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                               DECADENCE

                        _HENRY SIDGWICK MEMORIAL
                                LECTURE_

                                   by

                             THE RIGHT HON.
                       ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR, M.P.

                     [DELIVERED AT NEWNHAM COLLEGE,
                           JANUARY 25, 1908]


                               CAMBRIDGE
                        at the University Press
                                 1908




                               Cambridge:
                       PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
                        AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.




DECADENCE.


I must begin what I have to say with a warning and an apology. I must
warn you that the present essay makes no pretence to be an adequate
treatment of some compact and limited theme; but rather resembles those
wandering trains of thought, where we allow ourselves the luxury of
putting wide-ranging questions, to which our ignorance forbids any
confident reply. I apologise for adopting a course which thus departs
in some measure from familiar precedent. I admit its perils. But it is
just possible that when a subject, or group of subjects, is of great
inherent interest, even a tentative, and interrogative, treatment of it
may be worth attempting.

My subject, or at least my point of departure, is Decadence. I do
not mean the sort of decadence often attributed to certain phases of
artistic or literary development, in which an overwrought technique,
straining to express sentiments too subtle or too morbid, is deemed to
have supplanted the direct inspiration of an earlier and a simpler age.
Whether these autumnal glories, these splendours touched with death,
are recurring phenomena in the literary cycle: whether, if they be,
they are connected with other forms of decadence, may be questions well
worth asking and answering. But they are not the questions with which I
am at present concerned. The decadence respecting which I wish to put
questions is not literary or artistic, it is political and national.
It is the decadence which attacks, or is alleged to attack, great
communities and historic civilisations: which is to societies of men
what senility is to man, and is often, like senility, the precursor and
the cause of final dissolution.

It is curious how deeply imbedded in ordinary discourse are traces
of the conviction that childhood, maturity, and old age, are stages
in the corporate, as they are in the individual, life. “A young and
vigorous nation,” “a decrepit and moribund civilisation”--phrases like
these, and scores of others containing the same implication, come as
trippingly from the tongue as if they suggested no difficulty and
called for no explanation. To Macaulay (unless I am pressing his famous
metaphor too far) it seemed natural that ages hence a young country
like New Zealand should be flourishing, but not less natural that an
old country like England should have decayed. Berkeley, in a well-known
stanza, tells how the drama of civilisation has slowly travelled
westwards to find its loftiest development, but also its final
catastrophe, in the New World. While every man who is weary, hopeless,
or disillusioned talks as if he had caught these various diseases from
the decadent epoch in which he was born.

But why _should_ civilisations thus wear out and great communities
decay? and what evidence is there that in fact they do? These
questions, though I cannot give to them any conclusive answers, are
of much more than a merely theoretic interest. For if current modes
of speech take decadence more or less for granted, with still greater
confidence do they speak of Progress as assured. Yet if both are
real they can hardly be studied apart, they must evidently limit and
qualify each other in actual experience, and they cannot be isolated in
speculation.

Though antiquity, Pagan and Christian, took a different view, it
seems easier, _a priori_, to understand Progress than Decadence. Even
if the former be limited, as presumably it is, by the limitation of
human faculty, we should expect the ultimate boundary to be capable of
indefinite approach, and we should _not_ expect that any part of the
road towards it, once traversed, would have to be retraced. Even in the
organic world, decay and death, familiar though they be, are phenomena
that call for scientific explanation. And Weismann has definitely asked
how it comes about that the higher organisms grow old and die, seeing
that old age and death are not inseparable characteristics of living
protoplasm, and that the simplest organisms suffer no natural decay,
perishing, when they do perish, by accident, starvation, or specific
disease.

The answer he gives to his own question is that the death of the
individual is so useful to the race, that Natural Selection has, in
all but the very lowest species, exterminated the potentially immortal.

One is tempted to enquire, whether this ingenious explanation could be
so modified as to apply not merely to individuals but to communities.
Is it needful for the cause of civilisation as a whole, that the
organised embodiment of each particular civilisation, if and when
its free development is arrested, should make room for younger and
more vigorous competitors? And if so can we find in Natural Selection
the mechanism by which the principle of decay and dissolution shall
be so implanted in the very nature of human associations that a due
succession among them shall always be maintained?

To this second question the answer must, I think, be in the negative.
The struggle for existence between different races and different
societies has admittedly played a great part in social development. But
to extend Weismann’s idea from the organic to the social world, would
imply a prolonged competition between groups of communities in which
decadence was the rule, and groups in which it was not;--ending in the
survival of the first, and the destruction of the second. The groups
whose members suffered periodical decadence and dissolution would be
the fittest to survive: just as, on Weismann’s theory, those species
gain in competitive efficiency whom death has unburdened of the old.

