of the unrestricted permission to let women inherit and be dowered (which according to Plutarch had been introduced only after the Peloponnesian war ³⁰), two-fifths of the land of Lacedaemon had by his time come into the possession of women, on which account, the number of fighting men fell off to such an extent that the country succumbed almost at one shock, the women being of no service, and creating a greater disturbance than the enemy. ³¹ Among the Greeks also the philosophers admitted women to comradeship, especially the later schools, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Neo-Pythagoreans; and these philosophies became prevalent in Rome. Already Plato in Greece, and following him in Rome, in the days of Nero, a strenuous advocate of applied philosophy, the Stoic Musonius Rufus, advanced the opinion, which to-day is becoming popular again, that the virtues of men and women are the same, and that therefore boys and girls should receive a common education; and used for it the kind of argumentation which is thought to be a

²⁹ Ib. XIII. 5

^<sup>29a According to Lampridius, who recounts the petty absurdities therein enacted, Vita Heliogabali, c. 4. He also called an assembly of meretrices, ib. c. 26.

⁸¹ Politics. II. vi. (or ix.) 11-12. 7.

peculiarity of our age, appealing to the fact that no distinction between the sexes is made in the training of horses and dogs. And the women themselves were not backward in claiming the same privileges with men, on the ground, now again currently taken, that they were human beings just as much as men were. Juvenal, in fact, represents a wife caught in adultery saying to her husband: "It was agreed that you should do as you please, and that I too might indulge myself. Clamour as you may, and confound sea with sky, I am a human being [homo sum]." 33 In minor matters, it may be noted that they took to drinking wine, which had in the primitive days been forbidden to them, just as women to-day are taking up smoking. They frequented all the places where men congregated, mingled in elections, and formed societies and clubs, and met in conventions of their own. They even took fencing lessons, indulged in various other athletic exercises, and wore bright-coloured "sweaters." 34

At the same time, as was pointed out in the speech of Messalinus already referred to, many of the hard ways of the ancients had been changed to ways milder and more joyous.³⁵ The provinces were governed with less extortion. Subsidies were granted to cities that had suffered calamity from fire or earthquake. Public endowments were established by men of

⁸² Plato, Republic, V. 451D-452A; Musonius, in Stobaeus's Florilegium, Excerpta, II. 13, 123, cf. 126. To Aristotle this comparison seemed out of place: Polit., II. ii. (or v.) 15. That there is but one virtue of men and women, was held by the Cynic Antisthenes, according to Diogenes Laërtius, VI. 12. He exaggerated this from what Socrates had maintained; for according to Aristotle Socrates held, not that the virtues of men and women are the same, but that certain virtues, such as courage and temperance, are the same in men and women (i.e., whatever virtue they have in common is the same in both, cf. Plato, Meno, 72E, 73A-B, where the question is merely logical)—an opinion which Aristotle himself combatted, Polit., I. v. (or xii.) 8; on their difference cf. II. ii. (or iv.) 10, and with respect to continence Nich. Eth., VII. v. (or vi.) 4. Xenophon gives us the exceptions Socrates made: "The nature of women is no wise inferior to that of men, except in the lack of judgment and strength," Banquet, c. 2. Yet Plato himself also asserted generally that women are inferior to men in virtue, Law, VI. 781B. Later Plutarch tried to prove the similarity of men's and women's virtue, in his essay On the Virtues of Women, by citing exceptional instances of female heroic deeds, mostly of a character entirely different from men's!

^{34 &}quot;Endromidas Tyrias," Juvenal, VI. 246.

^{35 &}quot;Respondit multa duritiae veterum in meliora et laetius mutata."

wealth: temples erected, libraries and other educational institutions founded, orphan asylums maintained, gymnasia and baths constructed, and sanatoriums built in salubrious localities. The condition of slaves was improved, among other things the abandonment of them in old age and infirmity being prohibited. The gladiatorial shows were more strictly regulated, even women took part in them, rendering them less serious, and at last they gave way in popular estimation to the less dangerous races in the circus. The military punishment of decimation was discontinued. The people were disarmed. Eventually the killing or exposure and even the selling of children were given up. 35a The Romans, tested by our standards, always were fearfully cruel; but compared with their own past,

their cruelty slowly diminished

^<sup>85a Such evils were forbidden by Constantine, who offered public assistance to indigent parents, Codex Theod, XI. xxvii. 1, 2.

Co-incident with the advent of Roman civilisation to its period of culmination, was the emergence of the two great evils we have above cited — on the one hand financial monopoly, concentration of wealth, breaking-down of competition, at last a kind of socialism, and on the other a falling birth-rate, which began in the upper classes and worked down to the lower,

whereupon it was followed by diminishing population.

At Rome in the first centuries before and after Christ the fortunes accumulated by a few individuals, compared with the poverty which surrounded them, were enormous. At the com-

³⁶ The Greek word agape used in the New Testament means affection, or fondness, not love as it is now translated. It corresponded to the Latin caritas, of which the English form "charity" has acquired another meaning.

³⁷ Cicero, De Officiis, II. xxi, 73.

³⁰ Nat. Hist. XVIII. vii, (or vi.) 3. On the immensity of estates cf. Seneca, Ep. 87 86, 89 §§18-21, Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, II. 40.

^{40 &}quot;Panem et circenses," Juvenal, X. 81.

⁴¹ Cf. Seneca: "Luxuria, terrarum marisque vastatrix," Epist., 95, 19.
42 Cf. E. Ray Lankester: "Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organisation in this way." Article on Degeneration in The Advancement of Science, London, 1890,

⁴²a Cf. Novel. Constitut. Justin.. 80 Praefatio

decreased in numbers, "destroyed as they were by poverty, taxes, and military service. Even when times of peace came," he adds, "they were doomed to inactivity, because the rich were in possession of the soil and employed slaves only." 43 Juvenal also hints at unjust practices — of first trampling down and ruining the fields of small owners desirous of retaining their land, to compel them to sell. 44 The large plantations, or latifundia, were perceived by Pliny to be causing the ruin of Italy, 45— of her agriculture first, and then of her civilisation. The heart of the empire was eaten up, and the canker spread outward to the extremities.

All this meant the disappearance of the middle classes. Most of the charges of the state were, in fact, thrown upon them, and they succumbed. The richer burghers were enrolled as curiales and compelled to serve in the magistracies; and upon them was laid the responsibility for the collection of the tribute due to the imperial government. They were thereby made into tyrants over their fellow citizens; ⁴⁶ but as they had to supply any deficiency out of their own pockets, their office became a burden which they tried to avoid, and when this was not allowed, from which they tried to escape. They could escape by selling out, by going into bankruptcy, by entering the army, the civil service of the empire, or (when Christianity prevailed) the clergy, or by running away to the barbarians. These means, all but the clerical refuge, were one after another closed to them by the emperor, except he granted special honour (such as the senatorial dignity) to some of them as a peculiar privilege. The wealthiest became thus privileged. Their heirs remained so; but the heirs of the others inherited their duties, which went with the property. Other privileged ones were the very poorest of the cities, especially of Rome, for whose benefit, to appease them and keep them quiet, much of the money collected was spent. The middling rich had to

⁴³ Civil Wars, I. 7.

