THE DRAWBACKS OF CIVILIZATION.

Southland Times, Issue 969, 15 June 1868, Page 2

THE DRAWBACKS OF CIVILIZATION.

(From the "Saturday Review," March 21.) It is scarcely possible for anybody with the smallest turn for speculation to find himself among scenes of comparatively new civilization without wondering what it is that this extraordinary process is supposed to effect in the destinies of men. If he is content with a phrase, his wonder comfortably subsides in the accepted convicion that civilization is civilization; therefore it civilizes, and therefore it Is a fine and noble thing. But if he is of a temper not to be soothed by a phrase, the contrast between the new civilization of to-day, and the old barbarism which but yesterday it replaced suggests a good many ideas that yerhaps dO not fit in with the usual theories about the progress of the species, and tire growing happiness and elevation of man. Of course the contrast might just as well occur to to him in the centre of an old and polite country, but) for obvious reasons, it is under these circumstances Jess „ likely to impress him. The process has been more gradual, and so the_ contrast is less violent. The two extremes -of the progress coming less closely together, the antitihesis is in comparison blunt and remote. If one seeks the barbarous age in England, it is necessary to go. back ever so many hundred years in search of the people who lived in the forests, burnt human sacrifices in wicker cages, and painted themselves with woad. The long distance, and all that it means, breaks the shock of the contrast, and gives us instead something like the order and graduation of an intelligible development. It is when the interval has been short, when, a full-grown civilisation at once steps into the place of the old-bar-barism, when the names and traditions and almost the actual reminiscences of the savage survive in the midst of the institutions of a polished race, that : one is impressed by the H difference, and led to think of what the difference comes to. There are moments when the result and sum of the much vaunted process looks much less golden and glorious than common language is believed to imply. Civilization has its seamy side. If you are in a great city, where no more than a couple of hundred years ago the savage could make terms with the craftier. white man, who has since improved him pretty nearly off the face of the earth— and these cities are not rare in the New World, if they are not to be found in the Old — here it is more than likely that the drawbacks of civilization will stand first in the contemplative man's meditations. Here he may, without being thought too captious or perverse or morose, persuade

himself, at least for the hour, that the world deceives itself a good deal as to the unalloyed triumphs of the march of man to new ages. Nobody now believes in the virtue or bliss of the savage stage, but perhaps the enthusiast for the modern time is as extreme in his faith in our virtue and bliss as Rousseau and his school were about the primitive epochs in social life. Reaction in one direction makes men think too well of a stage when society was free from fetters, when wants were few, tastes simple, and habits unsophisticated. So reaction in another direction may make us estimate far more highly than they deserve the advantages of a time when, if wants are many, there are abundant means of gratifying them, if tastes are less simple they are more lofty, and if habits are more artificial they are also more wide and more humane. Men incline in one direction or in the other according as they look to the good things which the existence of an artificial society bestows, or to the good things which have had to be paid away as the cheap preliminary condition of greater boons.

At first we see only the advantages, and none of the drawbacks. We see superb cities rising up where, within the memory of man, was desolation and savagery; rows of wigwams suddenly disappear, and in their room stand, as if by magic, long boulevards of marble palaces, full of luxury and splendour. Therearesch6olsandalmsb.ouseßandacademies of music, where the " soul is waked by tender strokes of art." Where there was formerly one human creature there are now a thousand ; where there was formerly the stupor and monotony of the barbarian, there are now the energy and enterprise and helpful service of the civilized man. In America you can see this process go on under your very eyes. Once the frontier of civilization was Chicago. Then it was Omaha, five hundred miles more to the west. To-day it is Cheyenne, still further by another five hundred mile 3. The whistle of the locomotive and the screeching of the Cheyenne Indian may be heard together. In London, in the same way, we point to our local extension. What was only a few years back pasture land or waste is to-day covered with the gigantic mansions of the rich, or the densely thronged tenements of the poor. The thrusting back of the savage further and further, and the reclamation every day of more and more land for cities and suburbs, are going on with unexampled rapidity all over the globe. The multiplication and crowding of men, the spread and fulness of luxury, the increase of demand and the increase of supply, the growth of knowledge and the facilitation of the materials of life — this is the universal spectal. . Now and then a man may be pardoned for asking, What comes of it, and whither does it all tend ?

