or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The
student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or
London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres;
but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men
who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor
problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance
for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and
we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is
doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most
dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which
the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of
study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is
accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the
details of that practical application of science which has changed
the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health
resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western
methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European
and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of
European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact
that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem
conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question
in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European
or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the
form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to
what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of
any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or
political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every
continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating
or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take
place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of
people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal
or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than
ever before.
So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern
civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of
modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The
movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces,
in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.
The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase
in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an
extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature.
In both directions the advance has been very great during the past
four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with
ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great
age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in
many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain
was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year
150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central
Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate
than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical
science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed
at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern
movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At
the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always
been--sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more
than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the
science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal
and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded,
the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from
what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity.
Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on
beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars;
and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements
there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some
respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There
were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than
the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance,
was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam
and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting
immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely
changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt
to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as
in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were
not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go
to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a
feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a
student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and
use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution
in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here
again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not
merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern
city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed
one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one
of the most formidable problems of modern life.
Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and
water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air
is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so
the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they
annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without
regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced
each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with
the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the
farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained
intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the
effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific
development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind
that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation
on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at
the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing
output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when
our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in
an ironless age--and, later on, in an age without coal--and will have
to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and
use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific
civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of
field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century,
more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power
that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine,
the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been
literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been
over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of
the human race.
The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note,
and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of
learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same
time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of
before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of
the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and
the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren
in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and
knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision,
differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as
the rifle is differentiated from the bow.
The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world
as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces
for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a
thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the
whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the
mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole
world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.
In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery
is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort
and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread
the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown,
and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the
machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern
civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Greco-Roman
civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the
Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were
then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement,
wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast
scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in
applied science--all these mark our civilization as they marked the
wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands
twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older
civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are
quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old
civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the
two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in
the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that
it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.
One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency
to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge.
When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is
always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness
of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life,
is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man
of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand,
merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will not assert that
in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome;
but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than
was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the
military history of the Greco-Roman period as compared with the history
of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of
European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change
was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days
of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when
the Roman republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled
with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in
the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states
described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do
their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly
ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any
infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to
an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers.
The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been
completed.
Now the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few
centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most
armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an
alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years’ War in
Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning
of the break-up of the great Polish kingdom, the regiments and brigades
of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every
army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place
played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants
appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they
were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically
every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared,
while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history.
This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil
War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as
we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the
war of independence. During the whole of that period the people had
been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War
broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning,
the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than
ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war
waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings
were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little
sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across
the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes,
dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always
intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the
Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides and the great majority of
the enormous masses of fighting men wholly disregarded, and were wholly
uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were, of course,
foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or
for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much
the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born.
Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true
citizens’ fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically
citizen armies as the Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great
age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the republic.
Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization
as compared with the later stages of the Greco-Roman or classic
civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics.
In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith,
politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar
was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous
fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his
political-military career. Augustus established imperial Rome on firm
foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired
by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington
and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the
immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations
culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the
incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp
contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries.
During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory
that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this
respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which
statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries
ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century
ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large,
and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be
an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion
that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident
of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking
generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life,
but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators,
German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers
which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability,
show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and
literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman
proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have
been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a
century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last
few generations have been either men of moderate means or, if men of
wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their
public services.
I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize
in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is
a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and
the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the
ancient Greco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which
the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances
are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the
fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest,
and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be
compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a
world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is
ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at
one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost
every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect
is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We
have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence,
a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have
before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.
Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop
only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has
been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course,
been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of
activity; and, although usually this set in motion other kinds of
activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements
have been the preeminent examples of this type. But they are not the
only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phœnicians, at almost
opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one
element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements
that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The
extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth
century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great
administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement
of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols,
and the perfection of their military organization rendered their
armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other
Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the
Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the imperial throne of
China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India.
The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism
were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting
men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into
bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows
of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease
any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they
had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted,
and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a
trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phœnician civilization was
almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it
left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint
indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their
many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell because
this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at
the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities
which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost
the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his
statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and
pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not
all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic
development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the
Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older
civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity
to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world’s surface;
the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities;
the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement--are all
these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and
terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be
in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go
down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity
for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we
have the wit and the courage and the honesty.
Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think
that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on
the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has
held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not
come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty
deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to develop any one set
of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others,
equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the
Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phœnician, nor the
subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.