⁴⁴ Sat. XIV. 140-51; Cf. Sallust, Bel. Jug. 41 (8), Horace, Odes, II. xviii. 23-8, Apuleius, Metamor. IX. 35-9.

^{46 &}quot;Quot curiales, tot tyranni," Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei, V.
47 An early instance of avoidance, under Trajan, in Bithynia, is mentioned
by Pliny the Younger, Ep. X. 113 (or 114).

pay for the support of both those above and those below them,

and were crushed between the two.

49 See the latter's Ep. X. 36 (or 34, or 43).

^<sup>50 See J. P. Waltzing, Etude historique sur les Corporations professionelles chez les Romains, Louvain, 1896, vol. ii. pp. 16, 267, 333n. He quotes Symmachus: "patriae servientes." Relat. 14.

⁵¹ X. xx. 1 and 11, XIII. v. 14, 19, and 35, XIV. iii. 8.

The Catholic church has merely retained its allied particular case under the same principle, in the form "once a priest, always a priest,"

⁵³ H. Wallon, Histoire de l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquité, Paris, 1879, iii

^{115, 198.}

54 Op. cit., 481. With obvious reference to doings in France in 1848, Waltzing adds: "C'était une véritable organisation de travail par l'État, entre les mains de qui se trouvaint en grande partie la production et la distribution des richesses."

^<sup>55 Ammianus Marcellinus, XXXI. 6; Salvianus, V.

⁵⁶ Waltzing, 336-48.

^{57 16. 266.}

⁵⁸ Salvianus, V. Also Waltzing, 339-40.

peror's pen been reduced.⁵⁹ Or better still, they could apply

to the church and become - beggars.60

⁵⁹ Seeck, op. cit., ii. 321-4

⁶⁰ Seeck, ib. 334-6.

¹ Lactantius, De Morte Persecutorum, c. 7.

⁶² Lactantius, loc. cit.

among the Huns, and further about the venality and delay of justice, as reported by Priscus, in Mueller's Fragmenta Histor. Graec., vol. iv., p. 87.

The appearance at Rome of celibacy and childlessness towards the end of the republic and their continuance under the empire, is a well-known phenomenon. It began, of course, among the upper classes.⁶⁸ The old ancestor-worship had

⁶⁴ Salvianus, VII.

⁶⁵ S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 232

⁶⁶ Clement of Alexandria, Paedogogus, III. 11.

⁶⁷ According to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III. 2; cf. Irenæus,

^<sup>68 Horace, who associated with them, spoke of the "vitio parentum rara juventus," Odes, I. ii. 23-4. Cf. Juvenal, to be quoted presently. But still

Lucan was able to refer to "fecunda virorum paupertas," Pharsalia, I.

69 De Beneficiis, III. 16. Jerome (Ep. 2) tells of a woman who had

that a man should require from his wife a propriety of behaviour which he himself does not show," Digest, XLVIII. v. 13, 5. Cf. Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts, c. 47. But Plautus puts a demand for the woman's morality in men into the mouth of an old woman, Mercator, IV. v. 3-15. Aristotle, Politics, VII. xiv. (or xvi.) end, and Isocrates, Nicocles, seem to require equal continence, at least during marriage; and Musonius made extravagant demands in this connection, in Stobaeus, VI. 61. The Christian Fathers, of course, taught that men should set the example and be as strict with themselves as they required their wives to be, e. g., Lactantius, Divin, Instit., VI.

71 Plutarch, Life of Cato

rid of them when born, which was becoming discredited and was retained principally for abnormalities, ⁷² new means were discovered of preventing birth ⁷³ and even conception. ⁷⁴ The children the ladies of quality did have, they of course did not themselves tend, that being left to servants. ⁷⁵ The maternal instincts of women were satisfied by substitutes: a Christian Father tells us that heathen ladies "maintain parrots and curlews; they do not receive the orphan child, but they expose the children that are born at home and take up the young of birds, preferring irrational to rational creatures." ⁷⁶ Many men did not marry at all, as it was still easier to enjoy free love without contracting so much as this loose tie. To marry a poor woman still left her beyond control; but to marry a rich woman gave the control to her,—and according to Juvenal nothing was more intolerable than a rich wife. ⁷⁷ The bachelor or the childless widower, moreover, was courted and flattered by those who hankered after legacies, while the father of a family was left to himself. The old aristocratic families, to whom so much of the glory of Rome had been due, were dying out, and their places in the senate had to be supplied by men

⁷² Seneca: "Children, if they be born weak or monstrous, we drown," De Ira. I. 15, 2.

Sed jacet aurato vix ulla puerpera

Tantum artes hujus [nutricis], tantum medicamina possunt.

Quae steriles facit atque homines in ventre necandos

Conduct. Sat. VI. 594-7.

Ovid tiraded against abortion, but principally on account of the risk his mistress had incurred, Amorum II. xiv. Cf. also Minutius Felix, Octavius, c. 30. In Greece Plato approved of exposing children (using discrimination), Repub. V., 460C, (but cf. 461C), and Aristotle preferred foeticide, Polit. VII. xiv. (or xvi.) 10. The Christians, of course, classed also the latter with murder: so Athenagoras, Legatio pro Christianis, c. 35; cf. Tertullian, Exhort. ad Castitat., c. 12, Apologeticus, c. 35; and of course they condemned the exposing of children, Lactantius, Divin. Instit., VI. 20.—Tacitus remarked the absence of such practices among the Germans, Germania, c. 19.

74 Cf. Lucretius, IV. 1269-77.

75 See Aulus Gellius, XII. i, where the philosopher Favorinus tried to teach a woman, the wife of a senator, to be "a whole mother." Some doctors, however, made a pretty comparison with the transplanting of seedlings, and recommended that the child should be born by one woman and reared by another: so, Soranus, who also maintained that the mother's milk was not wholesome for twenty days after bearing! I. xxxi. 87.

76 Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, III. 4

⁷⁸ Tertullian scorned such laws as "vanissimae," Apologeticus, 4.

⁷⁹ Codex Theod., VIII. xvi.

