33arbara ^etnetodt Lectures on ^floral* of Cratoe IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? By STAN- TON COIT. SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM. By JOHN BATES CLARK. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MO- NOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS. COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM. By HAMILTON HOLT. THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONS. By ALBERT SHAW. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? BY STANTON COIT BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Cbc ititoersibc press noticed the effect of heat upon clay and introduced the art of pottery. Until then men had no utensils that could withstand 76 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? the action of fire ; they could not boil water except by dropping hot stones into some receptacle of wood or skin. Now, by the new device of boiling, the food- supply was enormously increased. The blessing of another mastery over matter was henceforth shared by all the mem- bers of the tribe. But, at the same time, there was a corresponding force added to the chief's grip upon his men. We see the law illustrated, that every new in- vention, owned by the few, becomes one more trap for the many. The differentia- tion between the owner of the tribe's wealth and the propertyless became with the introduction of pottery fixed and hopeless. The master dealt out not only fire and arrows, but cooking-utensils; or IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 77 he withheld all these if he saw fit; and if you had been there, but not in com- mand, you, too, would have tamely sub- mitted or have died. XVI. ANIMALS TAMED AND IRON SMELTED The word "tamely" which I have just used, brings me to the next great event which moved mankind perceptibly nearer to civilization proper. It is an event which was not only a literal fact of prime importance, but which is eter- nally a symbol of man's own fate. It was probably first the dog that lent him- self to the imagination of the speaking, fire-making, arrow-shooting, clay-bak- ing, anthropoid ape, as a stimulus to the 78 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? idea that captive animals might be of service to human beings. Man began to tame not only the dog, but the sheep, the ox, the camel, the goat, the horse, and the elephant. The gain to all the tribe was enormous. The men all shared in the profit, but once more their mas- ter appropriated the new increment in power. He became the owner of the domesticated animals as well as of the inanimate pot and arrow and flame. But at this stage it must have seemed to all the other members of the tribe that they also were owned, soul and body, by their chief. They could not help seeing, nor could he, that they were his men. And how natural it was for them to rejoice in the fact that they belonged to some IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 79 one who was mightier than themselves, and who identified his own prosperity with that of the tribe, and of every indi- vidual in it who served it according to his will. Loyalty to the beloved com- munity became loyalty to the chief. But it is evident that what mankind had caused to happen to the dog and the horse, the chief had accomplished in re- gard to the human beings who had come under his power. He had tamed them ; they were no longer wild animals. They had rendered up individual liberty and self-reliant independence such as we see among many species of wild beasts. But instead, as the price of obedience to a will outside their own, they had received a thousand creature-comforts. 8o IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? Only one more invention was needed to lift them to the highest and latest stage of barbarism. Some one now hit upon the art of smelting iron the first in- vention that had not directly to do with the supplying of food. By leaps and bounds the art of smelting iron advanced man in the equipment of war, in the building of houses, roads, and vehicles of transportation. Now what magnificent returns individuals received for having surrendered their original liberty to do as they pleased ! After all, what would inde- pendent initiative have been worth with- out fire or arrow or earthern kettle, or cow or horse or wheel, or sword and shield? Who would not have forfeited the bare birthright of empty (although IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 81 healthy) independence for participation in the ever richer conquest over the phys- ical resources of Nature ? XVII. CIVILIZATION PROPER But now at last, only ten thousand years ago, the event occurred which put forever out of the question any possibility of prudence in any waywardness of indi- vidual whim, or any deviation from the rule dictated by the owner of things. This time the something that happened did not cause an increase of man's mas- tery over physical Nature. It was, in- stead, like that initial invention which turned apes into men. And again, like spoken language, it was a device to facili- tate communication of mind with mind. 82 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? In some one of the many groups of be- ings who had learned the use of fire, arrows, pots, sheep, and swords, some genius hit upon the idea of written signs as a medium of communication with those distant in space, and as a means of perpetuating a knowledge of the will of the dead among his survivors. But be it observed that only the master, never the man, only the owner of things, the con- troller of circumstances, was in a posi- tion to embody and preserve his judgment and desire in written signs. The new art of writing enhanced the power of rulers, of chiefs. The Pharaoh, not the fellah, dictated the inscription that was to be engraved. Thus all the rulers of the past were now able to perpetuate their power IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 83 by adding their sanction to the word of the living chief, while no voice from the ranks of the governed