'The difference between progression and stationary inaction,' says one
of our greatest living writers, 'is one of the great secrets which
science has yet to penetrate.' I am sure I do not pretend that I can
completely penetrate it; but it undoubtedly seems to me that the
problem is on the verge of solution, and that scientific successes in
kindred fields by analogy suggest some principles--which wholly remove
many of its difficulties, and indicate the sort of way in which those
which remain may hereafter be removed too.
But what is the problem? Common English, I might perhaps say common
civilised thought, ignores it. Our habitual instructors, our ordinary
conversation, our inevitable and ineradicable prejudices tend to make
us think that 'Progress' is the normal fact in human society, the fact
which we should expect to see, the fact which we should be surprised if
we did not see. But history refutes this. The ancients had no
conception of progress; they did not so much as reject the idea; they
did not even entertain the idea. Oriental nations are just the same
now. Since history began they have always been what they are. Savages,
again, do not improve; they hardly seem to have the basis on which to
build, much less the material to put up anything worth having. Only a
few nations, and those of European origin, advance; and yet these
think--seem irresistibly compelled to think--such advance to be
inevitable, natural, and eternal. Why then is this great contrast?
Before we can answer, we must investigate more accurately. No doubt
history shows that most nations are stationary now; but it affords
reason to think that all nations once advanced. Their progress was
arrested at various points; but nowhere, probably not even in the hill
tribes of India, not even in the Andaman Islanders, not even in the
savages of Terra del Fuego, do we find men who have not got some way.
They have made their little progress in a hundred different ways; they
have framed with infinite assiduity a hundred curious habits; they
have, so to say, screwed themselves into the uncomfortable corners of a
complex life, which is odd and dreary, but yet is possible. And the
corners are never the same in any two parts of the world. Our record
begins with a thousand unchanging edifices, but it shows traces of
previous building. In historic times there has been little progress; in
prehistoric times there must have been much. In solving, or trying to
solve, the question, we must take notice of this remarkable difference,
and explain it, too, or else we may be sure our principles are utterly
incomplete, and perhaps altogether unsound. But what then is that
solution, or what are the principles which tend towards it? Three laws,
or approximate laws, may, I think, be laid down, with only one of which
I can deal in this paper, but all three of which it will be best to
state, that it may be seen what I am aiming at.
First. In every particular state of the world, those nations which are
strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked
peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best. Secondly. Within every
particular nation the type or types of character then and there most
attractive tend to prevail; and, the most attractive, though with
exceptions, is what we call the best character. Thirdly. Neither of
these competitions is in most historic conditions intensified by
extrinsic forces, but in some conditions, such as those now prevailing
in the most influential part of the world, both are so intensified.
These are the sort of doctrines with which, under the name of 'natural
selection' in physical science, we have become familiar; and as every
great scientific conception tends to advance its boundaries and to be
of use in solving problems not thought of when it was started, so here,
what was put forward for mere animal history may, with a change of
form, but an identical essence, be applied to human history. At first
some objection was raised to the principle of 'natural selection' in
physical science upon religious grounds; it was to be expected that so
active an idea and so large a shifting of thought would seem to imperil
much which men valued. But in this, as in other cases, the objection
is, I think, passing away; the new principle is more and more seen to
be fatal to mere outworks of religion, not to religion itself. At all
events, to the sort of application here made of it, which only amounts
to searching out and following up an analogy suggested by it, there is
plainly no objection. Everyone now admits that human history is guided
by certain laws, and all that is here aimed at is to indicate, in a
more or less distinct way, an infinitesimally small portion of such
laws. The discussion of these three principles cannot be kept quite
apart except by pedantry; but it is almost exclusively with the
first--that of the competition between nation and nation, or tribe and
tribe (for I must use these words in their largest sense, and so as to
include every cohering aggregate of human beings)--that I can deal now;
and even as to that I can but set down a few principal considerations.
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about
to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history. Ancient civilisation may
be compared with modern in many respects, and plausible arguments
constructed to show that it is better; but you cannot compare the two
in military power. Napoleon could indisputably have conquered
Alexander; our Indian army would not think much of the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand. And I suppose the improvement has been continuous: I have
not the slightest pretence to special knowledge; but, looking at the
mere surface of the facts, it seems likely that the aggregate battle
array, so to say, of mankind, the fighting force of the human race, has
constantly and invariably grown. It is true that the ancient
civilisation long resisted the 'barbarians,' and was then destroyed by
the barbarians. But the barbarians had improved. 'By degrees,' says a
most accomplished writer,[4] 'barbarian mercenaries came to form the
largest, or at least the most effective, part of the Roman armies. The
body-guard of Augustus had been so composed; the praetorians were
generally selected from the bravest frontier troops, most of them
Germans.' 'Thus,' he continues, 'in many ways was the old antagonism
broken down, Romans admitting barbarians to rank and office; barbarians
catching something of the manners and culture of their neighbours. And
thus, when the final movement came, the Teutonic tribes slowly
established themselves through the provinces, knowing something of the
system to which they came, and not unwilling to be considered its
members.' Taking friend and foe together, it may be doubted whether the
fighting capacity of the two armies was not as great at last, when the
Empire fell, as ever it was in the long period while the Empire
prevailed. During the Middle Ages the combining power of men often
failed; in a divided time you cannot collect as many soldiers as in a
concentrated time. But this difficulty is political, not military. If
you added up the many little hosts of any century of separation, they
would perhaps be found equal or greater than the single host, or the
fewer hosts, of previous centuries which were more united. Taken as a
whole, and allowing for possible exceptions, the aggregate fighting
power of mankind has grown immensely, and has been growing continuously
since we knew anything about it.