⁸⁰ Cf. Novel. Constit. Justin., 38, Praet. §1

^**Boa Livy, in the first century of the empire, expressed astonishment at the earlier continued populousness of Italy in spite of the constant fighting and contrasted it with the thin population which in many regions in his day barely saved the country from being a solitude, vi. 12.

and uncultivated land, which the emperor released from the payment of taxes.⁸² Even the offer of abandoned land free and untaxed did not succeed in inviting cultivators ^82a

Greece was another centre of depopulation, having in fact reached that condition long before, in her own period of decline, when men preferred hetairae to wives, and advanced women chose that condition. At Athens, which had passed out of its ascending into its culminating period about the time of the Persian wars, ⁸³ at its climax under Pericles there was a woman movement, led by Aspasia (an early Mary Wollstonecraft), who was succeeded by Plato (an early John Stuart Mill), ^83a and as Athens declined, women became freer. ⁸⁴ Then the dramatists, beginning with Euripides, advised against marriage, emphasising the burden of a poor wife and the slavery to a rich one, and laying particular stress upon the inconvenience of having children. ⁸⁵ Then the philosophers took up the same strain, and matrimony was frowned upon, or only tolerated, by many of them, such as Democritus, ⁸⁶ Theophras-

82 Codex Theod., XI. xxviii. 2

**SeaPertinax allowed any one to occupy and cultivate abandoned land anywhere, and as much as he could manage, according to Herodian, II. 4, 6. Similarly later emperors, *Codex. Just.*, XI. lviii. 8. *Cf.* in Euboea Dio Chrysostom, *Orationes*, VII. 34-7.

83 A sign of the change may be seen in the little incident noted by Herodotus (VI. 122, or by some interpolator) of a certain Callias's treatment of his three daughters, to whom he bequeathed his property and

whom he permitted to marry as they pleased.

88a Pericles himself is represented by Thucydides (II. 45) as admonishing women to avoid giving occasion for talk among men either of praise or blame. This may have been due to the fact that he was himself of a retiring disposition, and somewhat conservative or old-fashioned in his views (cf. his statement in II. 60 \$2 that the prosperity of the state as a whole is something better to be aimed at than the prosperity of individuals), in spite of the radicalness and subversiveness of much of his practice. His words also show that a change was taking place both in the conduct of the women and in the attitude toward the state.

the profession of medicine to women, at the instance of the maiden Agnodice, as narrated by Hyginus (c. 274). Her hair cut, and disguised as a man, she studied under Hierophilus, and being very successful in obstetrics, was haled before the court but the women came to her rescue.

and the law excluding female practitioners was aftered.

85 See extracts in Stobacus's Florilegium, LXVIII. and LXIX. and LXXVI Cf. Plantus, Miles Glor, III. i. 85-128.

86 In Stobaeus, LXXVI. 15, cf. 16; and according to Clement of Alexandria. Stromata, II. 23.

Yet so late as at the beginning of the third century some of the provinces at the circumference of the empire still remained fairly swarming; for we learn from Tertullian in

⁸⁷ According to Jerome, Adv. Jovin. I. 47.

Seneca), op. cit., I. 191. (Diogenes Laërtius, X. xxvi. 118, is doubtful: see Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen, iv. 459.) Later also Epictetus, Discourse, III. xxii. 67–82.

⁸⁹ According to Diogenes Laërtius, VI. 72, VII. 33, 131

som a friend, it was no shame to redeem a mistress, and Phocion's son put this into practice, completing it with marriage: Plutarch, Life of Phocion, end.

^<sup>91 This reason had begun to be operative long before, as it was com-

⁹² XXXVII. fragment 4.

⁹⁸ So especially Musonius, in Stobaeus, LXVII. 20, LXXV. 15, LXXXIV. 21; also Hierocles, ib. LXVII. 21-4, LXXV. 14, and Antipater, ib. LXVII.

Africa that even then there was pressure of population upon the means of subsistence, but a pressure caused rather by the exhaustion of nature's supplies. "The earth," he wrote in his best rhetoric, "is every day more cultivated and better furnished. All places are accessible, all known, all open to commerce. Farms have obliterated deserts, sheep have put lions to flight, cities outnumber houses," etc., etc. "Proof of mankind's abundance: we are burdensome to the world, its elements barely suffice us, our necessities become more straitened, and complaints are everywhere heard that nature no longer affords us her sustenence. And anticipating Malthus he added that "pestilence and famine and wars and earthquakes must be regarded as a remedy, as though to prune the insolence of the human race." These prunings did come to the provinces, which were too drained of their resources to be able to meet them or to recuperate from them when they passed over.

The evil days did come to all, bringing wars which the people now coupled with famine and pestilence as intolerable scourges, no longer seeking occasion for fighting as their ancestors had done, but shuddering when it was forced upon them; for they stood on the defensive, with no glory or booty to gain, and their ease and comfort were at stake. "If the peace of the world could corrupt great souls," wrote Longinus in the latter half of the third century, "much more does so the interminable war which now oppresses us, and especially the sentiments which direct the present age; for the love of money with which we are all contaminated and the love of pleasure lead us into slavery and overwhelm our lives, the one disease making us petty, the other vile"; and he added that he was unable to find how such evils were to be avoided by people "who honoured wealth infinitely, and even deified it." ⁹⁶ A couple of centuries more, and Salvianus, likewise recognising with Juvenal that the vices from which the Roman world was

^<sup>04 There was an opinion that the earth was growing old and wearing out: Lucretius, II. 1143-74, Pliny, Nat. Hist. XVII. iii. (or v.), Tremellius (combated by Columella, I. Preface, 1-3, II. i.), Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, c. 1. This expressed a truth, that the soil was gradually becoming exhausted; cf. above p. 73, n. 2a.

⁹⁶ On the Sublime, near end. With the last words cf. Hadrian's letter (preserved by Vopiscus in his life of Saturninus) about the Egyptians, who, he wrote, Jews and Christian and all, worshipped this one god alone.

suffering had originated in the long peace, similarly perceived that the horrors to which they were exposed rendered the Romans still more depraved. The Romans in Gaul, in Spain, and elsewhere, he admitted to be more vicious than the barbarians who were conquering them. They had begun to be so when pagans, and did not cease to be so when they became Christians. And the Christians added one more vice, the most dangerous of all; for they raised weakness to a cult. Saintly men, says Salvianus, himself approving, make themselves feeble, because if they were strong they could with difficulty be saintly. If the Apostle Paul thought he had to seek infirmity of body, who would wisely avoid it? If he feared strength of flesh, who would rationally presume to be strong? For this reason men dedicated to Christ both are and wish to be weak. Naturally, with this failing, and with its treatment of all men and women as brothers and sisters, and its consequent confusion of the sexes, its want of patriotism, and, also springing from its disregard of the morrow on earth, its advocacy of celibacy, Christianity could do nothing to stem

⁹⁷ They were the "vitia et longae pacis et opulentae securitatis," op. cit.

98 VI., and again in VII.

99 VII. "Ibi praecipue vitia, ubicumque Romani," VI.

1 V [

⁸ Clement of Alexandria, for instance, would have them wear the same costume, though his words also permit and enjoin several differences, Paedagogus, II. 10 (or 11), cf. III. 11. He here fell into agreement with Zeno, who had made the same recommendation (Diogenes Laërtius, VII. 33), though he shrank from following Zeno in recommending free exposure of all parts of the body (ib.), still recognising that there is some difference between men and women

4"We have no country on earth, that we may despise earthly possessions," id. ib. III. 8. In Greece already some of the philosophers had risen [?] to this state of detachment: cf. Seneca's account of Stilpo, De Constantia Sapientis, c. 5. The sentiment that one's country is wherever one lives well, appears, put into the mouth of the god of merchants, in Aristophanes' Pluto, 1151. The Christians could worship God and prepare for heaven in one country as well as in another. In putting off the world, they

put off the countries into which it was divided.

of the Christians desiring to perpetuate the state — Christians, to whom on earth there is no morrow, Exhort. ad Castit. c. 12, cf. Ad Uxorem, I. 5. Yet some of the Christians tolerated marriage, for their country's sake: so Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, II. 23; or rather, for continuing God's image on earth, Methodius, Banquet of the Ten Virgins, II. 1; but only secondarily, as the world was already populous, and virginity comes first, Cyprian, On the Dress of Virgins, c. 23.

