The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for
civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it?--WHITMAN.
We find ourselves to-day in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of
society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to the most
optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us,
indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the
various races of man have to pass through--as children pass through
measles or whooping cough; but if it is a disease, there is this serious
consideration to be made, that while History tells us of many nations
that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of
some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in
which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more
normal and healthy condition. In other words the development of human
society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain
definite and apparently final stage in the process we call
Civilisation; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested.
Of course it may at first sound extravagant to use the word disease in
connection with Civilisation at all, but a little thought should show
that the association is not ill-grounded. To take the matter on its
physical side first, I find that in Mullhall's Dictionary of Statistics
(1884) the number of accredited doctors and surgeons in the United
Kingdom is put at over 23,000. If the extent of the national sickness is
such that we require 23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely
be rather serious! And _they_ do not cure us. Wherever we look to-day,
in mansion or in slum, we see the features and hear the complaints of
ill-health; the difficulty is really to find a healthy person. The state
of the modern civilised man in this respect--our coughs, colds,
mufflers, dread of a waft of chill air, &c.--is anything but creditable,
and it seems to be the fact that, notwithstanding all our libraries of
medical science, our knowledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are
actually less capable of taking care of ourselves than the animals are.
Indeed, talking of animals, we are--as Shelley I think points out--fast
depraving the _domestic_ breeds. The cow, the horse, the sheep, and even
the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming ever more and more subject to
disease, and are liable to ills which in their wilder state they knew
not of. And finally the savage races of the earth do not escape the
baneful influence. Wherever Civilisation touches them, they die like
flies from the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along with
it, and often its mere contact is sufficient to destroy whole races.
But the word Disease is applicable to our social as well as to our
physical condition. For as in the body disease arises from the loss of
the physical unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the form of
warfare or discord between the various parts, or of the abnormal
development of individual organs, or the consumption of the system by
predatory germs and growths; so in our modern life we find the unity
gone which constitutes true society, and in its place warfare of classes
and individuals, abnormal development of some to the detriment of
others, and consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites.
If the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should say it is--both in
its direct and its derived sense--to the civilised societies of to-day.
Again, mentally, is not our condition most unsatisfactory? I am not
alluding to the number and importance of the lunatic asylums which cover
our land, nor to the fact that maladies of the brain and nervous system
are now so common; but to the strange sense of mental unrest which marks
our populations, and which amply justifies Ruskin's cutting epigram:
that our two objects in life are, "Whatever we have--to get more; and
wherever we are--to go somewhere else." This sense of unrest, of
disease, penetrates down even into the deepest regions of man's
being--into his moral nature--disclosing itself there, as it has done
in all nations notably at the time of their full civilisation, as the
sense of Sin.[1] All down the Christian centuries we find this strange
sense of inward strife and discord developed, in marked contrast to the
naive insouciance of the pagan and primitive world; and, what is
strangest, we even find people glorying in this consciousness--which,
while it may be the harbinger of better things to come, is and can be in
itself only the evidence of loss of unity, and therefore of ill-health,
in the very centre of human life.
Of course we are aware with regard to Civilisation that the word is
sometimes used in a kind of ideal sense, as to indicate a state of
future culture towards which we are tending--the implied assumption
being that a sufficiently long course of top hats and telephones will in
the end bring us to this ideal condition; while any little drawbacks in
the process, such as we have just pointed out, are explained as being
merely accidental and temporary. Men sometimes speak of civilising and
ennobling influences as if the two terms were interchangeable, and of
course if they like to use the word Civilisation in this sense they have
a right to; but whether the actual tendencies of modern life taken in
the mass _are_ ennobling (except in a quite indirect way hereafter to be
dwelt upon) is, to say the least, a doubtful question. Any one who
would get an idea of the glorious being that is as a matter of fact
being turned out by the present process should read Mr. Kay Robinson's
article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for May, 1883, in which he
prophesies (quite solemnly and in the name of science) that the human
being of the future will be a toothless, bald, toeless creature with
flaccid muscles and limbs almost incapable of locomotion!
