Chapter XI: Preface (10)

This last statement is in itself partly an answer to the position taken by Mr. Kidd, that there is for the individual no “rational sanction” for the conditions of progress. In a progressive community, where the conditions provide for the happiness of four-fifths or nine-tenths of the people, there is undoubtedly a rational sanction for progress both for the community at large and for the great bulk of its members; and if these members are on the whole vigorous and intelligent, the attitude of the smaller fraction who have failed will be a matter of little consequence. In such a community the conflict between the interests of the individual and the organism of which he is a part, upon which Mr. Kidd lays so much emphasis, is at a minimum. The stress is severest, the misery and suffering greatest, among precisely the communities which have made least progress--among the Bushmen, Australian black fellows, and root-digger Indians, for instance.

Moreover, Mr. Kidd does not define what he means by “rational sanction.” Indeed one of his great troubles throughout is his failure to make proper definitions, and the extreme looseness with which he often uses the definitions he does make. Apparently by “rational” he means merely selfish, and proceeds upon the assumption that “reason” must always dictate to every man to do that which will give him the greatest amount of individual gratification at the moment, no matter what the cost may be to others or to the community at large. This is not so. Side by side with the selfish development in life there has been almost from the beginning a certain amount of unselfish development too; and in the evolution of humanity the unselfish side has, on the whole, tended steadily to increase at the expense of the selfish, notably in the progressive communities about whose future development Mr. Kidd is so ill at ease. A more supreme instance of unselfishness than is afforded by motherhood cannot be imagined; and when Mr. Kidd implies, as he does very clearly, that there is no rational sanction for the unselfishnsess of motherhood, for the unselfishness of duty, or loyalty, he merely misuses the word rational. When a creature has reached a certain stage of development it will cause the female more pain to see her offspring starve than to work for it, and she then has a very rational reason for so working. When humanity has reached a certain stage it will cause the individual more pain, a greater sense of degradation and shame and misery, to steal, to murder, or to lie, than to work hard and suffer discomfort. When man has reached this stage he has a very rational sanction for being truthful and honest. It might also parenthetically be stated that when he has reached this stage he has a tendency to relieve the sufferings of others, and he has for this course the excellent rational sanction that it makes him more uncomfortable to see misery unrelieved than it does to deny himself a little in order to relieve it.

However, we can cordially agree with Mr. Kidd’s proposition that many of the social plans advanced by would-be reformers in the interest of oppressed individuals are entirely destructive of all growth and of all progress in society. Certain cults, not only Christian, but also Buddhistic and Brahminic, tend to develop an altruism which is as “supra-natural” as Mr. Kidd seemingly desires religion to be; for it really is without foundation in reason, and therefore to be condemned.

Mr. Kidd repeats again and again that the scientific development of the nineteenth century confronts us with the fact that the interests of the social organism and of the individual are, and must remain, antagonistic, and the latter predominant, and that there can never be found any sanction in individual reason for individual good conduct in societies where the conditions of progress prevail. From what has been said above it is evident that this statement is entirely without basis, and therefore that the whole scheme of mystic and highly irrational philosophy which he founds upon it at once falls to the ground. There is no such necessary antagonism as that which he alleges. On the contrary, in the most truly progressive societies, even now, for the great mass of the individuals composing them the interests of the social organism and of the individual are largely identical instead of antagonistic; and even where this is not true, there is a sanction of individual reason, if we use the word _reason_ properly, for conduct on the part of the individual which is subordinate to the welfare of the general society.

We can measure the truth of his statements by applying them, not to great societies in the abstract, but to small social organisms in the concrete. Take for instance the life of a regiment or the organization of a police department or fire department. The first duty of a regiment is to fight, and fighting means the death and disabling of a large proportion of the men in the regiment. The case against the identity of interests between the individual and the organism, as put by Mr. Kidd, would be far stronger in a regiment than in any ordinary civilized society of the day. Yet as a matter of fact we know that in the great multitude of regiments there is much more subordination of the individual to the organism than is the case in any civilized state taken as a whole. Moreover, this subordination is greatest in precisely those regiments where the average individual is best off, because it is greatest in those regiments where the individual feels that high, stern pride in his own endurance and suffering, and in the great name of the organism of which he forms a part, that in itself yields one of the loftiest of all human pleasures. If Mr. Kidd means anything when he says that there is no rational sanction for progress he must also mean that there is no rational sanction for a soldier not flinching from the enemy when he can do so unobserved, for a sentinel not leaving his post, for an officer not deserting to the enemy. Yet when he says this he utters what is a mere jugglery on words. In the process of evolution men and societies have often reached such a stage that the best type of soldier or citizen feels infinitely more shame and misery from neglect of duty, from cowardice or dishonesty, from selfish abandonment of the interests of the organism of which he is part, than can be offset by the gratification of any of his desires. This, be it also observed, often takes place, entirely independent of any religious considerations. The habit of useful self-sacrifice may be developed by civilization in a great society as well as by military training in a regiment. The habit of useless self-sacrifice may also, unfortunately, be developed; and those who practice it are but one degree less noxious than the individuals who sacrifice good people to bad.