would be allowed to immortalize itself in written speech. This is the reason that written language introduced civilization proper. There was no longer any chance for the wild- ness of the beast to crop out. Here began the empire of the dead over the living; but it was the empire of dead rulers over living slaves. The mastery over Nature and the monopoly of social power thereby became practically in- finite. The tamers were now omnipotent in comparison with the tamed. It must be noticed that the process of transform- ing beasts into citizens was one to which only the tamed, but not the tamers, were 84 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE* subjected. The ruler stood outside of and above the rule he made. The law was for his subjects. This was the case with Henry VIII at the acme of civil- ization as it had been with the first of the Pharaohs. Not only the blond beast of prey, but the swarthy also dictated an ethic for his subjects in order to keep himself in ascendancy. It was because Nietzsche admired all beasts of prey and felt con- tempt for their victims that he hated Jesus Christ and proudly assumed the title of Anti-Christ. For Christ had set up an ethic which encouraged the vic- tims to protest and attempt to win back their primeval initiative, to take over the sovereignty which had been concen- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 85 trated in the hands of the mighty and to diffuse it among the nobodies of the tribe. St. Luke goes so far as to assert that even before Jesus was born his Mother entertained levelling ideas. Into her lips he puts a song in which she mag- nifies the Lord because she believed her Son would bring down the mighty and exalt them of low degree. But alas! civ- ilization went on for fifteen hundred years and succeeded in tying Christian- ity to the chariot-wheel of monopolized initiative. XVIII. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AFTER CHRIST Christianity had to wait for some- thing to happen that would lend force 86 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? to its Gospel. That something did not occur until the middle of the fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the door to the divine bridegroom of humanity. I have said that in the fifteenth cen- tury after Christ a new principle began to work in society ; but I did not say that it was then for the first time promul- gated. Civilization was the organization of man's mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest ; it was the giving only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is evidently not to be Christian IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 87 any more than it is to be Buddhistic or Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Every- body admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured " without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with be- ing civilized to be highly selfish ; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social in- terest ; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power trans- ferred to the general will of the commu- nity; if the community should relegate its administration to representatives, but should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the power 88 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? entrusted to them, then something new something as different from civiliza- tion as the airship from the horse-cart would have begun to establish itself. A new species of social order can be noth- ing other than an order whose basic principle is totally new ; and what greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that between self-inter- est and the interest of the community? Whenever the latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the song of the Magnificat. No such consummation of humanity has taken place, but it is un- deniable that in the fifteenth century the Word entered like a seed into the soil IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 89 of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began to fulfil itself. Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was the invention of gunpowder; another was the mari- ner's compass ; a third was the invention of paper ; a fourth, the printing-press ; a fifth was the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of Christo- pher Columbus, whereby instead of over- populated India he opened up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Amer- icas. 9 o IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron : they enhanced incal- culably the mastery of man over matter. But in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the beginning of hu- man evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of control over others. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 91 But the initiative that now flowed to the multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of self-real- ization which the talking ape had en- joyed. It was the accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of self-realiza- tion. 92 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? But it was only the beginning : the effects of the introduction of gunpow- der, the compass, the printing-press and paper, and the new ideas about the heav- ens, and the opening-up of relatively un- inhabited lands, were scarcely discern- ible for two centuries, and then only as a destructive force. Indeed, for still an- other hundred years the process was one chiefly of disintegration. There was tak- ing place a transference of power from the few to the many ; a diffusion of sov- ereignty, as well as a redistribution of wealth ; and the change was accompa- nied by an awakening of the masses to the meaning of the transformation which they were undergoing. The people be- gan to realize that the invention of gun- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 93 powder had raised the peasant as a fighter to the level of the armed knight ; that the compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possi- ble