Few will say that in the petty fragment of human history which alone
is open to our inspection, there is satisfactory evidence of any such
long drawn process. Some may even be disposed to ask whether there
is adequate evidence of such a phenomenon as decadence at all. And
it must be acknowledged that the affirmative answer should be given
with caution. Evidently we must not consider a diminution of national
power, whether relative or absolute, as constituting by itself a proof
of national decadence. Holland is not decadent because her place in
the hierarchy of European Powers is less exalted than it was two
hundred and fifty years ago. Spain was not necessarily decadent at
the end of the seventeenth century because she had exhausted herself
in a contest far beyond her resources either in money or in men. It
would, I think, be rash even to say that Venice was decadent at the
end of the eighteenth century, though the growth of other Powers, and
the diversion of the great trade routes, had shorn her of wealth and
international influence. These are misfortunes which in the sphere of
sociology correspond to accident or disease in the sphere of biology.
And what we are concerned to know is whether in the sphere of sociology
there is also anything corresponding to the decay of old age--a decay
which may be hastened by accident or disease, which must be ended by
accident or disease, but is certainly to be distinguished from both.

However this question should be answered the cases I have cited are
sufficient to shew where the chief difficulty of the enquiry lies.
Decadence, even if it be a reality, never acts in isolation. It is
always complicated with, and often acts through, other more obvious
causes. It is always therefore possible to argue that to these causes,
and not to the more subtle and elusive influences collectively
described as ’decadence,’ the decline and fall of great communities is
really due.

Yet there are historic tragedies which (as it seems to me) do most
obstinately refuse to be thus simply explained. It is in vain that
historians enumerate the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt
contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military
disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing
burdens, and waning wealth--the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our
eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel
that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic
should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of
some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with
the full explanations of which we are in search.

Consider for instance the long agony and final destruction of Roman
Imperialism in the West, the most momentous catastrophe of which we
have historic record. It has deeply stirred the imagination of mankind,
it has been the theme of great historians, it has been much explained
by political philosophers, yet who feels that either historians or
philosophers have laid bare the inner workings of the drama? Rome
fell, and great was the fall of it. But why it fell, by what secret
mines its defences were breached, and what made its garrison so
faint-hearted and ineffectual--this is not so clear.

In order to measure adequately the difficulty of the problem let us
abstract our minds from historical details and compare the position of
the Empire about the middle of the second century, with its position
in the middle of the third, or again at the end of the fourth, and
ask of what forces history gives us an account, sufficient in these
periods to effect so mighty a transformation. Or, still better, imagine
an observer equipped with our current stock of political wisdom,
transported to Rome in the reign of Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius,
and in ignorance of the event, writing letters to the newspapers on the
future destinies of the Empire. What would his forecast be?

We might suppose him to examine, in the first place, the military
position of the State, its probable enemies, its capacities for
defence. He would note that only on its eastern boundary was there
an organised military Power capable of meeting Rome on anything like
equal terms, and this only in the regions adjacent to their common
frontier. For the rest he would discover no civilised enemy along
the southern boundary to the Atlantic or along its northern boundary
from the Black Sea to the German Ocean. Warlike tribes indeed he
would find in plenty: difficult to crush within the limits of their
native forests and morasses, formidable it may be in a raid, but
without political cohesion, military unity, or the means of military
concentration;--embarrassing therefore rather than dangerous.
If reminded of Varus and his lost legions, he would ask of what
importance, in the story of a world-power could be the loss of a
few thousand men surprised at a distance from their base amid the
entanglements of a difficult and unknown country. Never, it would seem,
was Empire more fortunately circumstanced for purposes of home defence.

But (it might be thought) the burden of securing frontiers of such
length, even against merely tribal assaults, though easy from a
strictly military point of view, might prove too heavy to be long
endured. Yet the military forces scattered through the Roman Empire,
though apparently adequate in the days of her greatness would,
according to modern ideas, seem hardly sufficient for purposes of
police, let alone defence. An army corps or less was deemed enough
to preserve what are now mighty kingdoms, from internal disorder and
external aggression. And if we compare with this the contributions,
either in the way of money or of men, exacted from the territories
subject to Rome before the Empire came into being, or at any period of
the world’s history since it dissolved away, the comparison must surely
be entirely in favour of the Empire.

But burdens which seem light, if measured by area, may be heavy if
measured by ability to pay. Yet when has ability to pay been greater
in the regions bordering the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean than
under the Roman Empire? Travel round it in imagination, eastward
from the Atlantic coast of Morocco till returning westward you reach
the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and you will have skirted a region,
still of immense natural wealth, once filled with great cities, and
fertile farms, better governed during the Empire than it has ever been
governed since (at least till Algeria became French and Egypt British);
including among its provinces what were great states before the Roman
rule, and have been great states since that rule decayed, divided
by no international jealousies, oppressed by no fear of conquest,
enterprising, cultured. Remember that to estimate its area of taxation
and recruiting you must add to these regions Bulgaria, Servia, much
of Austria and Bavaria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain,
and most of Britain, and you have conditions favourable to military
strength and economic prosperity rarely equalled in the modern world
and never in the ancient.