The religious element in our development is that on which Mr. Kidd most strongly dwells, entitling it “the central feature of human history.” A very startling feature of his treatment is that in religious matters he seemingly sets no value on the difference between truth and falsehood, for he groups all religions together. In a would-be teacher of ethics such an attitude warrants severe rebuke; for it is essentially dishonest and immoral. Throughout his book he treats all religious beliefs from the same standpoint, as if they were all substantially similar and substantially of the same value; whereas it is, of course, a mere truism to say that most of them are mutually destructive. Not only has he no idea of differentiating the true from the false, but he seems not to understand that the truth of a particular belief is of any moment. Thus he says, in speaking of the future survival of religious beliefs in general, that the most notable result of the scientific revolution begun by Darwin must be “to establish them on a foundation as broad, deep, and lasting as any the theologians ever dreamed of.” If this sentence means anything it means that all these religious beliefs will be established on the same foundation. It hardly seems necessary to point out that this cannot be the fact. If the God of the Christians be in very truth the one God, and if the belief in Him be established, as Christians believe it will, then the foundation for the religious belief in Mumbo Jumbo can be neither broad, deep, nor lasting. In the same way the beliefs in Mohammed and Buddha are mutually exclusive, and the various forms of ancestor worship and fetichism cannot all be established on a permanent basis, as they would be according to Mr. Kidd’s theory.

Again, when Mr. Kidd rebukes science for its failure to approach religion in a scientific spirit he shows that he fails to grasp the full bearing of the subject which he is considering. This failure comes in part from the very large, not to say loose, way in which he uses the words “science” and “religion.” There are many sciences and many religions, and there are many different kinds of men who profess the one or advocate the other. Where the intolerant professors of a given religious belief endeavor by any form of persecution to prevent scientific men of any kind from seeking to find out and establish the truth, then it is quite idle to blame these scientific men for attacking with heat and acerbity the religious belief which prompts such persecution. The exigencies of a life and death struggle unfit a man for the coldness of a mere scientific inquiry. Even the most enthusiastic naturalist, if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark. A less important but amusing feature of his argument is that he speaks as if he himself had made an entirely new discovery when he learned of the important part played in man’s history by his religious beliefs. But Mr. Kidd surely cannot mean this. He must be aware that all the great historians have given their full importance to such religious movements as the birth and growth of Christianity, the Reformation, the growth of Islamism, and the like. Mr. Kidd is quite right in insisting upon the importance of the part played by religious beliefs, but he has fallen into a vast error if he fails to understand that the great majority of the historical and sociological writers have given proper weight to this importance.

Mr. Kidd’s greatest failing is his tendency to use words in false senses. He uses “reason” in the false sense “selfish.” He then, in a spirit of mental tautology, assumes that reason must be necessarily purely selfish and brutal. He assumes that the man who risks his life to save a friend, the woman who watches over a sick child, and the soldier who dies at his post, are unreasonable, and that the more their reason is developed the less likely they will be to act in these ways. The mere statement of the assertion in such a form is sufficient to show its nonsense to any one who will take the pains to think whether the people who ordinarily perform such feats of self-sacrifice and self-denial are people of brutish minds or of fair intelligence.

If none of the ethical qualities are developed at the same time with a man’s reason, then he may become a peculiarly noxious kind of wild beast; but this is not in the least a necessity of the development of his reason. It would be just as wise to say that it was a necessity of the development of his bodily strength. Undoubtedly the man with reason who is selfish and unscrupulous will, because of his added power, behave even worse than the man without reason who is selfish and unscrupulous; but the same is true of the man of vast bodily strength. He has power to do greater harm to himself and to others; but, because of this, to speak of bodily strength or of reason as in itself “profoundly anti-social and anti-evolutionary” is foolishness. Mr. Kidd, as so often, is misled by a confusion of names for which he is himself responsible. The growth of rationalism, unaccompanied by any growth in ethics or morality, works badly. The society in which such a growth takes place will die out, and ought to die out. But this does not imply that other communities quite as intelligent may not also be deeply moral and be able to take firm root in the world.