for the poor to escape from Euro- pean masters whom they were unable to vanquish ; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mas- tery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative ; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth cen- tury after Christ, each new mechanical 94 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? invention or discovery has had the un- intended and undesired effect ultimately of scattering among the many the pent- up power of owners and rulers, and of creating in the many fresh psychic en- ergy and a new capacity of invention. This great process of levelling-up took again an enormous leap forward in the middle of the nineteenth century. The steam-engine advanced it almost as much as all the fifteenth-century inventions and discoveries together. The new fa- cilities of travel brought new experi- ences, and these, by the psychological law of contrast and novelty, stimulated intelligence many-fold. The new speed in transportation made it possible for thousands to escape from oppression IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 95 where scarcely one had been able to do so in former generations. The Irish peas- ants began to pour into America ; then followed the Germans ; soon Russians and Latins were helped to leave the Old World ; sometimes in all came a million- odd in one year. Wealth was multiplied and scattered to a degree that had never been dreamed to be possible. Not only in the United States, but in France, Italy, Scandinavia, the British Empire, and South America, the diffusion of social initiative was taking place. First, power spread from the few to the many severally ; but now, for a quarter of a century, the many, without surrender- ing, have been pooling their new power in the general will of the nation. There, 96 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? in the unified and unifying purpose of nations like America, and of each of her federate States, the power is being safe- guarded for the community and for its members severally by political devices which render public servants incapable of prolonged usurpation. XIX. CIVILIZATION FACES ITS SUCCESSOR Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was not triumphant until the inven- tion of written language, so the new order call it what you will : Chris- tianity, the Meaning of America, the Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy, Humanity IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 97 this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermen- tation now goes on apace. The World- War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon as a struggle of civiliza- tion against its successor. Alarmed and armed to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand it- self over territory which had been pre- empted and mapped out by social de- mocracy, and was being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth fore- shadowed in Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man. 98 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? But more significant than the World- War of the passing away of the old order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World- War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the real- ization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization. It would seem that the civilized, an- ticipating a move on the part of the humanized, and fearing an appropria- tion of the benefits of new inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 99 upon by the upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their ability and intention to turn all the forces of Na- ture and devices of reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the com- mon life. We are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic and political equality. Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of indus- trial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the freedom of the seas ioo IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? during times of peace. The aeroplane and the airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the meek of the earth to rush together to one another's rescue; and wireless telegraphy, as soon as it is established universally, will sound to them the alarum in the twinkling of an eye. All the new inventions are, as it were, God's detectives for the exposing of the subtle and disguised crimes of the great ; or they are God's captains for the mobilization of the scattered forces of the meek when the plot of an oppressor has been unearthed. The people need IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 101 only to realize that the new inventions are by their very nature breakers of power-monopolies, in order to find in them an irresistible incentive to rise and act in the cause of world-wide democratic initiative. High explosives, the gas-engine, the giant gun, sheets of flame, deadly gases, all these are with- in the reach of Christ's little ones to encircle their kingdom-that-is-coming against the attacks of inhuman humans. The new inventions are humanity's de- structors to annihilate civilization's de- stroyers. I have specified some of the twentieth century's inventions to show that, like the compass and the printing-press, they io2 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? will be scatterers of privileges to the masses. I might go on indefinitely add- ing to the list, but I will cite only one more. It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that a new way of making cheap paper was discovered so cheap that it became possible to sell great dailies for one cent. But this practice was not established until the twentieth century. And it was only a few years ago that the greatest news- paper of the world and a very strong- hold of upper-class monopoly was able, or driven, to reduce its price from threepence (six cents) to a penny. But I specify the case of the London Times because, like a miracle of divine healing, but entirely due to the cheapness of pa- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 103 per, is the change of its policy from that of brutal imperialism to the democratic one of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states. Now that the Times has been converted, we may be sure that the universe itself has come round to the side of the right, and has taken up the cause of the poor. By the pricking of my thumbs I know that something better than civilization this way comes. Dull indeed must be that man whose blood does not tingle with anticipation. Yet the physical in- ventions of the twentieth century are not to be compared in pregnancy of good with its less palpable, its spiritual, novelties. 