Our observer however might, very rightly, feel that a far-spreading
Empire like that of Rome, including regions profoundly differing in
race, history and religion, would be liable to other dangers than
those which arise from mere external aggression. One of the first
questions, therefore, which he would be disposed to ask, is whether
so heterogeneous a state was not in perpetual danger of dissolution
through the disintegrating influence of national sentiments. He would
learn probably, with a strong feeling of surprise, that with the single
exception of the Jews, the constituent nations, once conquered, were
not merely content to belong to the Empire, but could scarcely imagine
themselves doing anything else: that the Imperial system appealed, not
merely to the material needs of the component populations, but also to
their imagination and their loyalty; that Gaul, Spain, and Britain,
though but recently forced within the pale of civilisation, were as
faithful to the Imperial ideal as the Greek of Athens or the Hellenised
Orientals of Syria; and that neither historic memories, nor local
patriotism, neither disputed succession, nor public calamities, nor
administrative divisions, ever really shook the sentiment in favour of
Imperial Unity. There might be more than one Emperor: but there could
only be one Empire. Howsoever our observer might disapprove of the
Imperial system he would therefore have to admit that the Empire, with
all its shortcomings, its absolutism and its bureaucracy, had solved
more successfully than any government, before or since, the problem of
devising a scheme which equally satisfied the sentiments of East and
West; which respected local feelings, encouraged local government; in
which the Celt, the Iberian, the Berber, the Egyptian, the Asiatic,
the Greek, the Illyrian, the Italian were all at home, and which,
though based on conquest, was accepted by the conquered as the natural
organisation of the civilised world.

Rome had thus unique sources of strength. What sources of weakness
would our observer be likely to detect behind her imposing exterior?
The diminution of population is the one which has (rightly I think)
most impressed historians: and it is difficult to resist the evidence,
either of the fact, or of its disastrous consequences. I hesitate
indeed to accept without qualification the accounts given us of the
progressive decay of the native Italian stock from the days of the
Gracchi to the disintegration of the Empire in the West: and when we
read how the dearth of men was made good (in so far as it was made
good) by the increasing inflow of slaves and adventurers from every
corner of the known world, one wonders _whose_ sons they were who, for
three centuries and more, so brilliantly led the van of modern European
culture, as it emerged from the darkness of the early Middle Ages.
Passing by such collateral issues, however, and admitting depopulation
to have been both real and serious, we may well ask whether it was not
the result of Roman decadence rather than its cause, the symptom of
some deep-seated social malady, not its origin. We are not concerned
here with the aristocracy of Rome, nor even with the people of Italy.
We are concerned with the Empire. We are not concerned with a passing
phase or fashion, but with a process which seems to have gone on with
increasing rapidity, through good times as well as bad, till the final
cataclysm. A local disease might have a local explanation, a transient
one might be due to a chance coincidence. But what can we say of a
disease which was apparently co-extensive with Imperial civilisation in
area, and which exceeded it in duration?

I find it hard to believe that either a selfish aversion to matrimony
or a mystical admiration for celibacy, though at certain periods the
one was common in Pagan and the other in Christian circles, were
more than elements in the complex of causes by which the result was
brought about. Like the plagues which devastated Europe in the second
and third centuries, they must have greatly aggravated the evil, but
they are hardly sufficient to account for it. Nor yet can we find
an explanation of it in the discouragement, the sense of impending
doom, by which men’s spirits were oppressed long before the Imperial
power began visibly to wane, for this is one of the things which, if
historically true, does itself most urgently require explanation.

It may be however that our wandering politician would be too well
grounded in Malthusian economics to regard a diminution of population
as in itself an overwhelming calamity. And if he were pressed to
describe the weak spots in the Empire of the Antonines he would be
disposed, I think, to look for them on the ethical rather than on the
military, the economic, or the strictly political sides of social life.
He would be inclined to say, as in effect Mr Lecky does say, that in
the institution of slavery, in the brutalities of the gladiatorial
shows, in the gratuitous distribution of bread to the urban mobs, are
to be found the corrupting influences which first weakened and then
destroyed the vigour of the State.

I confess that I cannot easily accept this analysis of the facts. As
regards the gladiatorial shows, even had they been universal throughout
the Empire, and had they flourished more rankly as its power declined,
I should still have questioned the propriety of attributing too
far-reaching effects to such a cause. The Romans were brutal while they
were conquering the world: its conquest enabled them to be brutal with
ostentation; but we must not measure the ill consequences of their
barbaric tastes by the depth of our own disgusts, nor assume the Gothic
invasions to be the natural and fitting Nemesis of so much spectacular
shedding of innocent blood.

As for the public distributions of corn, one would wish to have more
evidence as to its social effects. But even without fully accepting the
theory of the latest Roman historian, who believes that, under the then
prevailing conditions of transport, no very large city could exist in
Antiquity, if the supply of its food were left to private enterprise,
we cannot seriously regard this practice, strange as it seems to us, as
an important element in the problem. Granting for the sake of argument
that it demoralised the mob of Rome, it must be remembered that Rome
was not the Empire, nor did the mob of Rome govern the Empire, as once
it had governed the Republic.