Perhaps it is safer on the whole not to use the word Civilisation in
such ideal sense, but to limit its use (as is done to-day by all writers
on primitive society) to a definite historical stage through which the
various nations pass, and in which we actually find ourselves at the
present time. Though there is of course a difficulty in marking the
commencement of any period of historical evolution very definitely, yet
all students of this subject agree that the growth of property and the
ideas and institutions flowing from it did at a certain point bring
about such a change in the structure of human society that the new stage
might fairly be distinguished from the earlier stages of Savagery and
Barbarism by a separate term. The growth of Wealth, it is shown, and
with it the conception of Private Property, brought on certain very
definite new forms of social life; it destroyed the ancient system of
society based upon the _gens_, that is, a society of equals founded upon
blood-relationship, and introduced a society of classes founded upon
differences of material possession; it destroyed the ancient system of
mother-right and inheritance through the female line, and turned the
woman into the property of the man; it brought with it private ownership
of land, and so created a class of landless aliens, and a whole system
of rent, mortgage, interest, etc.; it introduced slavery, serfdom and
wage-labour, which are only various forms of the dominance of one class
over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and
the policeman. Every race that we know, that has become what we call
civilised, has passed through these changes; and though the details may
vary and have varied a little, the main order of change has been
practically the same in all cases. We are justified therefore in calling
Civilisation a historical stage, whose commencement dates roughly from
the division of society into classes founded on property and the
adoption of class-government. Lewis Morgan in his _Ancient Society_ adds
the invention of writing and the consequent adoption of written History
and written Law; Engels in his _Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigenthums und des Staats_ points out the importance of the
appearance of the Merchant, even in his most primitive form, as a mark
of the civilisation-period; while the French writers of the last century
made a good point in inventing the term _nations policées_
(policemanised nations) as a substitute for civilised nations; for
perhaps there is no better or more universal mark of the period we are
considering, and of its social degradation, than the appearance of the
crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the rage of any decent North
American Indians if they had been told they required _policemen_ to keep
them in order!]
If we take this historical definition of Civilisation, we shall see that
our English Civilisation began hardly more than a thousand years ago,
and even so the remains of the more primitive society lasted long after
that. In the case of Rome--if we reckon from the later times of the
early kings down to the fall of Rome--we have again about a thousand
years. The Jewish civilisation from David and Solomon downwards
lasted--with breaks--somewhat over a thousand years; the Greek
civilisation less; the series of Egyptian civilisations which we can now
distinguish lasted altogether very much longer; but the important points
to see are, first, that the process has been quite similar in character
in these various (and numerous other) cases,[2] quite as similar in fact
as the course of the same disease in various persons; and secondly that
in no case, as said before, has any nation come _through_ and passed
beyond this stage; but that in most cases it has succumbed soon after
the main symptoms had been developed.
But it will be said, It may be true that Civilisation regarded as a
stage of human history presents some features of disease; but is there
any reason for supposing that disease in some form or other was any less
present in the previous stage--that of Barbarism? To which I reply, I
think there is good reason. Without committing ourselves to the
unlikely theory that the "noble savage" was an ideal human being
physically or in any other respect, and while certain that in many
points he was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think we must
allow him the superiority in some directions; and one of these was his
comparative freedom from disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew up among the
Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew the North American natives as
well as any white man has ever done, says (in his _Ancient Society_, p.
45), "Barbarism ends with the production of grand Barbarians." And
though there are no native races on the earth to-day who are actually in
the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism;[3] yet, if we take the
most advanced tribes that we know of--such as the said Iroquois Indians
of twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kaffir tribes round Lake
Nyassa in Africa, now (and possibly for a few years more) comparatively
untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the river Uaupes, thirty
or forty years back, of Wallace's _Travels on the Amazon_--all tribes in
what Morgan would call the _middle_ stage of Barbarism--we undoubtedly
in each case discover a fine and (which is our point here) _healthy_
people. Captain Cook in his first Voyage says of the natives of
Otaheite, "We saw no critical disease during our stay upon the island,
and but few instances of sickness, which were accidental fits of the
colic;" and, later on, of the New Zealanders, "They enjoy perfect and
uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and
old, men and women, crowded about us ... we never saw a single person
who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers we have
seen naked did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or
any marks that an eruption had left behind." These are pretty strong
words. Of course diseases exist among such peoples, even where they have
never been in contact with civilisation, but I think we may say that
among the higher types of savages they are rarer, and nothing like so
various and so prevalent as they are in our modern life; while the power
of recovery from _wounds_ (which are of course the most frequent form of
disablement) is generally admitted to be something astonishing. Speaking
of the Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, "Their state of health enables them to
survive injuries which would be almost instantly fatal to any civilised
European." Mr. Frank Oates in his Diary[4] mentions the case of a man
who was condemned to death by the king. He was hacked down with axes,
and left for dead. "What must have been intended for the _coup de grâce_
was a cut in the back of the head, which had chipped a large piece out
of the skull, and must have been meant to cut the spinal cord where it
joins the brain. It had, however, been made a little higher than this,
but had left such a wound as I should have thought that no one could
have survived ... when I held the lanthorn to investigate the wound I
started back in amazement to see a hole at the base of the skull,
perhaps two inches long and an inch and a half wide, and I will not
venture to say how deep, but the depth too must have been an affair of
inches. Of course this hole penetrated into the substance of the brain,
and probably for some distance. I dare say a mouse could have sat in
it." Yet the man was not so much disconcerted. Like Old King Cole, "He
asked for a pipe and a drink of brandy," and ultimately made a perfect
recovery! Of course it might be said that such a story only proves the
lowness of organisation of the brains of savages; but to the Kaffirs at
any rate this would not apply; they are a quick-witted race, with large
brains, and exceedingly acute in argument, as Colenso found to his cost.