[4] Mr. Bryce
Again, this force has tended to concentrate itself more and more in
certain groups which we call 'civilised nations.' The literati of the
last century were for ever in fear of a new conquest of the barbarians,
but only because their imagination was overshadowed and frightened by
the old conquests. A very little consideration would have shown them
that, since the monopoly of military inventions by cultivated states,
real and effective military power tends to confine itself to those
states. The barbarians are no longer so much as vanquished competitors;
they have ceased to compete at all. The military vices, too, of
civilisation seem to decline just as its military strength augments.
Somehow or other civilisation does not make men effeminate or unwarlike
now as it once did. There is an improvement in our fibre--moral, if not
physical. In ancient times city people could not be got to
fight--seemingly could not fight; they lost their mental courage,
perhaps their bodily nerve. But now-a-days in all countries the great
cities could pour out multitudes wanting nothing but practice to make
good soldiers, and abounding in bravery and vigour. This was so in
America; it was so in Prussia; and it would be so in England too. The
breed of ancient times was impaired for war by trade and luxury, but
the modern breed is not so impaired.
A curious fact indicates the same thing probably, if not certainly.
Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held
their ground before the ancient. There is no lament in any classical
writer for the barbarians. The New Zealanders say that the land will
depart from their children; the Australians are vanishing; the
Tasmanians have vanished. If anything like this had happened in
antiquity, the classical moralists would have been sure to muse over
it; for it is just the large solemn kind of fact that suited them. On
the contrary, in Gaul, in Spain, in Sicily--everywhere that we know
of--the barbarian endured the contact of the Roman, and the Roman
allied himself to the barbarian. Modern science explains the wasting
away of savage men; it says that we have diseases which we can bear,
though they cannot, and that they die away before them as our fatted
and protected cattle died out before the rinderpest, which is
innocuous, in comparison, to the hardy cattle of the Steppes. Savages
in the first year of the Christian era were pretty much what they were
in the 1800th; and if they stood the contact of ancient civilised men,
and cannot stand ours, it follows that our race is presumably tougher
than the ancient; for we have to bear, and do bear, the seeds of
greater diseases than those the ancients carried with them. We may use,
perhaps, the unvarying savage as a metre to gauge the vigour of the
constitutions to whose contact he is exposed.
Particular consequences may be dubious, but as to the main fact there
is no doubt: the military strength of man has been growing from the
earliest time known to our history, straight on till now. And we must
not look at times known by written records only; we must travel back to
older ages, known to us only by what lawyers call REAL evidence--the
evidence of things. Before history began, there was at least as much
progress in the military art as there has been since. The Roman
legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the
shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them. There
has been a constant acquisition of military strength by man since we
know anything of him, either by the documents he has composed or the
indications he has left.
The cause of this military growth is very plain. The strongest nation
has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even subduing it, but
always prevailing over it. Every intellectual gain, so to speak, that a
nation possessed was in the earliest times made use of--was INVESTED
and taken out--in war; all else perished. Each nation tried constantly
to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons; by
conscious and unconscious imitation each nation formed a type of
character suitable to war and conquest. Conquest improved mankind by
the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce, which was then called
peace, improved them by the competition of training and the consequent
creation of new power. Since the long-headed men first drove the
short-headed men out of the best land in Europe, all European history
has been the history of the superposition of the more military races
over the less military of the efforts, sometimes successful, sometimes
unsuccessful, of each race to get more military; and so the art of war
has constantly improved. But why is one nation stronger than another?
In the answer to that, I believe, lies the key to the principal
progress of early civilisation, and to some of the progress of all
civilisation. The answer is that there are very many advantages--some
small and some great--every one of which tends to make the nation which
has it superior to the nation which has it not; that many of these
advantages can be imparted to subjugated races, or imitated by
competing races; and that, though some of these advantages may be
perishable or inimitable, yet, on the whole, the energy of civilisation
grows by the coalescence of strengths and by the competition of
strengths.