Slavery is a far more important matter. The magnitude of its effects on
ancient societies, difficult as these are to disentangle, can hardly be
exaggerated. But with what plausibility can we find in it the cause of
Rome’s decline, seeing that it was the concomitant also of its rise?
How can that which in Antiquity was common to every state, have this
exceptional and malign influence upon one? It would not in any case be
easy to accept such a theory; but surely it becomes impossible when we
bear in mind the enormous improvement effected under the Empire both in
the law and the practice of slavery. Great as were its evils, they were
diminishing evils--less ruinous as time went on to the character of the
master, less painful and degrading to the slave. Who can believe that
this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy a civilisation,
which, in its vigour, it had helped to create?

Of course our observer would see much in the social system he was
examining which he would rightly regard as morally detestable and
politically pernicious. But the real question before him would not be
‘are these things good or bad?’ but ‘are these things getting better
or getting worse?’ And surely in most cases he would be obliged to
answer ‘getting better.’ Many things moreover would come under his
notice fitted to move his admiration in a much less qualified manner.
Few governments have been more anxious to foster an alien and higher
culture, than was the Roman Government to foster Greek civilisation.
In so far as Rome inherited what Alexander conquered, it carried out
the ideal which Alexander had conceived. In few periods have the rich
been readier to spend of their private fortunes on public objects.
There never was a community in which associations for every purpose of
mutual aid or enjoyment sprang more readily into existence. There never
was a military monarchy less given to wars of aggression. There never
was an age in which there was a more rapid advance in humanitarian
ideals, or a more anxious seeking after spiritual truth. There was much
discussion, there was, apart from politics, but little intolerance.
Education was well endowed, and its professors held in high esteem.
Physical culture was cared for. Law was becoming scientific. Research
was not forgotten. What more could be reasonably expected?

According to our ordinary methods of analysis it is not easy to say
what more _could_ be reasonably expected. But plainly much more was
required. In a few generations from the time of which I am speaking
the Empire lost its extraordinary power of assimilating alien and
barbaric elements. It became too feeble either to absorb or to expel
them: and the immigrants who in happier times might have bestowed
renewed vigour on the commonwealth, became, in the hour of its decline,
a weakness and a peril. Poverty grew as population shrank. Municipal
office, once so eagerly desired, became the most cruel of burdens.
Associations connected with industry or commerce, which began by freely
exchanging public service for public privilege, found their members
subjected to ever increasing obligations, for the due performance of
which they and their children were liable in person and in property.
Thus while Christianity, and the other forces that made for mercy, were
diminishing the slavery of the slave, the needs of the Bureaucracy
compelled it to trench ever more and more upon the freedom of the
free. It was each man’s duty (so ran the argument) to serve the
commonwealth: he could best serve the commonwealth by devoting himself
to his calling if it were one of public necessity: this duty he should
be required under penalties to perform, and to devote if necessary to
its performance, labour to the limits of endurance, fortune to the
last shilling, and family to the remotest generation. Through this
crude experiment in socialism, the civilised world seemed to be rapidly
moving towards a system of universal caste, imposed by no immemorial
custom, supported by no religious scruple, but forced on an unwilling
people by the Emperor’s edict and the executioner’s lash.

These things have severally and collectively been regarded as the
causes why in the West the Imperial system so quickly crumbled into
chaos. And so no doubt they were. But they obviously require themselves
to be explained by causes more general and more remote; and what were
these? If I answer as I feel disposed to answer--Decadence--you will
properly ask how the unknown becomes less unknown merely by receiving
a name. I reply that if there be indeed subtle changes in the social
tissues of old communities which make them, as time goes on, less
resistant to the external attacks and the internal disturbances by
which all communities are threatened, overt recognition of the fact
is a step in advance. We have not an idea of what ‘life’ consists in,
but if on that account we were to abstain from using the term, we
should not be better but worse equipped for dealing with the problems
of physiology; while on the other hand if we could translate life
into terms of matter and motion to-morrow, we should still be obliged
to use the word in order to distinguish the material movements which
constitute life or exhibit it, from those which do not. In like manner
we are ignorant of the inner character of the cell changes which
produce senescence. But should we be better fitted to form a correct
conception of the life-history of complex organisms if we refused to
recognise any cause of death but accident or disease? I admit, of
course, that the term ‘decadence’ is less precise than ‘old age’:
as sociology deals with organisms far less definite than biology. I
admit also that it explains nothing. If its use is to be justified at
all, the justification must depend not on the fact that it supplies an
explanation, but on the fact that it rules out explanations which are
obvious but inadequate. And this may be a service of some importance.
The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of
dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us
to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish
(as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide
the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the
fate of empires. National character is subtle and elusive; not to be
expressed in statistics nor measured by the rough methods which suffice
the practical moralist or statesman. And when through an ancient and
still powerful state there spreads a mood of deep discouragement, when
the reaction against recurring ills grows feebler, and the ship rises
less buoyantly to each succeeding wave, when learning languishes,
enterprise slackens, and vigour ebbs away, then, as I think, there is
present some process of social degeneration, which we must perforce
recognise, and which, pending a satisfactory analysis, may conveniently
be distinguished by the name of ‘decadence.’