⁶ Cf. Seeck, op. cit., II. 335-6. He quotes Lactantius: "Unum certum et verum liberalitatis officium est egentes atque inutiles alere," Divin. Instit., VI ii. 28.

^<sup>6a "Quid hoc ad Christianos, quid ad Dei servos, quos paradisus invitat... Mala atque adversa mundi fortiter tolerant, dum dona et prospera futura prospectant," Cyprian, Ad Demet., IV.— Christianity, we may note, existed during, and helped on, the ascent of civilisation in Europe through the Middle Ages, but it was another, a revised Christianity. The exemplar of this Christianity was Martin of Tours, in whose life it was chiefly remembered that he had been a soldier and, giving half his cloak to the beggar, had kept the other half for himself.

⁷ Ct. German. c. 28

⁹ VII.

¹⁰ XIV. 6, XXVIII. 4; XXVII. 3

¹¹ Thus Seneca drew the contrast: "Et Scipio triumphale illud et militare corpus movit ad numeros, non molliter se infringens, ut nunc mos

acy of the city-bred men showed itself exteriorly in the use of fine raiment and ointments, in the shaving of the face and even the depilation of the whole body. At Carthage things were even worse. There and throughout Roman Africa, people were said to have all the vices in a superior degree. Many men became women in face, walk, and dress; and what Clement of Alexandria called "preposterous Venus" was practised openly. As for the women, matrons could not by their dress be distinguished from courtesans. Among other things revived to-day, they dyed their hair yellow. In general, "luxury has deranged everything," a Christian Father complained: "men play the part of women, and women that of men, contrary to nature; women are at once wives and husbands; and their promiscuous lechery is a public institution." 17

Already by the latter half of the third century the Romans of Italy, where the peasant conscripts often cut off their thumbs to avoid military service ¹⁸— a practice not unknown to-day,—would willingly have left the defence of the empire to the outer provinces, and a party of the emperor Gallienus seems to have desired letting the provinces become independent and take care of themselves; and when Aurelian abolished that policy and reconquered the provinces that had separated, at the same time restoring the currency, the city rose up in rebellion. A little later, the emperor Probus, having pacified the Roman world for the last time, fell into the error some good people at the present day entertain, of thinking that soon there would be no more need of soldiers. Accordingly he set them to the use-

est etiam incessu ipso ultra muliebrem mollitiem fluentibus; sed ut illi antiqui viri solebant, inter lusum ac festa tempora, virilem in modum tripudiare, non facturi detrimentum, etiam si ab hostibus suis spectarentur,"

De Transvillitate Animi c. 15

12 The last by means of pitch-plasters: see Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, III. 3; cf. Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, II. 8. Clement remarks that "the bushy hair of the barbarians has something fearful in it," loc. cit. Cf. Alexander Walker: "They were bearded Romans who conquered the then beardless Greeks; they were bearded Goths who conquered the then beardless Romans," Beauty (American ed.) p. 218.

13 Paedagogus, II. 10.

14 Salvianus, VII.; cf. Clement again, op. cit., III. 3.

¹⁵ Tertullian, Apologeticus, c. 6.

¹⁶ Tertullian, De Cultu Féminarum, II. 6; Cyprian, On the Dress of Virgins, c. 16. Also men, according to Clement, loc. cit.

18 Ammianus Marcellinus, XV. 12; Codex Theod. VII. xiii. 4, 5, 10.

The fall of Rome had many causes. A and B and C may be independent causes each of a part of X. Or A may be cause of B, and B cause of C, and C cause of X: then, while C is the primary cause of X, A and B are earlier or more fundamental causes of X. Or A and B may be partial causes of C, which is primary cause of X; and, further back, of A and of B may be various independent or consecutive causes. The Roman empire fell before the Germans in the north and the Saracens in the south, primarily because from being stronger than they it had become weaker, while its greater wealth and more favourable situation attracted them. It became weaker than

¹⁹ Aurelius Victor, De Cæsaribus, c. 37, §4.

when the Greeks conquered the Persians, the latter were not strong enough to support such heavy armour and to wield such powerful weapons as the former.

²¹ Grandeur et Decadence des Romains, ch. 22.

not worth saving, and those men and women who benefited by it were incapable of saving it. Then all the Romans practically became equal again in subjection and poverty, and the natural inequality of the sexes re-appeared in a reign of violence.

The Romans were agriculturists, every citizen cultivating his own little four-acre plot and having a share in the public land, and were still military; while their oriental neighbours had passed on into the stage of artizanship and were industrial. The Romans conquered the over-civilised Carthaginians and barbarous Spain, and afterward Gaul, getting immense treasure in gold and silver from them, and continuing for many years to work the Spanish mines with the enslaved labour of

that country's own people and afterward with slaves imported from elsewhere. This led to the growth of luxury and the ever-growing desire for more, along with the seizure of the public lands by the rich and the concentration of landed estates, to be worked by slave labour; while the superfluous incomes were wasted in delicacies, and their material form, money, was spent in trade with the East. As the supply of the precious metals from the west gave out, the Romans conquered the East itself, as much as was accessible to them — beyond Greece and Asia Minor — Syria, Assyria, Egypt; and, beside possessing in them a new source of slaves, drew from them another supply of accumulated treasure, which again flowed back to the East in return for real wealth drawn from there, and ultimately to the still further East in India and China. They drew also food supplies from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, which ruined the Italian husbandmen, at first tending to democracy, then enabling the rich all the more easily to buy up the land and turn it into waste for cattle. At last their supply of treasure was exhausted, and, their labour being enervated, they were ruined — in the west first, and later in the east; after which even the former also learned, in sorrow and in pain, to become artizans.