Mr. Kidd’s definitions of “supra-natural” and “ultra-rational” sanctions, the definitions upon which he insists so strongly and at such length, would apply quite as well to every crazy superstition of the most brutal savage as to the teachings of the New Testament. The trouble with his argument is that, when he insists upon the importance of this ultra-rational sanction, defining it as loosely as he does, he insists upon too much. He apparently denies that men can come to a certain state at which it will be rational for them to do right even to their own hurt. It is perfectly possible to build up a civilization which, by its surroundings and by its inheritances, working through long ages, shall make the bulk of the men and women develop such characteristics of unselfishness, as well as of wisdom, that it will be the rational thing for them as individuals to act in accordance with the highest dictates of honor and courage and morality. If the intellectual development of such a civilized community goes on at an equal pace with the ethical, it will persistently war against the individuals in whom the spirit of selfishness, which apparently Mr. Kidd considers the only rational spirit, shows itself strongly. It will weed out these individuals and forbid them propagating, and therefore will steadily tend to produce a society in which the rational sanction for progress shall be identical in the individual and the State. This ideal has never yet been reached, but long steps have been taken towards reaching it; and in most progressive civilizations it is reached to the extent that the sanction for progress is the same not only for the State but for each one of the bulk of the individuals composing it. When this ceases to be the case progress itself will generally cease and the community ultimately disappear.

Mr. Kidd, having treated of religion in a preliminary way, and with much mystic vagueness, then attempts to describe the functions of religious belief in the evolution of society. He has already given definitions of religion quoted from different authors, and he now proceeds to give his own definition. But first he again insists upon his favorite theory, that there can be no rational basis for individual good conduct in society, using the word rational, according to his usual habit, as a synonym of selfish; and then asserts that there can be no such thing as a rational religion. Apparently all that Mr. Kidd demands on this point is that it shall be what he calls ultra-rational, a word which he prefers to irrational. In other words he casts aside as irrelevant all discussion as to a creed’s truth.

Mr. Kidd then defines religion as being “a form of belief providing an ultra-rational sanction for that large class of conduct in the individual where his interests and the interests of the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the general interest of the evolution which the race is undergoing,” and says that we have here the principle at the base of all religions. Of course this is simply not true. All those religions which busy themselves exclusively with the future life, and which even Mr. Kidd could hardly deny to be religious, do not have this principle at their base at all. They have nothing to do with the general interests of the evolution which the race is undergoing on this earth. They have to do only with the soul of the individual in the future life. They are not concerned with this world, they are concerned with the world to come. All religions, and all forms of religions, in which the principle of asceticism receives any marked development are positively antagonistic to the development of the social organism. They are against its interests. They do not tend in the least to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the organism “in the general interest of the evolution which the race is undergoing.” A religion like that of the Shakers means the almost immediate extinction of the organism in which it develops. Such a religion distinctly subordinates the interests of the organism to the interests of the individual. The same is equally true of many of the more ascetic developments of Christianity and Islam. There is strong probability that there was a Celtic population in Iceland before the arrival of the Norsemen, but these Celts belonged to the Culdee sect of Christians. They were anchorites, and professed a creed which completely subordinated the development of the race on this earth to the well-being of the individual in the next. In consequence they died out and left no successors. There are creeds, such as most of the present day creeds of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, which do very noble work for the race because they teach its individuals to subordinate their own interests to the interests of mankind; but it is idle to say this of every form of religious belief.

It is equally idle to pretend that this principle, which Mr. Kidd says lies at the base of all religions, does not also lie at the base of many forms of ethical belief which could hardly be called religious. His definition of religion could just as appropriately be used to define some forms of altruism or humanitarianism, while it does not define religion at all, if we use the word religion in the way in which it generally is used. If Mr. Kidd should write a book about horses, and should define a horse as a striped equine animal found wild in South Africa, his definition would apply to certain members of the horse family, but would not apply to that animal which we ordinarily mean when we talk of a horse; and, moreover, it would still be sufficiently loose to include two or three entirely distinct species. This is precisely the trouble with Mr. Kidd’s definition of religion. It does not define religion at all as the word is ordinarily used, and while it does apply to certain religious beliefs, it also applies quite as well to certain non-religious beliefs. We must, therefore, recollect that throughout Mr. Kidd’s argument on behalf of the part that religion plays he does not mean what is generally understood by religion, but the special form or forms which he here defines.