I am well aware that though the space I have just devoted to the
illustration of my theme provided by Roman history is out of all
proportion to the general plan of this address, yet the treatment of
it is inadequate and perhaps unconvincing. But those who are most
reluctant to admit that decay, as distinguished from misfortune, may
lower the general level of civilisation, can hardly deny that in many
cases that level may for indefinite periods shew no tendency to rise.
If decadence be unknown, is not progress exceptional? Consider the
changing politics of the unchanging East[1]. Is it not true that there,
while wars and revolutions, dynastic and religious, have shattered
ancient states and brought new ones into being, every community, as
soon as it has risen above the tribal and nomad condition, adopts
with the rarest exceptions a form of government which, from its
very generality in Eastern lands, we habitually call an ‘oriental
despotism’? We may crystallise and re-crystallise a soluble salt as
often as we please, the new crystals will always resemble the old ones.
The crystals, indeed, may be of different sizes, their component
molecules may occupy different positions within the crystalline
structure, but the structure itself will be of one immutable pattern.
So it is, or seems to be, with these oriental states. They rise, in
turn, upon the ruins of their predecessors, themselves predestined
to perish by a like fate. But whatever their origin or history, they
are always either autocracies or aggregations of autocracies; and no
differences of race, of creed, or of language seem sufficient to vary
the violent monotony of their internal history. In the eighteenth
century theorists were content to attribute the political servitude of
the Eastern world to the unscrupulous machinations of tyrants and their
tools. And such explanations are good as far as they go. But this, in
truth, is not very far. Intrigue, assassination, ruthless repression,
the whole machinery of despotism supply particular explanations of
particular incidents. They do not supply the general explanation of
the general phenomenon. They tell you how this ruler or that obtained
absolute power. They do not tell you why every ruler is absolute.
Nor can I furnish the answer. The fact remains that over large and
relatively civilised portions of the world popular government is
profoundly unpopular, in the sense that it is no natural or spontaneous
social growth. Political absolutism not political freedom is the
familiar weed of the country. Despots change but despotism remains: and
if through alien influences, like those exercised by Greek cities in
Asia, or by British rule in India, the type is modified, it may well be
doubted whether the modification could long survive the moment when its
sustaining cause was withdrawn.

Now it would almost seem as if in lands where this political type was
normal a certain level of culture (not of course the same in each
case) could not permanently be overpassed. If under the excitement of
religion or conquest, or else through causes more complicated and more
obscure, this limit has sometimes been left behind, reaction has always
followed, and decadence set in. Many people indeed, as I have already
observed, take this as a matter of course. It seems to them the most
natural thing in the world that the glories of the Eastern Khalifate
should decay, and that the Moors in Morocco should lose even the memory
of the learning and the arts possessed but three centuries ago by the
Moors in Spain. To me it seems mysterious. But whether it be easy of
comprehension or difficult, if only it be true, does it not furnish
food for disquieting reflexion? If there are whole groups of nations
capable on their own initiative of a certain measure of civilisation,
but capable apparently of no more, and if below them again there are
(as I suppose) other races who seem incapable of either creating a
civilisation of their own, or of preserving unaided a civilisation
impressed upon them from without, by what right do we assume that
no impassable limits bar the path of Western progress? Those limits
may not yet be in sight. Surely they are not. But does not a survey
of history suggest that somewhere in the dim future they await our
approach?

It may be replied that the history of Rome, on which I dwelt a moment
ago, shews that arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the
prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races
or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon
experience their hopes of an awakening spring.

I am not sure, however, that this is the true interpretation of the
facts. There is no spectacle indeed in all history more impressive
than the thick darkness settling down over Western Europe, blotting
out all but a faint and distorted vision of Graeco-Roman culture, and
then, as it slowly rises, unveiling the variety and rich promise of the
modern world. But I do not think we should make this unique phenomenon
support too weighty a load of theory. I should not infer from it that
when some wave of civilisation has apparently spent its force, we
have a right to regard its withdrawing sweep as but the prelude to a
new advance. I should rather conjecture that in this particular case
we should find, among other subtle causes of decadence, some obscure
disharmony between the Imperial system and the temperament of the West,
undetected even by those who suffered from it. That system, though
accepted with contentment and even with pride, though in the days of
its greatness it brought civilisation, commerce, and security in its
train, must surely have lacked some elements which are needed to foster
among Teutons, Celts, and Iberians the qualities, whatever these may
be, on which sustained progress depends. It was perhaps too oriental
for the occident, and it certainly became more oriental as time went
on. In the East it was, comparatively speaking, successful. If there
was no progress, decadence was slow; and but for what Western Europe
did, and what it failed to do, during the long struggle with militant
Mahommedanism, there might still be an Empire in the East, largely
Asiatic in population, Christian in religion, Greek in culture, Roman
by political descent.