The Europeans also were at the outset mostly agricultural, the land being either held in common by the communes or parcelled out with obligation or service to the state, which was the same as rent paid to the common owner, not in money, but in labour. In the Crusades they tried to conquer the near East, and were successful for but a short time. Then a greater West was opened to them in America,²² and from there, working the natives to death and afterward importing slaves from Africa, they drew immense treasure of gold and silver, which rendered possible taxation in money and the purchase and sale of land, bringing about the conversion of the old holdings into private property and the seizure of the commons. This treasure was again drained off to the East,—to the far East mostly now. Then again they went after it, and the English con-

^<sup>22 "Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world," Gibbon, ch. VI., between notes 91 and 92. Therefore, conversely, Mexico and Peru were the Spain of the new world: so Del Mar, History of the Precious Metals, p. 17.

quered India. This brings us to the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, Europe began to be supplied with cheap food, this time from the west; and where it was admitted free, as in England, it greatly depressed the landed interest, permitting the upgrowth of democracy. But now come in some differences. The drain to the East was met by various expedients, principally by the introduction of credit money. And, greatest difference of all, at the end of the eighteenth century the English, with the aid of money obtained from the East, developed manufacturing by machinery and steam power, on a large scale, with the capitalist system, and have entered the industrial stage, though some of the European states are not yet out of the stage of militarism. This industrialism has supplied England with a substitute for agriculture, and, extending to some other portions of Europe and to North America, has retarded the drain to the East, by putting western productivity ahead of the eastern, so that actually manufactures may be exported thither.

Here we are at present. But now the East is adopting western methods, and in time the same eastern superiority may perhaps tell, due to its people's ability and willingness to live on less. Then the drain may set in again. We have, moreover, recently been favoured by new supplies of gold, notably from the far south and the extreme north. But these will not last many years longer, and may be compared with the gold which Cæsar brought from Gaul. When appreciation again sets in (perhaps forty or fifty years from now, or even sooner) and becomes intolerable, it may be met by resort to paper money. That is a possibility, but not a probability, since the financiers will for their own selfish purposes resist. There will likewise be failure of the sources of real wealth, as we have seen. In addition, we have to face the moral evils ever grow-

ing in a high civilisation

CHAPTER VII.

RE-APPEARANCE OF THE SYMPTOMS OF DECAY

Nevertheless, symptoms already appear which show that the

¹ Above, p. 115.

upon the doers or non-doers. Humanitarianism is showing signs of becoming maudlin.² New religions are invading us from the East, or are being invented around us every day. Labour is decreasing; amusement is increasing; and the num-

ber of legal holidays has begun to grow.

Worst of all, we see already emergence of the two great evils that accompany the efflorescence of civilisation and foreshadow its end. Attendant upon humanitarianism and discontent, there seem to be coming on a collapse of competition and a lessening of labour, already begun, which are fostered by socialism, seeking complete equality between all men. And attendant upon an already begun breach of the contrast between men and women and the surfeit of abundant amusements, there are a falling off of marriages and a decrease of the birthrate, which are fostered by a woman movement, seeking complete equality between the sexes. These two companion evils, essentially of diminishing competition and of diminishing birthrate, indicate that it is becoming pleasanter to put down the burden of civilisation and to enjoy what it offers, than to carry on and transmit it.

The better to understand the appearance of these two evils and the danger to be apprehended from them, we need a review of the immediate past and a forecast of the not distant future.

The era in which we to-day live has had three stages of development, each dating from a period of expansion. The first was the period commencing with the Crusades, the second with the discovery of America, the third with the American and French revolutions, the so-called industrial revolution, in which

²Cf. Greg: "Nous avons les défauts de nos qualités. Our growing tenderness to suffering is accompanied with a corresponding gentleness towards wrong. Our morality grows laxer as our hearts grow softer. We are nearly as charitable to the sinner as to the sufferer. We condemn nothing very bitterly. We punish nothing very severely. We scarcely regard anything as wicked which is not cruel. . . . We are not exactly bad, but neither are we strong nor true," op. cit., 52-4. This was written forty years ago, in England, and things are still more so, and in a wider area, to-day.

bread freely to the poor, and at Lille they have given to working people free tickets to the municipal theatre. Is this the beginning again of "panem et circenses"? And even without thinking ourselves socialists, we Americans, in many of our cities, give free breakfasts to our public-school

children.

From this relaxation of the rigour of nature toward mankind important results have flowed. Most immediate was the cheapening of land. The increased quantity of the new, in spite of the augmented productivity of the old, caused also the old to fall in value. Of this a consequence was very prominent. The class who lived off the land, acquiring their wealth, power, and position therefrom, the landlords, the men

^<sup>4 Pp. 165, 166, 177-8, 182, 194, 200, 216, 256, 261, 320,

Pp. 188-90, 192-3, 219, 322, cr. 234, 259.

P. 310; again 355: "When an aristocracy comes to doubt the legitimacy of its empire, either it has not the courage to defend it or it defends i

^<sup>7 Essay on "Equality," in Mixed Essays, 63, also p. vi.
⁸ "Numine deum electa, quae . . . et humanitatem homini daret," Nat. Hist., III. 5 (or 6).— Mr. Kidd's thesis is that our individual and social interests are divergent, and that, while instinct prompts to the latter, reason inclines to the former, and while instinct is stronger at first, reason

Now along with these two actual accomplishments of democracy and humanitarianism, have come the tentative beginnings of the two evils which have been signalised,—beginnings which seem not evil and perhaps may not be if they go not too far. On the one hand, the greater productivity of labour, owing to improved processes and machinery and to better sources and greater supplies to work upon, has permitted the benefit to be taken in the forms both of greater production and of lessened labour-time or greater leisure. On the other, the greater ease of production has permitted women and even children to be employed in tending the lighter movements of machines and performing the more delicate operations of manufacturing, opening new opportunities of self-support to spinsters and orphans and even of extra gain to those who are

In the other case, the admission of women to the industries alongside of men, with prospect of adding to the future brotherhood also a sisterhood, is already beginning to have the effect of taking women out of the homes, putting them in rivalry with men, and breaking down that mutual dependence of men and women on each other and that dependence of children on their parents which are the basis of marriage; while the diminution and even the destruction of the old household employments by the new manufacturing industries is bringing idleness into the well-to-do homes where the women have remained, and thereby tends to drive these women out in pursuit of amusement and distraction, which, indeed, are being more and more provided for them. The eventual result may be the placing of all women outside the home alongside of

That these dreams are a product of the last hundred years'

It was a curious coincidence that the relaxation in the pressure of circumstances upon mankind, so characteristic of the western world during the last century, began at the very time when Malthus was bringing into consciousness the relationship between the sources and yield of provisions and the numbers of the population, and advising that mankind should voluntarily cease to press upon the limitations set by nature. The then opening of new lands and augmenting of the rendering power of old soils amounted to the same thing as, from the other side, a decrease in the number of the people, and therefore seemed to belie Malthus's law about the more rapid

^<sup>9 Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population was first published in an imperfect form in 1798 and completely rewritten in 1803, and slightly revised in 1817 and 1826. References here are to the ninth edition, London, 1888.

this was a statement of the general course of things throughout the ages. Malthus himself recognised that on exceptional occasions the means of subsistence might take a sudden leap and widen the room for more population.¹⁰ He held, however, that by its natural expansive power the population would quickly fill up the new room and again press upon its bounds.

This has taken place, and the pressure is tightening.