104 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? XX. AGAINST THE MATERIALISTIC VIEW OF HISTORY Before passing, however, from the physical inventions to the new moral ideas and mental contacts, I must inter- polate a comment to save myself from misunderstanding. Generally, those who trace to mechanical utilities new epochs in the development of mankind proceed upon the materialistic theory of history. But this theory I have in no wise com- mitted myself to, for I count it to be false. It is true that I have traced all the great steps in human advancement to physical inventions, but I have in no word implied that the inventions them- selves were caused by anything material IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 105 whatsoever. And if they themselves were, as I believe, the result of man's mental and spiritual activities reacting against events, then my tracing of hu- man advancement to them implies no belief in the materialistic theory of his- tory. Every effect of the inventions must be set down ultimately not to them, but to their causes ; and their causes were mental. Casually I have said as much, in remarking several times that they took place by a happy chance, or by a stroke of insight on the part of some rare genius, or by the reaction of some mediocre person's intelligent vo- lition against some extraordinary expe- rience which made the idea of the invention so obtrusively evident that 106 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? even a mind not unusually gifted could scarcely have avoided lighting upon it. The only phrase I have used by which I cannot absolutely stand is the expression " by a happy chance " ; for I believe that the mental productions of each person are due not to uncaused chance, or to accident, but to trends of the social mind that have been set in motion by mental exigencies arising out of current events. As primitive peo- ples, however, have left no record of their mental sequences, we cannot say with confidence what were the exact experiences that led to the idea of using fire, or to any other device that trans- formed the relation of human beings to one another or to their material habitat. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 107 I only repeat that whatever caused the inventions caused all the remote effects of these, and that if the causes of the inventions were mental and spiritual, then an interpretation of history is not materialistic merely because it traces advancement to mechanical utilities. That I am right in tracing these to mental and spiritual causes is proved at least in the case of recent inventions. For we know that their causes were psychic ; we know the mental atmos- phere, and how it arose, that brought forth the telephone and aeroplane and submarine. We know that these were not due to physical necessities or to any material causes. They arose from the brooding of creative imaginations io8 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? disciplined in a method learned by re- flection upon former successes in discov- ery. We also know in what main par- ticulars this modern atmosphere differs from that of former centuries. But such questions are not germane to my cen- tral theme, and so I pass them over lightly. Let me then return without further delay from this digression which has been made in the interests, not of my argument, but of my self-respect as a student of social facts. XXI. CONTACT OF PEOPLES Consider, for instance, that at the be- ginning of our century, for the first time in more than fifteen hundred years, the Christian nations came into contact with IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 109 a mighty pagan power, and were com- pelled to acknowledge it as not only a political, but a moral, equal. Whoever knows the magical effect in the quick- ening of intellectual and spiritual life due to new contact with a contrasting type of national culture will agree that the meeting thus of Christendom with the so-called "heathen" world is a fact of prime significance in the history of man. Nor is it simply the contact of heathen and Christian on terms of moral equal- ity. There is another aspect to Japan's ascendancy and her recognition by the West. The East and the West meet at last. The psychic invasion of each by the other must be epoch-making and in the no IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? direction of the completeness and uni- fication spiritually of all mankind in a brotherhood of nations and nation-states. The new contact of heathen and Chris- tian, and of white and colored, of East and West, means that the exploitation of the dark races by nations more highly organized on a basis of self-interest is about to cease forever. With the hu- manization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes who never di- vided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the " have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical universe. Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many in Old England thought that there is nothing IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? in new under the sun ? Then I would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative political and social equality, of immi- grants from some fifty-one different na- tions of the Old World. These people will mix their blood, their tempera- ments, and their traditions, and not only will a new variety of human being emerge, but the mixing of opposites in idea and temperament will quicken self- consciousness and heighten mental power and speed up its activity. The opportu- nity of the blond beasts of prey has lain in the torpor and inactivity and igno- rance of the multitude. But I find no torpor in California. And where there ii2 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? is no one that will allow himself to be preyed upon, even blond beasts take up the new enterprise of co-operation among equals. This is an inevitable result of the contact of many varieties of unlikes, the unification, not of equals, but of supplementary equivalents. When such psychic conditions have prevailed for a century or more, it is inconceivable that trade can continue to consist of compe- tition between individuals and the per- mission of the successful to amass and hoard fortunes. Either production and distribution will become communal, or the community will tax large fortunes into the state and national treasury. But there are three other distinguish- ing characteristics of the twentieth cen- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? u 3 tury which make for the replacing of civilization by humanization, and for the transition of trade from the harshness of the law into the abounding grace of the gospel XXII. THE POWER TO TRANSMIT HUMAN LIFE, ITS SOCIAL CONTROL First, the limiting of population by the will of human individuals. In the beginning men stole fire from the gods ; but life they allowed the Almighty to continue to dispense at his own inscrut- able pleasure, while they remained his pleased but puzzled agents in its trans- mission. It was only in the eighties of the last century, after a hundred thou- sand years, that man hit upon the idea n 4 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? and the practice of controlling life as he had controlled fire. From the beginning, he had planted the fire-seed according to his own purpose and social need. And now at last he has come to look upon the life-seed as not simply in his keep- ing as a trust for another, but as his own property to control in the interest of his own future. Can human audacity reach higher ? Can the assumption of divine and creative responsibility by man out- strip this latest act of self-government ? From beast to citizen, did we say ? But have we not found the process during the last four hundred years to be from citizenship to godship, from creature to creator ? It was one of your American reformers who entitled a book Man as IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 115 Social Creator. From beast to citizen seemed dull enough ; but from citizen to God what intoxication of zest does this thought engender ! Can the creature dare it ? Is- this the great venture ? Is this the meaning of the travail of the ages ? Or is it only a process from citizen to man, from tamed beast to free spirit feeling the Soul of All at the inmost centre of himself, and rinding the means at last of incarnating that soul in the com- munity, in politics, trade, and domestic life? Howsoever the new facts and the newer outlook are to be interpreted, it becomes quite clear that if civilization was the taming of beasts, something that is not civilization has begun to assert itself. The liberating of citizens, as it n6 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? moves to triumphant attainment, must scrap many an institution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of taming animals, when young women can and know that they can as war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never choose for the fruit of their love. But, secondly, close upon the inven- tion of means for controlling the trans- mission of life has followed the idea that this control shall not rest with the in- dividuals most intimately concerned, but with the will of the community of IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 117 the nation of federated humanity. If a man has no exclusive right to do as he pleases with his power of labor, to with- hold it or direct it irrespective of the general welfare and the will of the com- monweal, how much less, say the ad- vocates of eugenic marriage, shall men and women be permitted to follow their own whim and their selfish pleasure as regards the use or waste of the power to communicate life? This new doctrine that men are only trustees for the nation and posterity in their central power to control the future quantity and quality of human beings whom they may bring into existence, recognizes no division of society into the tamed and the tamers. There is no class suggested of monopo- n8 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? lists of social power who will regulate the rest of the community, as the owner of cattle controls the breeding of them. The general will of the community, ad- ministered under diffused public opin- ion and through the educated judgment of the individual himself, will decide. Only in cases of what are agreed to be downright crimes will the law step in to condemn and prevent, and then only through agents who are directly account- able to an enlightened and alert public opinion. The retaining of this new mas- tery of man over the quantity and qual- ity of human life, by the communal conscience against all monopolists, is the transcendent feature of the new order. But if this be so, then trade, our system IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 119 of producing and distributing wealth, ceases to be merely a question of the control of labor and becomes a question of the control of the transmission of hu- man life. Such control might have been accounted a possible privilege among Virginian breeders of slaves. But so to regard it seems monstrous, now that chattel slavery has been universally con- demned, thanks to the triumphant level- lers of the last hundred years. What is more, all trade is beginning to be re- garded as a question ultimately, not of the manufacture of machines and their