If men multiply, so does misery multiply. If luxury increases, so does j insatiable human desire ; and luxury, moreover, for some, means want for many. When Indians -whooped and fought on the banks of the Hudson or the Deleware, the squaw was content with a chaplet of shells, and a rag round her loins for decency. Her civilized successor insists on necklaces and bracelets from Paris, and what in the squaw we call naked, in the fine lady we call urn peu decolletee. Tbe difference is not wholly in favor of civilization. The squaw dressed herself scantily in rags for decency's sake. The fine lady undresses herself in lace and cambric for indecency's sake. Again, what is gained by the advance of some men to a civilized standard, if their advance still leaves increasing numbers behind them worse off than the savages were ? Eor the savage, being at least up to the mark of the highest social standard known to him, escaped that most ruinous of all sentiments— a consciousness of a degradation out of which there is neither desire nor means to make a way. The sediment that sinks to the bottom of great cities suffers all the hurt that comes from this fatal consciousness of a hopelessly sunk condition, which deliberately drives men and women to identify their good with evil. An Indian, in spite of his filth and rags and readiness to get drunk, yet has a dignity of manner which Louis the Eourteenth or one of his chamberlains could net have surpassed. The creature thinks himself a very fine fellow ; and on the whole, if a man must be dirty and drunken, is is better that he should be dignified and proud than that he should be only dirty and drunken, but be mean and devoid of all sense of self-respect into the bargain. To have saved anything from the moral wreck is by so much better than to have lost everything. The corruption of the best makes the worst, and no savage is so vile and brutal as the savage of a civilized society. That increase of population on which we are accustomed to pride ourselves, as though it were some prime credit to us, pretty unmistakeably means an increase of the sediment, if not relatively, still absolutely ; and that it should take place only absolutely is quite a bitter enough reflection. Eor though the number of depraved members of society may not grow in proportion to the total number, yet the quality of their depravity is likely to grow worse in proportion to the elevation of the standard of the best.

We may congratulate the Cheyenne Indian on having got the railway to the door of his wigwam, and he may in his conceit, imitated from his white skinned superiors, pity benighted ancestors who could not go their journeys without fatigue at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour. But then, if his ancestors could not do this, neither were they liable to be burnt to ashes, fifty at a time, in a railway carriage, as happened to some travellers in America two or three weeks ago. Even apart from ghastly horrors of this kind, one may now and again demand whether this endless facility of speedy locomotion is a boon without a drawback. To many persons it by no means appears in this purely rosy light ; to many persons, the sight of mankind scouring and bustling endlessly hither and thither oyer the face

of the earth, like eager, enev<j_^c ruts, with little bits of straw ov -ither rubbish packed ou their backs, is not in any way attractive or elevating. To be able to whisk yourself from tnis place to that in something like the twinkling of an eye is all very well under certain circumstances, but th t _ a roaiiy large portion of man's all too shori days should be passed in this infinite whisking about from here to yonder is no desirable end to have gained. On the contrary, that so much time should be given to mere locomotion as is the case with mercantile men in great commerc-inl countries is something rather to deplore than to crow oyer. The interchange of bales of goods is a noble thing, unquestionably ; but that the buyers and sellers also of the bales should rush to and fro at a moment's notice all over Europe and America, as if they were : themselves not much more than the bales which they are for ever buying and selling, is precisely the reverse of a noble thing. The convenience of being able to go from London to Edinburgh in a single night is obvious, if it is necessary that you should go that distance swiftly on some pressing affair. But is one to model one's existence and draw up the rules of one's life on the assumption that it is to be passed in the thick midst of these pressing affairs ? Or ought we not rather to look on tranquility and equilibrium and regularity as the normal condition of things? In the thousand encomiums which are poured forth upon steam and speed, do we often take into account the waste and' havoc which they make in "plain living" — how they practically shorten the days of a man ? England is not a very vast country, and, except for our maniacal bustlings over the Continent in the summer, we are comparatively domestic and stay-at-home. Our kinsman on the other side of the Atlantic live in i a country where distances are measured by many hundreds of miles, and where a journey of six-and- thirty or eight-and-forty continuous hours is thought of only as coming in the week's work, just in the ' course of business. . One would suppose ■ that mighty ends and high aims were ■ necessary to induce men to cut off slices from their three score and ten years of living with such profusion as this. The accumulation of a certain quantity of hard cash, however, is found to be an end mighty enough and high enough to justify men, m their own eyes, in shaping life on these lavish principles. Eeflections of this kind may lead us perhaps to consider how far the ideal types of a career which are most popular with our race deserve the elevation to which it is customary among us to raise them. We despise those less enterprising stocks which are content to live with an even tranquility, not thirsting too eagerly to be rich, not thinking the apex of civilization to have been reached when the land has been covered with railways, happy in some pursuit which demands moderate toil, which brings moderate fruits, and which leaves some room and some inclination for life itself, after the means of supporting it have been well gathered. Our Saxon contempt for this is premature and misplaced. The elements of a perfectly civilized life are not all included in our scheme. It is quite possible to imagine men accepting ideals in the light of which the ideal of the enterprising merchant must seem a meagre and meaningless distortion of human qualities, not so very much nobler than the barbarism which h« absurdly boasts that he is expelling. To buy English or American goods is no guarantee that a man has ceased to be barbarous. Indeed, even to manufacture and to sell them is not always found to be such a guarantee. The spirit in which a merchant aspires to have the biggest warehouse or the biggest turn-over of money is sometimes every bit as discreditable and as uncivilized as the spirit in which a savage aspires to have most scalps at his girdle. Untempered by other influences — too often despised influences — this barbarism is the natural issue and out-come of commerce. It is well worth while for everybody who has any chance to insist upon this in the commercial age, and in the two essentially and devotedly commercial peoples of the world. To go on mistaking mere commerce for civilization is one of the most vulgar and mischievous blunders possible. Not seldom the conditions which seem most favorable to abundant bartering are most hostile to j true and permanent civilization.