Undoubtedly, in the race for life, that group of beings will tend ultimately to survive in which the general feeling of the members, whether due to humanitarianism, to altruism, or to some form of religious belief proper, is such that the average individual has an unselfish--what Mr. Kidd would call an ultra-rational--tendency to work for the ultimate benefit of the community as a whole. Mr. Kidd’s argument is so loose that it may be construed as meaning that, in the evolution of society, irrational superstitions grow up from time to time, affect large bodies of the human race in their course of development, and then die away; and that this succession of evanescent religious beliefs will continue for a very long time to come, perhaps as long as the human race exists. He may further mean that, except for this belief in a long succession of lies, humanity could not go forward. His words, I repeat, are sufficiently involved to make it possible that he means this, but, if so, his book can hardly be taken as a satisfactory defence of religion.

If there is justification for any given religion, and justification for the acceptance of supernatural authority as regards this religion, then there can be no justification for the acceptance of all religions, good and bad alike. There can, at the outside, be a justification for but one or two. Mr. Kidd’s grouping of all religions together is offensive to every earnest believer. Moreover, in his anxiety to insist only on the irrational side of religion, he naturally tends to exalt precisely those forms of superstition which are most repugnant to reasoning beings with moral instincts, and which are most heartily condemned by believers in the loftiest religions. He apparently condemns Lecky for what Lecky says of that species of unpleasant and noxious anchorite best typified by St. Simeon Stylites and the other pillar hermits. He corrects Lecky for his estimate of this ideal of the fourth century, and says that instead of being condemned it should be praised, as affording striking evidence and example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work. This is not true. The type of anchorite of which Mr. Lecky speaks with such just condemnation flourished most rankly in Christian Africa and Asia Minor, the very countries where Christianity was so speedily overthrown by Islam. It was not an example of the vigor of the immature social forces at work; on the contrary, it was a proof that those social forces were rotten and had lost their vigor. Where an anchorite of the type Lecky describes, and Mr. Kidd impliedly commends, was accepted as the true type of the church, and set the tone for religious thought, the church was corrupt, and was unable to make any effective defence against the scarcely baser form of superstition which received its development in Islamism. As a matter of fact, asceticism of this kind had very little in common with the really vigorous and growing part of European Christianity, even at that time. Such asceticism is far more closely related to the practices of some loathsome Mohammedan dervish than to any creed which has properly developed from the pure and lofty teachings of the Four Gospels. St. Simeon Stylites is more nearly kin to a Hindoo fakir than to Phillips Brooks or Archbishop Ireland.

Mr. Kidd deserves praise for insisting as he does upon the great importance of the development of humanitarian feelings and of the ethical element in humanity during the past few centuries, when compared with the mere material development. He is, of course, entirely right in laying the utmost stress upon the enormous part taken by Christianity in the growth of Western civilization. He would do well to remember, however, that there are other elements than that of merely ceremonial Christianity at work, and that such ceremonial Christianity in other races produces quite different results, as he will see at a glance, if he will recall that Abyssinia and Hayti are Christian countries.

In short, whatever Mr. Kidd says in reference to religion must be understood as being strictly limited by his own improper terminology. If we should accept the words religion and religious belief in their ordinary meaning, and should then accept as true what he states, we should apparently have to conclude that progress depended largely upon the fervor of the religious spirit, without regard to whether the religion itself was false or true. If such were the fact, progress would be most rapid in a country like Morocco, where the religious spirit is very strong indeed, far stronger than in any enlightened Christian country, but where, in reality, the religious development has largely crushed out the ethical and moral development, so that the country has gone steadily backward. A little philosophic study would convince Mr. Kidd that while the ethical and moral development of a nation may, in the case of certain religions, be based on those religions and develop with them and on the lines laid down by them, yet that in other countries where they develop at all they have to develop right in the teeth of the dominant religious beliefs, while in yet others they may develop entirely independent of them. If he doubts this let him examine the condition of the Soudan under the Mahdi, where what he calls the ultra-rational and supra-natural sanctions were accepted without question, and governed the lives of the people to the exclusion alike of reason and morality. He will hardly assert that the Soudan is more progressive than say Scotland or Minnesota, where there is less of the spirit which he calls religious and which old-fashioned folk would call superstitious.

