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
thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over
the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid,
the main-spring 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
Græco-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 Græco-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 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 Græco-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 Græco-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 pre-eminent examples of this type. But they
are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the
Phoenicians, 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 Phoenician 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 cannot 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 cannot 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 Phoenician,
nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert
destruction.
We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are
to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all,
the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life,
the fundamental and essential qualities--the homely, every-day,
all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not
in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the
average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy
children, then the State will topple, will go down, no matter what may
be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But
these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be
that power of organization, that power of working in common for a
common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion
during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are
even more important than the things of the body. We can well do
without the hard intolerance and and barrenness of what was worst
in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been
greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the
present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the
pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be
worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual
leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if he wished to
punish a province he would leave it to be governed by philosophers;
the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one better than
the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the value of men
of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed
to accept Tolstoy as a guide in social and moral matters; but it would
also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoy, not to profit by the lofty
side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men whose hard
arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put
them on a level with the bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they
denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our
civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most
highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science
during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has
philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and
though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse
than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when
his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of
conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along
the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind,
that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more
permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding
civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that
does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who
would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average
man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if
the day of need should arise!
It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which
morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall
all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the
rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often
accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man;
in which a high material development in the things of the body shall
be achieved without subordination of the things of the soul; in which
there shall be a genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of
those virile qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall
avail any race; in which the fullest development of scientific
research, the great distinguishing feature of our present
civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever
take the place of character--for, from the standpoint of the nation as
of the individual, it is character that is the one vital possession.
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is
now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the
nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love
of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the
world's progress is essential to the world's well-being. You, my
hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under
modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our
newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do
each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each
people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but
each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it
first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be
a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage
be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you
and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness
and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different
fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the
less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the
people of my own land.
* * * * *
THE CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
An Address at the Cambridge Union, May 26, 1910
Mr. President and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure for me to be
here to-day and to address you and to wear what the Secretary[10] has
called the gilded trappings which show that I am one of the youngest
living graduates of Cambridge. Something in the nature of a tract was
handed to me before I came up here. It was an issue of the _Gownsman_
[holding up, amid laughter, a copy of an undergraduate publication]
with a poem portraying the poet's natural anxiety lest I should preach
at him. Allow me to interpose an anecdote taken from your own hunting
field. A one-time Master of Foxhounds strongly objected to the
presence of a rather near-sighted and very hard-riding friend who at
times insisted on riding in the middle of the pack; and on one
occasion he earnestly addressed him as follows: "Mr. So and So, would
you mind looking at those two dogs, Ploughboy and Melody. They are
very valuable, and I really wish you would not jump on them." To which
his friend replied, with great courtesy: "My dear sir, I should be
delighted to oblige you, but unfortunately I have left my glasses at
home, and I am afraid they must take their chance." I will promise to
preach as little as I can, but you must take your chance, for it is
impossible to break the bad habit of a lifetime at the bidding of a
comparative stranger. I was deeply touched by the allusion to the lion
and the coat-of-arms. Before I reached London I was given to
understand that it was expected that when I walked through Trafalgar
Square, I should look the other way as I passed the lions.