Already all the public lands of the United States have been appropriated: our whole territory is occupied. South America, South Africa, and Australia are not yet fully covered. Even our own country is not yet crowded. Spaces still remain for the over-stocked parts of the world to overflow into. But

¹⁰ Cf. pp. 252, 293, 334, 340-2, 474

¹² E.g., Paulus Diaconus. De Gestis Langobardorum, I. 1

Hard times, then, are ahead, not immediately perhaps (when the present chaos is ended), but certainly before many years, at most a couple of generations or so. A return will set in of the re-active pressure of nature upon mankind. Mankind will again be restive under it. They will not live in the peace and concord dreamt of in consequence of the peace and concord experienced during the last century of augmented supplies. The struggle for existence will again become sharp and bitter, and there will again be wars and rumours of wars. It will not then be safe for the lamb to lie down by the lion, when the lion is hungry. The strong will again rend, and the weak will need defence and protection. Class will contend with class, and nation with nation. Our women may weep at the prospect. Also our Mr. Doves and our Mr. Loves may tremble at it. But woe to that people which has not men that will stand up and fight without flinching. Those countries where the moral decay shall have gone deepest, where the proved stock shall have died out and given way to poor stock, where the greatest effeminisation of men shall have taken place (for the masculinisation of women will be no compensation), where the strong and the wise and the shrewd shall gain no more of wealth, power, and influence than the weak, silly, and incompetent, all being equal,—those will go to the wall. And when this fate shall have overtaken most of our western white men's countries, our cycle of civilisation will be completed.

These words were penned before the outbreak of the war now raging in Europe. This war is due primarily to the comparative overpopulation of Germany and the consequent need which the Germans feel for expansion. It does not mean the end of civilisation, but it may be the beginning of the ending, which is a long process, and a terrible process, and most terrible to those nations which suffer it first — those nations which are first defeated in the struggle for existence.

period of enjoyment at the culmination of the cycle of civilisation. We have reached that stage. If the lethargy of decay cannot be avoided in the end, at least its advent can be retarded. Retardation, then, both in matters physical and in matters moral, it is our duty to try to effect with all our might.

In the case of the products annually renewed, wastefulness

duplication of population, and all the other limited resources of nature—coal, iron, the other minerals, and forests—would be dug up or cut down and consumed in greater quantities, and their supplies be exhausted the sooner. Preferable is a more modest husbandry; and to keep the soil supplied with its several ingredients in their proper proportion by renovation is rather the task of careful agriculture and municipal economy.

The moral causes of decay are, to repeat for the last time, the most serious; and most important is the problem of preventing them, if possible, or at least of retarding them. If the brakes be put on before the down-grade becomes steep, their action will be the more effective. Or if we know of no positive checks, we may take time by the forelock and slacken speed of ourselves. Without metaphor, our principal concern should be to avoid doing the things that lead on to degenera-

First of all, we must not delude ourselves with the notion of the new era of peace. We should remember that it was the false prophets who cried "Peace, peace," where there was no peace. This is an often repeated cry raised by sloth and luxuriousness. To-day it is a popular craze, fomented by women and plutocrats. Humanitarian solicitude for life and financial solicitude for property have, till the late madness of two exalted Kaisers and their servile subjects, preserved most of the great nations from great wars with one another, while the latter, despite the former, has led them into little wars with the little nations. But their forbearance could not last much longer, and indeed it has already broken down. Feeble hopes were then indulged in, that when the nations did set to again, the wars of the future would by humanitarian restrictions be rendered almost bloodless, like the combats of the degenerate Italians at the time of the Renaissance, or perhaps even that like the warriors of Torelore we should fight "with baked apples, and with eggs, and with fresh cheeses," casting them into the water in a contest to see who could splash the most. It was forgotten that Italy was soon overrun by the French and the Spaniards; and little heed was given lest, as in the old tale whence the latter allusion is taken a some Saracens.

^<sup>1 Aucassin and Nicolete, Lang's translation.

should come from over the water and carry off our wealth and our women. Our Saracens are indeed whetting their bayonets beyond the sea of the setting sun. We, lapped in luxury, may seek peace, but it is not permitted us to have everything we want, and there shall be no peace, because others will not allow it. So far as can be seen ahead, for centuries yet, there will always be fighting nations. Abundant incentives will soon be coming to them, and pretexts will not be lacking. Then woe to those countries which are not prepared.

There is also an ill-advised over-praise of peace as the summum bonum, and disparagement of war as the maximum evil. People speak of war as retarding progress in civilisation. The reference to the destruction of property is mere materialism. Rather does it retard progress in decay: it is a moral purgative. As for the loss of life, it seems to be overlooked that every one must die somehow, and that violent death is generally less painful than natural death.² In war, contention is frank and open; in peace, underhand and fraudulent. If the prevention of over-population be left to natural death, especially if this be artificially delayed, the increase must be checked at its source, at birth; and this means an interference with nature's method of selecting the fittest. Eugenics will give little aid, if those who practise it have but one or two children. Female athletics will do no good, if athletic females be mostly barren. In our modern militarism, however, care needs to be taken not to draft into the army only the ablebodied. Even to weak men, in an army as in society, may work be assigned suitable to their capacities. Conscription should cover all who can be fathers, and if under the hardships the unsound perish, the world can get along without them.³ Of course war is an immediate evil, and therefore it must be faced; and it will be

^<sup>2 Even Kingsley was "sometimes tempted to think, having sat by many death beds, that our old forefathers may have been right, and that death in battle may be a not unenviable method of passing out of this troublesome world." The Roman and the Tenton, pp. 12-14.

^<sup>3 And every man rejected from the army for some inherited and transmissible deficiency (and not a mere acquired incapacity) should be segregated or sterilised. No one, unfit himself to be a soldier, and incapable of begetting a soldier, should be permitted to be a father, at a time when those who are fit to be soldiers and fathers are exposed to being cut off. But we may already be too humanitarian (or too degenerate, which amounts to almost the same thing) to adopt such a harsh system, with all the pain it might entail on individuals.

well if the threat of woe to them that carry the sword can be put into execution by those who would prefer to sheathe it. Instead of a Hague court of peace, it would be wiser if there were formed a United States of Europe. Europe would then be invincible over against the rest of the world. This would be of benefit even to us in America, who would then have to mind our p's and q's, and would not, for instance, so light-heartedly break a treaty as we recently did, until better second-

thought withdrew.

eventual disaster. But much harm may be brewed in the mean time in those countries where such abdication is contemplated and trifled with.

It cannot be the purpose of the ensuing volumes to solve the problem just stated by investigating the means of improving and perpetuating our civilisation. Eugenics alone, as we have seen, will not be sufficient. It may be that to put such means as are necessary into effect would require the excision of some gangrene already formed; to undergo which painful operation our people may not have sufficient courage and strength, there being no anæsthetic for the public at large. But at least we can set our faces resolutely against supporting and promoting measures that would increase the evils. To aid in encour-

THE CLIMAX OF CIVILISATION

aging resistance to such deceptive schemes is the humble task of the present series. Its object is the negative one of helping to preserve our civilisation from the dangers it is exposed to from the two proposed panaceas.