Mr. Kidd’s position in reference to the central feature of his argument is radically false; but he handles some of his other themes very well. He shows clearly in his excellent chapter on modern socialism that a state of retrogression must ensue if all incentives to strife and competition are withdrawn. He does not show quite as clearly as he should that over-competition and too severe stress make the race deteriorate instead of improving; but he does show that there must be some competition, that there must be some strife. He makes it clear also that the true function of the State, as it interferes in social life, should be to make the chances of competition more even, not to abolish them. We wish the best men; and though we pity the man that falls or lags behind in the race, we do not on that account crown him with the victor’s wreath. We insist that the race shall be run on fairer terms than before because we remove all handicaps. We thus tend to make it more than ever a test of the real merits of the victor, and this means that the victor must strive heart and soul for success. Mr. Kidd’s attitude in describing socialism is excellent. He sympathizes with the wrongs which the socialistic reformer seeks to redress, but he insists that these wrongs must not be redressed, as the socialists would have them, at the cost of the welfare of mankind.

Mr. Kidd also sees that the movement for political equality has nearly come to an end, for its purpose has been nearly achieved. To it must now succeed a movement to bring all people into the rivalry of life on equal conditions of social opportunity. This is a very important point, and he deserves the utmost credit for bringing it out. It is the great central feature in the development of our time, and Mr. Kidd has seen it so clearly and presented it so forcibly that we cannot but regret that he should be so befogged in other portions of his argument.

Mr. Kidd has our cordial sympathy when he lays stress on the fact that our evolution cannot be called primarily intellectual. Of course there must be an intellectual evolution, too, and Mr. Kidd perhaps fails in not making this sufficiently plain. A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else; but the prime factor in the preservation of a race is its power to attain a high degree of social efficiency. Love of order, ability to fight well and breed well, capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community, these and similar rather humdrum qualities go to make up the sum of social efficiency. The race that has them is sure to overturn the race whose members have brilliant intellects, but who are cold and selfish and timid, who do not breed well or fight well, and who are not capable of disinterested love of the community. In other words, character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual. We need intellect, and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character; but if we must choose between the two we choose character without a moment’s hesitation.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] _North American Review_, July, 1895.

XV

THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY[23]

Few more melancholy books have been written than Mr. Brooks Adams’s _Law of Civilization and Decay_. It is a marvel of compressed statement. In a volume of less than four hundred pages Mr. Adams singles out some of the vital factors in the growth and evolution of civilized life during the last two thousand years; and so brilliant is his discussion of these factors as to give, though but a glimpse, yet one of the most vivid glimpses ever given, of some of the most important features in the world-life of Christendom. Of some of the features only; for a fundamentally defective point in Mr. Adams’s brilliant book is his failure to present certain phases of the life of the nations,--phases which are just as important as those which he discusses with such vigorous ability. Furthermore, he disregards not a few facts which would throw light on others, the weight of which he fully recognizes. Both these shortcomings are very natural in a writer who possesses an entirely original point of view, who is the first man to see clearly certain things that to his predecessors have been nebulous, and who writes with a fervent intensity of conviction, even in his bitterest cynicism, such as we are apt to associate rather with the prophet and reformer than with a historian to whom prophet and reformer alike appeal no more than do their antitypes. It is a rare thing for a historian to make a distinct contribution to the philosophy of history; and this Mr. Adams has done. Naturally enough, he, like other men who break new ground, tends here and there to draw a devious furrow.

The book is replete with vivid writing, and with sentences and paragraphs which stand out in the memory as marvels in the art of presenting the vital features of a subject with a few master-strokes. The story of the Crusades, the outline of the English conquest of India, and the short tale of the rise of the house of Rothschild, are masterpieces. Nowhere else is it possible to find in the same compass any description of the Crusades so profound in its appreciation of the motives behind them, so startling in the vigor with which the chief actors, and the chief events, are portrayed. Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that it is in the description of the Crusades that Mr. Adams is at his best. He is dealing with a giant movement of humanity; and he grasps not only the colossal outward manifestations, but also the spirit itself, and, above all, the strange and sinister changes which that spirit underwent. His mere description of the Baronies set up by the Crusaders in the conquered Holy Land, with their loose feudal government, brings them before the reader’s eyes as few volumes specially devoted to the subject could. It is difficult to write of a fortress and make a pen-picture which will always stay in the mind; yet this is what Mr. Adams has done in dealing with the grim religious castles, terrible in size and power, which were built by the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital as bulwarks against Saracen might. He is not only a scholar of much research, but a student of art, who is so much more than a mere student as to be thrilled and possessed by what he studies. He shows, with a beauty and vigor of style not unbecoming his subject, how profoundly the art of Europe was affected by the Crusades. It is not every one who can write with equal interest of sacred architecture and military engineering, who can appreciate alike the marvels of Gothic cathedrals and the frowning strength of feudal fortresses, and who furthermore can trace their inter-relation.