products, nor of the propagation of plants and animals, but of the begetting of spiritual agents, who in their turn are to become the makers and masters 120 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? of the universe in which they are to live. The third characteristic event of our century which is to help us to slough off civilization, as our ancestors ten thou- sand years ago rid themselves of the wild- beast features of barbarism and savagery, is the awakening of women. Their claim to social initiative and responsibility is the extremest possible reach of democratic self-assertion. The remarkable peculiarity of their entrance into trade is not, however, that they are women, but that they are the one half of mankind who have never worked for hire, but always from love, and who have desired the wage less than the approval of those they served. The IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 121 morals of trade, as it has existed under the relation of master to wage-earner, even the ethics of trades-unionism, can- not survive the censure of women, who on other principles demand for them- selves the right of maintenance by the state to protect them in the bearing and rearing of children and the making of homes, and the nursing of the wounded and the sick. Now that women no longer allow themselves as social agents to be ignored, they will insist that not only the morals of marriage and of demo- cratic relations must become humane, but that all trade, as well as all legisla- tion, must be guided by the eugenic motive. 122 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? XXIII. FOREIGN TRADE THE BEGETTER OF WARS I have presumed to say that modern trade discloses civilization in its acutest form. The strict sobriety of this asser- tion we cannot, perhaps, appreciate to the full, unless we note the relation of trade during the last three hundred years to aggressive warfare. There prevails in the public mind the false notion that somehow peace and trade are akin in spirit and identical in their interests. This notion has been assiduously foisted upon the public by kings of industry and some professors of sociology, who possibly believe that it is true. But the facts of history prove that every great IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 123 war during the last three centuries has been undertaken in the service of foreign traders, who call upon their government to back their claims. According to Sir John Seeley, the greatest political histo- rian of the British Empire, foreign trade and modern war have always been one and the same thing. Some small nation- state resented the advent and methods of the foreign traders, and began to pre- pare for self-defence, asserting that it wished to be left alone, and that it meant to defend its own sacred traditions. This the government that backed the traders would not permit, and a clash of arms ensued. Or two rival sets of foreigners were jealous of each other in their effort to possess one and the same market and 124 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? induced their respective governments to spring at each other's throats. Under such circumstances war does not always arise, because the mere show of vastly superior might is often sufficient to com- pel immediate submission. Such was the case when the United States in 1853 ex ~ hibited in the harbors of bewildered and terrified Japan a fleet of great steamships. The threatened nation, having admitted no foreigners since the Jesuits in the seventeenth century plotted against its political independence, and not know- ing how to use steam to propel engines, saw that there was no alternative to vio- lent conquest by their uninvited guests but peaceful submission on their own part. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 125 Such peace, however, is not the holy thing which some persons declare all peace to be. When a man holds up his hands in answer to the challenge of a highway robber, bloodshed is avoided; but the outrage is none the less detest- able because perfect quiet prevails. Nor is it the kind of social calm which the angels meant when they proclaimed peace on earth to men of good will. On the contrary, it is that stillness of un- challenged iniquity of which our Lord expressed his menacing hate when He declared that He came not to bring peace but a sword. Trade illustrates civilization in its highest degree of in- telligence and elaboration ; and foreign trade is only trade in its widest transac- 126 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? tions. But foreign trade being the cause of all war, the only way to end warfare is to displace civilization by a system of wealth produced and distributed under communal control. Then commerce will no longer be inspired by the finan- cial interest of private investors, but by the total welfare of the whole people of the nation. But I have touched upon the identity of war and trade only to show their vital connection with civilization as a whole. XXIV. THE OPPOSITE OF A "RETURN TO NATURE" Civilization is still advancing by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, at the same time, with a greater acceleration of de- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 127 velopment, the men are checkmating the master and transferring control and initiative to the will of the common- wealth. At least, not otherwise am I able to interpret the new deference for nationality which has been aroused in protest against aggressive militarism ; nor the kind of industrial legislation that has been enacted during the last decade in California and other western states, in New Zealand and Australia, and even in Italy and England. It all means that the new inventions, although at first seized upon by monopolists, are seen to be such as to provide channels through which the pent-up instincts and hopes of the masses can act with con- certed power. It means that also polit- 128 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? ical machinery is being devised for se- curing the