INDEX

Babylonian civilisation 13, 88, 93. Bacon 67. Barbarians 18, 24, 133. Barbarism 3 and n., 14. Benloew, L. 11n. Berkeley 14n.

Birth-rate, recent fall of 134: see also Children. Brown, T. F. 56n. Budge, E. A. W. 92n., 93n.

Callias 112n.

Capital, consumption of 75, 76, 95; regulation of, and of labour 79: see also Wealth.

Carver T. N. 30n.

Carver, T. N. 30n. Cato 97, 109.

Celibacy, late appearance of 27; in Rome 95, 108, 115 and n.

Children, needed in early period 24, 25; later undesired 26, 27, 28, 32, 79, 110–11, 111, 112, 119, 126, 130n., 132, 142; deterioration 80.

China 14, 90, 139n. Christianity 100-1, 111, 115-16, 116n., 119, 129, 130n.

Cities, formation of 6; size of 26; modern 52; will decline 61; relation of, to the country 88: see

Civilisation, nature of 3-6, 129; growth of 6-10, 15; subject to decay 10; course of 15-50; works downward 48; two aspects of 46; advance of 46-9; superiority of modern 46, 47, 67; migration of 60-1; disbelief in decline of 62-3; decline of, inevitable 64-6; compensations 60-2; high, a burden 75; temptation to lay down 76, so at present 126; task of, two-fold 78 (see Wealth and Children); as a process, two kinds of 82.

Classes, formation of 9-10; rule of different 39-40; advent of the lower to power 40-1; rule of all 41; movements from the upper, down 28, 48, 76, 80, 108, 111, 119.; the middle, crushing out of 79, 80,

10

Clement of Alexandria 108n., 110n., 112n., 113n., 115n., 116n. Climax of our civilisation 59.

Coal, basis of our civilisation 54; supply of, and coming exhaustion 55-0; will rise in value 135.

Codification 35.

Collaboration, needed for progress

Collectivism 29. Columella 96n., 102, Comfort, extension o

Comfort, extension of 48. Communication, means of 6, 16. Competition, to be done away wit

131. Comte, A. 36n., 64.

Constantine 100n., 111

Contention, a factor of civilisation 7-9, 15.

Contraception 27, 79, 85, 86n., 110 and n., 123.

Contracts, period of 20, 29-30, 44, 64, 77.

Copper, in civilisation 54

Cornelia 8on.

Corporations system of, helps formation of monopolies 21; in the Roman empire 105-6.

in Greece and Rome 100.

Cournot, A. 8n., 32n.

Crates 96n., 113.

Custom, in the early period 19, 21. Cycles, the, of civilisation 10; theory of 10-12; necessary for science of history 13; the known 13-14; periods in: see Civilisation, course of; comparison of 44-50; advance of 44, 45, itself terminable? 45-6; duration of periods of 45-6; our position in 51-3, 123; ours the greatest 59-60. Cyprian 111n., 114n., 115n., 117n.

Dancing 116 and n.
Darwin 82n, 86.
Davis, W. S. 65-6n.
Death-rate, relation of, to birth
rate 81.

Debts, public 124.

Decay, states and civilisations subject to 10, 59; inevitable, but not prescribed 69; causes of 70, 83,

the physical 70-4, the moral 74-89; both may be retarded 138.

Deforestation 70, 71, 72.

Degeneration 15, 24, (27-8), 40, 42-3, 74, 75, 80, 85n., 85-6n., 103 and n.

Del Mar, A. 121n.

Democracy, cause of (17), 127-8; wrongly termed 41-2; needs of 50; modern 53, 123; in England 122.

Democritus 112.

Depopulation, in the Roman empire 73n., 111-12; in Greece 112-13.

Despotism, in the latest periods 42– 3; result of individualism 87; in China 90; not yet in prospect

Dill, S. 108n.
Dio Chrystom 73

Diogenes 113.

Diogenes Laertius 99n., 113n., 115n. Divorce, common in culminating period 27, 31, 77; present frequency of 52; in Egypt 92; in Babylonia 93; in Rome 109; at present 123.

Draper, J. W. 11n., 51n.

Ecclecticism, prevalence of, in later periods 36.

Ecclesiasticus 37n.

Economic changes, course of 19-24 Economists, in culminating periods

Education, longer in the later periods 27, 75, 79; more considered 33; at present 53, 128.

Effeminacy, late 77; prospect of 68 in the Roman empire 117.

Egypt 13, 44, 48, 72, 91–3. Electricity, in our civilisation 54.

England 122. Epictetus 113n.

Era, a new, expected 12-13, (32) 63, 131, 132; error of this theory 64-5, 129, cf. 135-6, 140; our 126-7

Ethics, science of, when arises 32,

Eugenics 84, 85, 86 and n., 141, 143. Euripides 112. Exhaustion of supplies 70; inevitable 73: see also Soil. Experimentation, needed for progress 35.

Families, the early proprietors 20; size of 25; development 2 Favorinus 110n.
Feminism, need of shunning 1143.
Feminisation of manners 31.
Ferrero, G. 87, 88 and n.
Flint, R. 7n., 12n., 51n.
Florus 11.
Foeticide 53, 86, 110, and n.
Forel, A. 63n., 67-8n., 89n.
Fourier, C. 12n.
Franklin 82n.

Galleo 67.
Galton, F. 83 and n., 86n.
Geikie, A. 56.
George, H. 3n., 82n.
Germans 14, 110n., 133, 134.
Gibbon 47, 94, 118, 121n.
Giddings, F. H. 63n.
Gilman, Mrs. C. P. 63, 64n.
Gold, prospect of supply of 59, 122;
standard 95, 124.
Greco-Roman, the, civilisation; the cycle of 13-14, 44, 46, 67; decline of 93ff.; comparison of, with modern 120-2, with the Chinese 130n.
Greg, W. R. 84n., 126n.
Guizot 6n., 104n.

Hadrian 1441.
Hammurabi, code of 93n.
Hebrew civilisation 13.
Heraclitus 11n.
Herder 14n.
Herodian 112n.
Herodotus 27n., 91, 93n., 112n.
Heroic period, early 32.
Hierocles 113n.
Hillquit, M. 53.
History, science of, impossible without cycles 13; repeats itself 66-7.
Holland 76n.
Horace 62, 95n., 96, 104n., 108n.
Hubbard, A. J. 130n.

Hull, E. 55.

Human beings, women as 99.

Humanity, not a collective being, and not cyclical 11 and n.

Humanitarianism, beginning of 29; effect of 77, 80, 88; at present 52, 126 and n. 128; cause of 129.

Hume 47n.

Huntington, E. 73n.

Huxley 130n.

Hyginus 112n.

