PART II.

THE RACES IN CIVILIZATION.

I.

CIVILIZATION is too complex a fact to be easily

analyzed or described. As a term it denotes the degree of perfection realized, in its collective and organized life, by a given society or state.

As a fact

it is not the progress of humanity, but the point this progress has reached in a given community; and this point as the blossom of past, but as the seed-plot of future progress. Were it perfect we should have perfect citizens in a perfect state. The more civilized a state is the more will it endeavour to perfect all its citizens; the more perfect the citizens the more civilized will be the state. A society can never be better than its constituent members. One highly cultured class in a state does not make it highly civilized. Its civilization is determined both as to quality and degree by the extent to which it creates and distributes the conditions of

social wellbeing, and the measure in which it secures their realization by the individual and the community. Civilization is to a state what culture is to a person, the harmony in being and action of the whole nature, the elaboration of the social organism into balanced and beautiful being by the full development of every social unit. There are as many varieties and degrees of civilization as of culture, but the one term like the other connotes an ideal element whose affinities are with the good and progressive rather than with the bad and decaying.*

The civilization of a given people and period stands expressed in the higher and more vital forms and forces of their social and national life. The forms the laws, institutions, customs, wealth, arts-exhibit the good already achieved and realized; the forces are the ideal tendencies and aims that struggle in the persons and through the forms to still better things. What civilizes must humanize-create throughout the society a fuller manhood. If the civilized stands opposed to the savage state, every vice is a tendency to revert, a de-civilizing influence, alien, however apparently inevitable.

* Guizot's analysis of the idea and elements of civilization is well known to every student of history ("Hist. de la Civilisation en Europe," Prem. Leçon). Professor Flint's criticism ("Philos. of Hist." i. 233, 234) is searching, and in many respects just. It would equally apply to what is here said were not the reference to the idea of civilization rather than the fact.

Modern civilization stands related to ancient as its heir, but as an heir who must, to retain his estate, enlarge it, improve its fields, utilize its watercourses, dig out its minerals, ameliorate its homes, and throng its rivers with cities, that instead of polluting shall purify the waters, instead of defacing shall beautify the land. Modern is more complex, many-sided, universal than ancient civilization, has in it more elements of progress and permanence, more seeds of degeneracy and decay. The older the state the simpler the society, the earliest social structures being the most rudimentary. Egypt was a sacerdotal state, a kingdom which stiffened and died because it could not escape from the iron hand of caste. Phoenicia existed for and by commerce-its very religion was made to minister to trade. Assyria was a political state, but its laws were summarized in the king. The civilizations that succeeded these were more complex, made up of a greater variety of elements, partly native, partly foreign. Assyria was Assyria was as ambitious as Persia, but the latter had a clearer idea of empire, of the relation the conquered countries ought to sustain to the conqueror. Greece was as commercial as Phoenicia, drove, indeed, her merchants from the Ægean and the Nile, but the mercantile was an element too little determinative to be distinctive of Greek culture. Into our own many past civilizations have been absorbed, and it has by the absorption been variously enriched. Our

political constitution is a splendid, though complex, expansion of the old Teutonic norm. Our laws, judicial and civil, show everywhere the influence of Rome. Our literature, art, and philosophy are permeated with Greek ideals and ideas. Our religion has come to us from Judæa, but from Judæa as interpreted on the intellectual side by Greece, on the political by Rome. And these elements, while mixed in the great crucible of our collective being, are singly active, affecting every phase of our personal, social, and political life.

But modern civilization, as compared with ancient, is more universal as well as more complex. Our world has grown vaster, but it has also grown more accessible in all its parts. Distance does not now divide. Commerce has made east and west, north and south meet. Much as our telegraph would have surprised a Greek, what it signifies as to the relations of men and peoples would have surprised him still more. He might have been amazed at reading in the morning a debate he had heard overnight, and been still more amazed to know that it could at the same moment be read at what remains of his own Athens, and in lands he never dreamed of beyond the sea. But what would have amazed him most is the unity of interests, the affinities of feeling, the sympathies of thought and action between distant and different peoples such swift and ceaseless intercourse implies. The merchant seeks and finds a

market everywhere. Everywhere the statesman sees a people with whom he has or ought to have relations, the student of nature or man an object he ought to study, the missionary a race he ought to evangelize. Thought and wealth circulate round the world. The ancient spirit was national, the modern is cosmopolitan. Where the idea of the state once stood the idea of

humanity now stands. The influence of the present is thus becoming in every society so potent as to modify the influence of the past, and combine with it in shaping the future. And so our civilization, by what it consciously assimilates, as by what it unconciously inherits, is being made ever fuller, more varied and resourceful, less local as to position, more universal as to character.

Its

And the individual grows with the society. Our culture is as varied, complex, manifold as our civilization. wealth does not burden the spirit, or its volume overflow the channel time has worn in it. Education is not so simple now as it was in ancient Greece, yet it is not, perhaps, any more difficult. The Dikaios Logos might despair of our youth who, though often familiar with the training ground, are not to be satisfied with the school of the harper and the ballads in praise of Pallas. His indeed was a glorious picture of the young man in his fresh and dewy spring-time, winsomely beautiful, gracefully exercising his energies as he ran with his comrade amid the