public welfare and protecting opportunities for individual genius and talent. No man asks for more. The world over we have reached the thresh- old of collective democracy, wherein the consuming of material wealth will be shared with approximate equality and wherein social control will be retained by the collective will, to safeguard indi- vidual initiative, and will be adminis- tered by public servants who have proved their superior ability, but who remain subject to almost instantaneous recall. Such a substitute for civilization, how- ever, is the opposite of a return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It presupposes the highest IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 129 mastery of man over matter and social unity among all mankind co-operating as nation-states and federations of states. As regards external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpen- ter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, ani- mated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opin- ion, will appear to my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be the law of his own being unless 130 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? he has lost his manhood's centrality. A crushing indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing during the twenty- six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths have become but items among the general products of industry and governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the Brit- ish state, and the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of po- etic hermits. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 131 But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away, whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of trusts and mo- nopolies to the general will of the com- munity. In America you have changed your federal law and many of your state constitutions, in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise through any legal barrier to the full assertion of the mind of the common life. So in every particular of his cure for civilization Mr. Carpenter's worship of savagery and barbarism is being rejected as fantastic. We may return to uncooked fruits and grains. But what a task for 132 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? the most highly developed industrial state, to raise and distribute an adequate supply of grapes, apples, and nuts the year round for the 1,000,000,000 in- habitants of the globe ! What a call for many wizards of California to produce new species of luscious edibles ! It would seem to me that the curse of civilization has lain in the direction of too little of either cooked or uncooked food, instead of too much. If the common people are to come into their own, trade in every necessity and luxury must be more highly integrated. The difference of the new era as regards foreign commerce will chiefly be that nations as a whole by their governments will conduct it in- stead of private traders. In other words, IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 133 foreign trade will be nationalized, in the way that social democrats have long de- manded that land and capital should be. The community will own and control it through state agents for the common welfare. Nothing of good which civili- zation has brought forth will be lost, nor will the organization of wealth be relaxed. Machinery will be multiplied a thou- sandfold. Like the human body itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this unity domi- i 3 4 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? nating a multiplicity of interests is at- tainable only through the entire mechan- ism of external government. And again, as the man resides in all the organs of the body, but is himself no organ, and as by the central unity of his life-energy is able to rush the white corpuscles to any part that is wounded or poisoned, so the general will, the community-self of the social democratic state, is begin- ning to direct all the healing agencies in the body politic to the rescue of the un- fortunate. Such beneficence and benev- olence, systematized and alert, is more than civilization. It is Christianity, it is the doing unto the least of one's fellow- men what self-interest prompts one never to do; but its power is equal to the re- IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? 135 demptive goodness that inspires it. In motive and method it is not business, it is different from trade; for it is a prog- eny of pity. But nevertheless, it is so- cialized wealth and applied science and politics. It is government by the gov- erned. When civilization has been superseded by this democratic process, which in our century is advancing at such rapid gait, there will surely be in the sphere of re- ligion no more return to Nature than in that of economics. There will be no more the worship of any one instinct or organ, or any external object or agent. How could Carpenter have so far forgotten his own definition of health as to applaud 136 IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE? the primitive ritualistic worship of the glories of the human body and the pro- cession of the stars ? That ritual was itself the symptom of the break-up of man's character into multiplicity, and the in- subordination of specific organs. Surely when man has gained centrality of health, he will worship the unifying will which is dominant whenever health prevails. He will adore the spirit which makes the many one. But men will never gain that centrality of health until they have established this worship of the one heart that beats in every human breast and, being inspired with religious passion for it, have brought the entire economic order into conformity with its behests. Rtocriibe presif CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara College Library Santa Barbara, California Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. LD 21-10m-10,'48 (Blllls4)476 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000813743 2 HM 101 C6