India 14, 87n., 90, 121.
Individualism, in later periods 29, 30, 32, 77; in different cycles 48; at present 53, 132; effect of 87; in the east 90.
Industrialism, age of 64, 66, 68, 74, 122, 128.
Infanticide 86n., 110 and n.
Inheritance 23n.
Instinct and reason 129-30n.
Interest, rate of 76n.
Irenaeus 108n.
Iron, importance of, in civilisation 17; in ours 54, 123.
Isaiah 133.
Isocrates 109n.
Italy 74, 121, 129 and n., 140.

Jacoby, P. 52n.
Japanese, the 90.
Jerome 109n., 113n.
Jevons 4n., 54n., 55-6, 56, 57.
Jordan. D. S. 85-6n.
Jurisprudence, course of 34-5.
Justice, taken as simple equality 108; to reign 132.
Justinian code 103n., 111n., 112.
Juvenal 94 and n., 96, 99 and n., 103n., 104, 108n., 109n., 110 and n., 114.

Kidd, B. 128-9, 129-30n Kingsley, C. 141n.

Labour, division of 24; combinations of 78.
Lactantius 11n., 107n., 109n., 110n.,

Lampridius 98n.

Land, relation of, to arms 17; own-\nership of 19; inheritance of 22–3;\nexchangeability of 19, 20; serv-\nice required for 20: later es-

of 21, in the Roman empire 102; seizure of, in Rome 103-4, in England 124; cheapening of 127; nearly all occupied 134-5; will rise in value 135.

Lang, A. 140n.

Lankester, E. R. 8n., 103n.

Lassalle, F. 63n.

Lawyers 30.

Leaders, two kinds of 33.

Letourneau, C. 92n.

Lex Julia et Poppaea 111.

Liebig 4n., 73n.

Literature, course of 34, 35-6; comparison of 47; at present 53.

Livy 97n., 111n.

Longinus 114.

Lubbock, J. 62.

Lucan 109n.

Lucian 67.

Lucretius 110n., 114n.

Luxury 36, 75, 117, 119.

Maine, H. 19n., 64.
Malte-Brun 134.
Malthus 114, 133 and n., 133.
Malthusianism (25).
Marriage, frequent in early periods 24-5; rarer later 26-7, 79; strict in early periods, lax in the later 31; in Egypt 91, in Babylonia 93, in Rome 109, 110, 111, in Greece 112; at present 52, 83; a public office 85; basis of 131.
Martial 110n.
Martin of Tours 116n.
Marx, K. 63n.
Mason, O. T. 26n.
Mendel 85.
Merivale, C. 111n.
Methodius 115n.
Militarism, age of 64, 66, 122.
Military art, course of 16-19.
Mill, J. S. 3n., 21n., 31-2n., 32n., 49.
Mines, in relation to civilisation 16, 21; in antiquity 67, 74, 120-1; exhaustion of 70, inevitable 73, 135, but may be retarded 137.
Minutius Felix 110n.
Mitford, W. 51n.
Molinari G. de an

cf. 123; distribution of 75; increase and decrease 121, 122.

Montesquieu 118.

Moore, R. T. 57.

Morality, course of 28-34; the single standard of, in Rome 109 and n., at present 125-6.

Muratori 73n.

Music, when prominent 37; in Rome 116.

Musonius Rufus 98, 99n., 109n., 113n

Natural selection 8, 25, 86; undermined 80; aids to 81; reversal of 28, 74, 84–5n., 119; singled out 85–6 and n.
Nature, control of 4–5, 7, 127.
Neo-Malthusianism 85.
Nymphodorus 41.

Ocellus Lucanus 86-7n. Odisse-Barot 7n. Oppian law, the 96-7. Optimism, unfounded 84r Ovid 110n.

Pacifists 125.
Pain, consideration paid to, in later periods 31.
Pantocracy 42.
Patriotism 29.
Patten, S. N. 63-4n.
Paul 101, 115.
Paulus Diaconus 134n.
Peace, period of 16-17, 18, 24, 25, 31, 52, 68, 94, 115, 117, 123, 125, 131, 132-3, 137, 141.
Pearson K. 8n., 32n., 51n.
Pericles 112 and n.
Persians 13, 90, 93, 118n.
Persians 13, 90, 93, 118n.
Pessimism, no need of 60.
Petrie, W. M. F. 7n., 18n.
Petronius 95-6.
Plato 11n., 33, 86n., 98, 99n., 108, 110n., 112.
Plautus 109n., 112n.
Pliny 65n., 102, 104, 114n., 129 and n.
Pliny the Younger 104n., 105.
Plotinus 108.
Plutarch 81n., 86n., 98, 99n., 109n.,

Sterilisation of the unfit 85.
Stilpo 115n.
Strabo 87n.
Struggle for existence, the 8, 80, 84n., 127, 131, 136.
Suetonius 96n.
Suffrage, female 142.
Sullivan law, the 124.
Survival of the fittest 8, 25.
Symmachus 105n.
Sympathy, development of 31.

Tacitus 68, 97n., 102, 110n., 116.
Taxation, course of 20, 22; increase of 75; in Rome 95; at present 124.
Taxes on incomes and legacies 22, 75; in Rome 95; at present 124.
Terence 100.
Tertullian 110n., 111n., 113-14, 115n., 117n.
Theocracy 39.
Theodoretus 73n.
Theodoretus 73n.
Theodosian code 100n., 111n., 112n.
Theophrastus 112-13.
Thoppe 56n.
Thucydides 11n., 81n., 112n.
Transportation, effect of improvements in 26; too much of 61: see also Communication.
Tremellius 114n.
Tribes and tribal stage 6.

Ulpian 109n. Urbanisation, effect of excessive 87-9.

Valerius Messalinus 97, 99 and n. Varro 67n.
Venereal diseases 27 and n.
Véron, E. 12n.
Vespasian 96.
Village communities 8n.
Virgil 133.
Virtues, the masculine and the

feminine, changes 31, 46, 77; identified 98-9n.; at present 53. Voltaire 67. Vopiscus 114n.

Wallace, A. R. 82n.
Wallon, H. 106n.
Waltzing, J. P. 105n., 106 and n.
War, cause of 25, 136; effect of 812, 82n.; too much ascribed to 856n.; modern 125, 128; not the
worst evil 141; inevitable 140,

Warriors, rule of 39, 40.

Wealth, course of 19, 20; relation of, to power 18, 20-1; when mobile 19-20; of what 20; in connection with children 28; accumulation of 78; decay of 78; in Rome 101-2.

Wives, need of 24.
Women, obliteration of distinction between, and men, when permitted to own land 23; appearance of independence on men and of equality with men 23-4, 24n., 33, 77; some provide for themselves 26; in later periods catered to in literature 35; and religion 38; unmarried, appearance of 26 and n.; married, little distinguished from single 77; present aspirations of 52, 132, 142; claim same privileges as men 99, 100; in Egypt 91-2, 98; in Rome, in politics 109, 118; in Greece 112; early Christians on 115n.; present condition 123, 126, 128; introduction of, into industry 130; effect of 131-2; inequality of, ascribed to men's use of force 132.

Xenophon 99n., 113n.

Zeller, E. 113n. Zeno 113, 115n.

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