Had this been the course of events large portions of mankind would
doubtless have been much better governed than they are. It is not so
clear that they would have been more ‘progressive.’ Progress is with
the West: with communities of the European type. And if _their_ energy
of development is some day to be exhausted, who can believe that there
remains any external source from which it can be renewed? Where are the
untried races competent to construct out of the ruined fragments of our
civilisation a new and better habitation for the spirit of man? They
do not exist: and if the world is again to be buried under a barbaric
flood, it will not be like that which fertilised, though it first
destroyed, the western provinces of Rome, but like that which in Asia
submerged for ever the last traces of Hellenic culture.

We are thus brought back to the question I put a few moments since.
What grounds are there for supposing that we can escape the fate to
which other races have had to submit? If for periods which, measured
on the historic scale, are of great duration, communities which have
advanced to a certain point appear able to advance no further; if
civilisations wear out, and races become effete, why should we expect
to progress indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be
reversed?

To these questions I have no very satisfactory answers to give, nor
do I believe that our knowledge of national or social psychology
is sufficient to make a satisfactory answer possible. Some purely
tentative observations on the point may, however, furnish a fitting
conclusion to an address which has been tentative throughout, and aims
rather at suggesting trains of thought, than at completing them.

I assume that the factors which combine to make each generation what
it is at the moment of its entrance into adult life are in the main
twofold. The one produces the raw material of society, the process
of manufacture is effected by the other. The first is physiological
inheritance, the second is the inheritance partly of external
conditions of life, partly of beliefs[2], traditions, sentiments,
customs, laws, and organisation--all that constitute the social
surroundings in which men grow up to maturity.

I hazard no conjecture as to the share borne respectively by these two
kinds of cause in producing their joint result. Nor are we likely to
obtain satisfactory evidence on the subject till, in the interests of
science, two communities of different blood and different traditions
consent to exchange their children at birth by a universal process
of reciprocal adoption. But even in the absence of so heroic an
experiment, it seems safe to say that the mobility which makes possible
either progress or decadence, resides rather in the causes grouped
under the second head than in the physiological material on which
education, in the widest sense of that ambiguous term, has got to
work. If, as I suppose, acquired qualities are not inherited, the only
causes which could fundamentally modify the physiological character of
any particular community are its intermixture with alien races through
slavery, conquest, or immigration; or else new conditions which varied
the relative proportion in which different sections of the population
contributed to its total numbers. If, for example, the more successful
members of the community had smaller families than the less successful;
or if medical administration succeeded in extinguishing maladies to
which persons of a particular constitution were specially liable; or
if one strain in a mixed race had a larger birth rate than another--in
these cases and in others like them, there would doubtless be a change
in the physiological factor of national character. But such changes
are not likely, I suppose, to be considerable, except, perhaps, those
due to the mixture of races;--and that only in new countries whose
economic opportunities tempt immigrants widely differing in culture,
and in capacity for culture, from those whose citizenship they propose
to share.

The flexible element in any society, that which is susceptible of
progress or decadence, must therefore be looked for rather in the
physical and psychical conditions affecting the life of its component
units, than in their inherited constitution. This last rather supplies
a limit to variations than an element which does itself vary: though
from this point of view its importance is capital. I at least find
it quite impossible to believe that any attempt to provide widely
different races with an identical environment, political, religious,
educational, what you will, can ever make them alike. They have been
different and unequal since history began; different and unequal they
are destined to remain through future periods of comparable duration.

But though the advance of each community is thus limited by its
inherited aptitudes, I do not suppose that those limits have ever been
reached by its unaided efforts. In the cases where a forward movement
has died away, the pause must in part be due to arrested development
in the variable, not to a fixed resistance in the unchanging factor
of national character. Either external conditions are unfavourable;
or the sentiments, customs and beliefs which make society possible
have hardened into shapes which make its further self-development
impossible; or through mere weariness of spirit the community resigns
itself to a contented, or perhaps a discontented, stagnation; or it
shatters itself in pursuit of impossible ideals, or for other and
obscurer reasons, flags in its endeavours, and falls short of possible
achievement.

Now I am quite unable to offer any such general analysis of the causes
by which these hindrances to progress are produced or removed as would
furnish a reply to my question. But it may be worth noting that a
social force has come into being, new in magnitude if not in kind,
which must favourably modify such hindrances as come under all but the
last of the divisions in which I have roughly arranged them. This force
is the modern alliance between pure science and industry. That on this
we must mainly rely for the improvement of the material conditions
under which societies live is in my opinion obvious, although no one
would conjecture it from a historic survey of political controversy.
Its direct moral effects are less obvious; indeed there are many most
excellent people who would altogether deny their existence. To regard
it as a force fitted to rouse and sustain the energies of nations
would seem to them absurd: for this would be to rank it with those
other forces which have most deeply stirred the emotions of great
communities, have urged them to the greatest exertions, have released
them most effectually from the benumbing fetters of merely personal
preoccupations,--with religion, patriotism, and politics. Industrial
expansion under scientific inspiration, so far from deserving praise
like this, is in their view, at best, but a new source of material
well-being, at worst the prolific parent of physical ugliness in
many forms, machine made wares, smoky cities, polluted rivers, and
desecrated landscapes,--appropriately associated with materialism and
greed.

