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THE SHADOW OF WEALTH.

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lives of the men and women who compose those classes, lives of monotonous toil without childhood and without old age, can hardly be matter of selfcongratulation to us, however imposing the results of their toil may be. When we celebrate the Progress of wealth, we must not forget that poverty attends it like its shadow. The direst destitution is found side by side with the amplest abundance. Mr. Henry George is entirely well founded when he writes:

"Just as a community realizes the conditions which all civilised communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress—just as closer settlement, and more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilisation of labour-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth, in consequence, increases not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to the population-so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The tramp' comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches.' "Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realised that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed-we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness."*

If, then, we take happiness in the sense of agreeable feeling, there would seem to be good grounds for holding that earlier generations were happier than the present, notwithstanding the Progress of

*Progress and Poverty, pp. 7, 6.

physical science. But if we take the word in the higher sense, and understand by it a psychical state arising from the equilibrium of the individual with his proper end, assuredly physical science is not its instrument. And so it may, perhaps, be justly said that we are in the habit of attaching too much importance to our advance in knowledge of natural law and to our application thereof to the material arts of life. It is, indeed, a condition of civilization that the people of a country should be able with moderate toil to procure what is necessary for comely living. But those necessaries have not an absolute value. They are a means, not an end. "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." Comfort is not the summum bonum of men nor of nations. There is no element of greatness, there is nothing which elevates, which ennobles, in mere utility. Material Progress does not correspond with, does not satisfy the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic needs of our nature. "The true test of civilization is not the census, not the size of cities, not the crops-no, but the kind of men the country turns out." So Emerson, who never said anything better: and he said many things excellently well. The real subject of Progress is man himself. And one chief token of his Progress is his possession of the power "to spurn man's common lure, life's pleasant things." No falser doctrine was ever formulated than Condorcet's-that human Progress is exclusively produced

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THE TEST OF CIVILIZATION.

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by improvement in intelligence. The law of man's Progress is moral. Its real factors are ethical qualities: probity, honour, justice, the capacity of self-sacrifice, of self-subordination to high ideals. So much is certain. And certain it is that a society in which moral Progress does not keep pace with intellectual and material Progress, is doomed to decadence.

As we look back upon those vast realms of extinction, the grave and the past, the mind is wont to be singularly fascinated by vanished civilisations, which in some respects were greater than our own. Who can gaze on the magnificent buildings grouped at Karnac round the hypostyle hall-"the greatest of man's architectural works," Mr. Ferguson judges --and think without wonder and amazement of those old Egyptian builders, with their highly organized government, their closely articulated social institutions, their wisdom to which the great Hebrew lawgiver, by whose moral precepts we nineteenth century Englishmen still chiefly live, owed so much : to which, indeed, the whole world owes so much, for they were the inventors and perfecters of writing. As we wander through the ruins of Nineveh and Persepolis, that tell us of the vast achievements of the Persians over whom Cyrus ruled, we picture to ourselves the living crowds once congregated there, and marvel at the fulness and activity and

complexity of their ordered life, at their keen susceptibility to the grace and beauty of existence. Still higher was the advance of Greece in the too brief period when it culminated in Athens. The world has never witnessed anything greater than the apogee of the Hellenic race, and its culture in what we call the age of Pericles. More enduring, because resting on deeper foundations, was the Roman state, which might well have seemed destined for eternity to the regal race that reared it: their mission to cast down the mighty, to spare the vanquished, to confer upon their ecumenical empire the blessing of peace. For it was not on the valour of their legionaries, the massive "iron hammers" of the whole earth, not on the skill of their generals, not on the wisdom of their statesmen, that their imperial fabric was based. No: the root from which their vast growth of empire sprang was that distinctively virile quality which they called virtue: devotion to the idea of law and to the claims of country: to truth, to justice, to endurance: in a word, to duty. "Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque," said their own poet. His testimony is true. This "prisca virtus" it was that made them by veritable right divine" lords of the human race.'

They perished and came to nought, those ancient civilizations. Great as they were in their achievements, splendid in their promises, they faded like

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VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS.

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an insubstantial pageant, and their place knew them no more. And the story of the decay and ruin of them all is substantially the same. It was no doubt from the corroding effects of luxury and self-indulgence, from the weakening of the springs of manly fortitude and heroic action, that the mighty Egyptian and Babylonian empires fell. Greek civilization was undermined by a sophistical excess of speculation which, calling in question the bases of ordered human existence, proved fatal to the permanence of all public and private relations and duties. That majestic Roman power collapsed because the foundation whereon it rested was overthrown. "Quid leges sine moribus vanæ proficiunt?" asked the poet. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire give the answer to the question. The laws remained; but the morality, which had been their life, had gone. All that noble ideal of plain living and high thinking, of virile and civic energy, which had made antique Rome what it was, had died, or survived only as "a fading verbal memory." "Faith and reverence and justice have fled from the earth to Olympus," wrote Marcus Aurelius. The verse of Euripides that "virtue is but a word, a delusion of nocturnal dreams," expressed the deep-seated popular conviction. And before many generations passed away, as Luitprand tells us, the very name of Roman became an imputation of baseness, of cowardice, of avarice, of

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