Another point which indicates superabundant health is the amazing animal
spirits of these native races! The shouting, singing, dancing kept up
nights long among the Kaffirs are exhausting merely to witness, while
the graver North American Indian exhibits a corresponding power of life
in his eagerness for battle or his stoic resistance of pain.[5]
Similarly when we come to consider the social life of the wilder
races--however rudimentary and undeveloped it may be--the almost
universal testimony of students and travelers is that within its limits
it is more harmonious and compact than that of the civilised nations.
The members of the tribe are not organically at warfare with each other;
society is not divided into classes which prey upon each other; nor is
it consumed by parasites. There is more true social unity, less of
disease. Though the customs of each tribe are rigid, absurd, and often
frightfully cruel,[6] and though all outsiders are liable to be regarded
as enemies, yet _within those limits_ the members live peacefully
together--their pursuits, their work, are undertaken in common, thieving
and violence are rare, social feeling and community of interest are
strong. "In their own bands Indians are perfectly honest. In all my
intercourse with them I have heard of not over half-a-dozen cases of
such theft. But this wonderfully exceptional honesty extends no further
than to the members of his immediate band. To all outside of it, the
Indian is not only one of the most arrant thieves in the world, but this
quality or faculty is held in the highest estimation." (Dodge, p. 64.)
If a man set out on a journey (this among the Kaffirs) "he need not
trouble himself about provisions, for he is sure to fall in with some
hut, or perhaps a village, and is equally sure of obtaining both food
and shelter."[7] "I have lived," says A. R. Wallace in his _Malay
Archipelago_ vol. ii. p. 460, "with communities in South America and the
East, who have no laws or law courts, but the public opinion of the
village ... yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide
distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and
servant, which are the product of our civilisation." Indeed this
_community_ of life in the early societies, this absence of division
into classes, and of the contrast between rich and poor, is now admitted
on all sides as a marked feature of difference between the conditions of
the primitive and of civilised man.[8]
Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of the Barbarian, probably
no one will be found to dispute the contention that he is more
easy-minded and that his consciousness of Sin is less developed than in
his civilised brother. Our unrest is the penalty we pay for our wider
life. The missionary retires routed from the savage in whom he can awake
no sense of his supreme wickedness. An American lady had a servant, a
negro-woman, who on one occasion asked leave of absence for the next
morning, saying she wished to attend the Holy Communion? "I have no
objection," said the mistress, "to grant you leave; but do you think you
_ought_ to attend Communion? You know you have never said you were sorry
about that goose you stole last week." "Lor' missus," replied the
woman, "do ye think I'd let an old goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed
Lord and Master?" But joking apart, and however necessary for man's
ultimate evolution may be the temporary development of this
consciousness of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition of the
mind in which it is absent is the most distinctively _healthy_; nor can
it be concealed that some of the greatest works of Art have been
produced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom it was absent; and
could not possibly have been produced where it was strongly developed.
Though, as already said, the latest stage of Barbarism, _i.e._, that
just preceding Civilisation, is unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet
we have in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the various nations
indirect records of this stage; and these records assure us of a
condition of man very similar to, though somewhat more developed than,
the condition of the existing races I have mentioned above. Besides
this, we have in the numerous traditions of the Golden Age,[9] legends
of the Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that a great
number of races in advancing towards Civilisation were conscious at some
point or other of having lost a primitive condition of ease and
contentment, and that they embodied this consciousness, with poetical
adornment and licence, in imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise.
Some people indeed, seeing the universality of these stories, and the
remarkable fragments of wisdom embedded in them and other extremely
ancient myths and writings, have supposed that there really was a
general pre-historic Eden-garden or Atlantis; but the necessities of the
case hardly seem to compel this supposition. That each human soul,
however, bears within itself some kind of reminiscence of a more
harmonious and perfect state of being, which it has at some time
experienced, seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid; and this by
itself might give rise to manifold traditions and myths.