The story of the taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders who followed the lead of the blind Doge Dandolo is told with an almost brutal ruthlessness quite befitting the deed itself. Nowhere else in the book is Mr. Adams happier in his insistence upon the conflict between what he calls the economic and the imaginative spirits. The incident sets well with his favorite theory of the inevitable triumph of the economic over the imaginative man, as societies grow centralized, and the no less inevitable fossilization and ruin of the body politic which this very triumph itself ultimately entails. The history of the English conquest of India is only less vividly told. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that one of Mr. Adams’s many merits is his contemptuous refusal to be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. He sees Macaulay’s greatness as a historian, and his essential truthfulness on many of the very points where he has been most sharply criticised.

Mr. Adams’s book, however, is far more than a mere succession of brilliant episodes. He fully sees that the value of facts lies in their relation to one another; and from the facts as he sees them he deduces certain laws with more than a Thucydidean indifference as to his own individual approval or disapproval of the development. The life of nations, like any other form of life, is but one manifestation of energy; and Mr. Adams’s decidedly gloomy philosophy of life may be gathered from the fact that he places fear and greed as the two forms of energy which stand conspicuously predominant; fear in the earlier, and greed in the later, stages of evolution from barbarism to civilization. Civilization itself he regards merely as the history of the movement from a condition of physical distribution to one of physical concentration. During the earlier stages of this movement the imaginative man--the man who stands in fear of a priesthood--is, in his opinion, the representative type, while with him, and almost equally typical, stand the soldier and the artist. As consolidation advances, the economic man--the man of industry, trade, and capital--tends to supplant the emotional and artistic types of manhood, and finally himself develops along two lines,--“the usurer in his most formidable aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive on scanty nutriment.” These two very unattractive types are, in his belief, the inevitable final products of all civilization, as civilization has hitherto developed; and when they have once been produced there follows either a stationary period, during which the whole body politic gradually ossifies and atrophies, or else a period of utter disintegration.

This is not a pleasant theory; it is in many respects an entirely false theory; but nevertheless there is in it a very ugly element of truth. One does not have to accept either all Mr. Adams’s theories or all his facts in order to recognize more than one disagreeable resemblance between the world as it is to-day, and the Roman world under the Empire, or the Greek world under the successors of Alexander. Where he errs is in his failure to appreciate the fundamental differences which utterly destroy any real parallelism between the two sets of cases. Indeed, his zeal in championing his theories leads him at times into positions which are seen at a glance to be untenable.

Probably Mr. Adams’s account of the English Reformation, and of Henry VIII. and his instruments, is far nearer the truth than Froude’s. But his view of the evils upon which the reformers as a whole waged war, and of the spirit which lay behind the real leaders and spurred them on, is certainly less accurate than the view given by Froude in his _Erasmus_ and _Council of Trent_. It can be partly corrected by the study of a much less readable book--Mr. Henry C. Lea’s work on _The Inquisition_. Yet Mr. Adams’s description of the English Reformation is very powerful, and has in it a vein of bitter truth; though on the whole it is perhaps not so well done as his account of the suppression of the Templars in France. If he can be said to have any heroes, the Templars must certainly be numbered among them.

He is at his best in describing the imaginative man, and especially the imaginative man whose energy manifests itself in the profession of arms. His description of the tremendous change which passed over Europe during the centuries which saw, what is commonly called, the decay of faith is especially noteworthy. In no other history are there to be found two sentences which portray more vividly the reasons for the triumph of the great Pope Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry, than these:

“To Henry’s soldiers the world was a vast space peopled by those fantastic beings which are still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of Rome, and his army, melting from the Emperor under a nameless horror, left him helpless.”