I believe this view to be utterly misleading, confounding accident with
essence, transient accompaniments with inseparable characteristics.
Should we dream of thus judging the other great social forces of which
I have spoken? Are we to ignore what religion has done for the world
because it has been the fruitful excuse for the narrowest bigotries
and the most cruel persecutions? Are we to underrate the worth of
politics, because politics may mean no more than the mindless clash of
factions, or the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers for
another? Is patriotism to be despised because its manifestations have
been sometimes vulgar, sometimes selfish, sometimes brutal, sometimes
criminal? Estimates like these seem to me worse than useless. All great
social forces are not merely capable of perversion, they are constantly
perverted. Yet were they eliminated from our social system, were each
man, acting on the advice, which Voltaire gave but never followed, to
disinterest himself of all that goes on beyond the limits of his own
cabbage garden, decadence I take it, would have already far advanced.

But if the proposition I am defending may be wrongly criticised, it
is still more likely to be wrongly praised. To some it will commend
itself as a eulogy on an industrial as distinguished from a military
civilisation: as a suggestion that in the peaceful pursuit of wealth
there is that which of itself may constitute a valuable social tonic.
This may be true, but it is not my contention. In talking of the
alliance between industry and science my emphasis is at least as much
on the word science as on the word industry. I am not concerned now
with the proportion of the population devoted to productive labour,
or the esteem in which they are held. It is on the effects which I
believe are following, and are going in yet larger measure to follow,
from the intimate relation between scientific discovery and industrial
efficiency, that I most desire to insist.

Do you then, it will be asked, so highly rate the utilitarian aspect
of research as to regard it as a source, not merely of material
convenience, but of spiritual elevation? Is it seriously to be ranked
with religion and patriotism as an important force for raising men’s
lives above what is small, personal, and self-centred? Does it not
rather pervert pure knowledge into a new contrivance for making money,
and give a fresh triumph to the ‘growing materialism of the age’?

I do not myself believe that this age is either less spiritual or more
sordid than its predecessors. I believe, indeed, precisely the reverse.
But however this may be, is it not plain that if a society is to be
moved by the remote speculations of isolated thinkers it can only
be on condition that their isolation is not complete? Some point of
contact they must have with the world in which they live, and if their
influence is to be based on widespread sympathy, the contact must be
in a region where there can be, if not full mutual comprehension, at
least a large measure of practical agreement and willing co-operation.
Philosophy has never touched the mass of men except through religion.
And, though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that
science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications.
Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be
illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which
startle or fatigue the imagination; but they will form no familiar
portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be
connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life. Critics
have made merry over the naive self-importance which represented
man as the centre and final cause of the universe, and conceived the
stupendous mechanism of nature as primarily designed to satisfy his
wants and minister to his entertainment. But there is another, and an
opposite, danger into which it is possible to fall. The material world,
howsoever it may have gained in sublimity, has, under the touch of
science, lost (so to speak) in domestic charm. Except where it affects
the immediate needs of organic life, it may seem so remote from the
concerns of men that in the majority it will rouse no curiosity, while
of those who are fascinated by its marvels, not a few will be chilled
by its impersonal and indifferent immensity.

For this latter mood only religion or religious philosophy can supply
a cure. But for the former, the appropriate remedy is the perpetual
stimulus which the influence of science on the business of mankind
offers to their sluggish curiosity. And even now I believe this
influence to be underrated. If in the last hundred years the whole
material setting of civilised life has altered, we owe it neither to
politicians nor to political institutions. We owe it to the combined
efforts of those who have advanced science and those who have applied
it. If our outlook upon the Universe has suffered modifications in
detail so great and so numerous that they amount collectively to a
revolution, it is to men of science we owe it, not to theologians or
philosophers. On these indeed new and weighty responsibilities are
being cast. They have to harmonise and to coordinate, to prevent the
new from being one-sided, to preserve the valuable essence of what is
old. But science is the great instrument of social change, all the
greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent
appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and
religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have
marked the development of modern civilisation.

It may seem fanciful to find in a single recent aspect of this
revolution an influence which resembles religion or patriotism in
its appeals to the higher side of ordinary characters--especially
since we are accustomed to regard the appropriation by industry of
scientific discoveries merely as a means of multiplying the material
conveniences of life. But if it be remembered that this process brings
vast sections of every industrial community into admiring relation
with the highest intellectual achievement, and the most disinterested
search for truth; that those who live by ministering to the common
wants of average humanity lean for support on those who search among
the deepest mysteries of Nature; that their dependence is rewarded
by growing success; that success gives in its turn an incentive to
individual effort in no wise to be measured by personal expectation of
gain; that the energies thus aroused may affect the whole character
of the community, spreading the beneficent contagion of hope and high
endeavour through channels scarcely known, to workers[3] in fields
the most remote; if all this be borne in mind it may perhaps seem not
unworthy of the place I have assigned to it.

But I do not offer this speculation, whatever be its worth, as an
answer to my original question. It is but an aid to optimism, not a
reply to pessimism. Such a reply can only be given by a sociology
which has arrived at scientific conclusions on the life-history of
different types of society, and has risen above the empirical and
merely interrogative point of view which, for want of a better, I
have adopted in this address. No such sociology exists at present, or
seems likely soon to be created. In its absence the conclusions at
which I provisionally arrive are that we cannot regard decadence and
arrested development as less normal in human communities than progress;
though the point at which the energy of advance is exhausted (if,
and when it is reached) varies in different races and civilisations:
that the internal causes by which progress is encouraged, hindered,
or reversed, lie to a great extent beyond the field of ordinary
political discussion, and are not easily expressed in current political
terminology: that the influence which a superior civilisation,
whether acting by example or imposed by force, may have in advancing
an inferior one, though often beneficent, is not likely to be self
supporting; its withdrawal will be followed by decadence, unless the
character of the civilisation be in harmony both with the acquired
temperament and the innate capacities of those who have been induced to
accept it: that as regards those nations which still advance in virtue
of their own inherent energies, though time has brought perhaps new
causes of disquiet, it has brought also new grounds of hope; and that
whatever be the perils in front of us, there are, so far, no symptoms
either of pause or of regression in the onward movement which for more
than a thousand years has been characteristic of Western civilisation.




NOTES:

[1] The ‘East’ is a term most loosely used. It does not here include
China and Japan and _does_ include parts of Africa. The observations
which follow have no reference either to the Jews or to the commercial
aristocracies of Phœnician origin.

[2] Beliefs include knowledge.

[3] This remark arises out of a train of thought suggested by two
questions which are very pertinent to the subject of the Address.

(1) Is a due succession of men above the average in original capacity
necessary to maintain social progress? and

(2) If so, can we discover any law according to which such men are
produced?

I entertain no doubt myself that the answer to the first question
should be in the affirmative. Democracy is an excellent thing; but,
though quite consistent with progress, it is not progressive _per se_.
Its value is regulative not dynamic; and if it meant (as it never does)
substantial uniformity, instead of legal equality, we should become
fossilised at once. Movement may be controlled or checked by the many;
it is initiated and made effective by the few. If (for the sake of
illustration) we suppose mental capacity in all its many forms to be
mensurable and commensurable, and then imagine two societies possessing
the same average capacity--but an average made up in one case of equal
units, in the other of a majority slightly below the average and a
minority much above it, few could doubt that the second, not the first,
would show the greatest aptitude for movement. It might go wrong, but
it would go.

The second question--how is this originality (in its higher
manifestations called genius) effectively produced? is not so simple.

Excluding education in its narrowest sense--which few would regard as
having much to do with the matter--the only alternatives seem to be the
following:

Original capacity may be no more than one of the ordinary variations
incidental to heredity. A community may breed a minority thus
exceptionally gifted, as it breeds a minority of men over six feet six.
There may be an average decennial output of congenital geniuses as
there is an average decennial output of congenital idiots--though the
number is likely to be smaller.

But if this be the sole cause of the phenomenon, why does the same race
_apparently_ produce many men of genius in one generation and few in
another? Why are years of abundance so often followed by long periods
of sterility?

The most obvious explanation of this would seem to be that in some
periods circumstances give many openings to genius, in some periods
few. The genius is constantly produced; but it is only occasionally
recognised.

In this there must be some truth. A mob orator in Turkey, a religious
reformer in seventeenth century Spain, a military leader in the
Sandwich islands, would hardly get their chance. Yet the theory of
opportunity can scarcely be reckoned a complete explanation. For it
leaves unaccounted for the _variety_ of genius which has in some
countries marked epochs of vigorous national development. Athens in
the fifth and fourth centuries, Florence in the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, Holland in the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, are the typical examples. In such periods the opportunities
of statesmen, soldiers, orators, and diplomatists, may have been
specially frequent. But whence came the poets, the sculptors, the
painters, the philosophers and the men of letters? What peculiar
opportunities had _they_?

The only explanation, if we reject the idea of a mere coincidence,
seems to be, that quite apart from opportunity, the exceptional stir
and fervour of national life evokes or may evoke qualities which in
ordinary times lie dormant, unknown even to their possessors. The
potential Miltons are ‘mute’ and ‘inglorious’ not because they cannot
find a publisher, but because they have nothing they want to publish.
They lack the kind of inspiration which, on this view, flows from
social surroundings where great things, though of quite another kind,
are being done and thought.

If this theory be true (and it is not without its difficulties) one
would like to know whether these undoubted outbursts of originality
in the higher and rarer form of genius, are symptomatic of a general
rise in the number of persons exhibiting original capacity of a more
ordinary type. If so, then the conclusion would seem to be that some
kind of widespread exhilaration or excitement is required in order to
enable any community to extract the best results from the raw material
transmitted to it by natural inheritance.


_Cambridge: Printed at the University Press._




Transcriber’s Note


In this file, text in _italics_ is indicated by underscores.

On page 41, “Greek in culture Roman by political descent” was corrected
to “Greek in culture, Roman by political descent.”