His account of the contrast between the relations of Philip Augustus and of Philip the Fair with the Church is dramatic in its intensity. To Mr. Adams, Philip the Fair, even more than Henry VIII., is the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church; and he makes him an even more repulsive, though perhaps an abler, man than Henry. In this he is probably quite right. His account of the hounding down of Boniface, and the cruel destruction of the Templars, is as stirring as it is truthful; but he certainly pushes his theory to an altogether impossible extreme when he states that the moneyed class, the _bourgeoisie_, was already the dominant force in France. The heroes of Froissart still lay in the future; and for centuries to come the burgher was to be outweighed by king, priest, and noble. The economic man, the man of trade and money, was, at that time, in no sense dominant.

That there is grave reason for some of Mr. Adams’s melancholy forebodings, no serious student of the times, no sociologist or reformer, and no practical politician who is interested in more than momentary success, will deny. A foolish optimist is only less noxious than an utter pessimist; and the pre-requisite for any effort, whether hopeful or hopeless, to better our conditions is an accurate knowledge of what these conditions are. There is no use in blinding ourselves to certain of the tendencies and results of our high-pressure civilization. Some very ominous facts have become more and more apparent during the present century, in which the social movement of the white race has gone on with such unexampled and ever-accelerating rapidity. The rich have undoubtedly grown richer; and, while the most careful students are inclined to answer with an emphatic negative the proposition that the poor have grown poorer, it is nevertheless certain that there has been a large absolute, though not relative, increase of poverty, and that the very poor tend to huddle in immense masses in the cities. Even though these masses are, relatively to the rest of the population, smaller than they formerly were, they constitute a standing menace, not merely to our prosperity, but to our existence. The improvement in the means of communication, moreover, has so far immensely increased the tendency of the urban population to grow at the expense of the rural; and philosophers have usually been inclined to regard the ultimate safety of a nation as resting upon its peasantry. The improvement in machinery, the very perfection of scientific processes, cause great, even though temporary, suffering to unskilled laborers. Moreover, there is a certain softness of fibre in civilized nations which, if it were to prove progressive, might mean the development of a cultured and refined people quite unable to hold its own in those conflicts through which alone any great race can ultimately march to victory. There is also a tendency to become fixed, and to lose flexibility. Most ominous of all, there has become evident, during the last two generations, a very pronounced tendency among the most highly civilized races, and among the most highly civilized portions of all races, to lose the power of multiplying, and even to decrease; so much so as to make the fears of the disciples of Malthus a century ago seem rather absurd to the dweller in France or New England to-day.

Mr. Adams does not believe that any individual or group of individuals can influence the destiny of a race for good or for evil. All of us admit that it is very hard by individual effort thus to make any alteration in destiny; but we do not think it impossible; and Mr. Adams will have performed a great service if he succeeds in fixing the eyes of the men who ought to know thoroughly the problems set us to solve, upon the essential features of these problems. I do not think his diagnosis of the disease is in all respects accurate. I believe there is an immense amount of healthy tissue as to the existence of which he is blind; but there is disease, and it is serious enough to warrant very careful examination.

However, Mr. Adams is certainly in error in putting the immense importance he does upon the question of the expansion or contraction of the currency. There is no doubt whatever that a nation is profoundly affected by the character of its currency; but there seems to be equally little doubt that the currency is only one, and by no means the most important, among a hundred causes which profoundly affect it. The United States has been on a gold basis, and on a silver basis; it has been on a paper basis, and on a basis of what might be called the scraps and odds and ends of the currencies of a dozen other nations; but it has kept on developing along the same lines no matter what its currency has been. If a change of currency were so enacted as to amount to dishonesty, that is, to the repudiation of debts, it would be a very bad thing morally; or, if a change took place in a manner that would temporarily reduce the purchasing power of the wage-earner, it would be a very bad thing materially; but the current of the national life would not be wholly diverted or arrested, it would merely be checked, even by such a radical change. The forces that most profoundly shape the course of a nation’s life lie far deeper than the mere use of gold or of silver, the mere question of the appreciation or depreciation of one metal when compared with the other, or when compared with commodities generally.

Mr. Adams unconsciously shows this in his first and extremely interesting chapter on the Romans. In one part of this chapter he seems to ascribe the ruin of the Roman Empire to the contraction of the currency, saying, “with contraction came that fall of prices which first ruined, then enslaved, and finally exterminated the native rural population of Italy.” This he attributes to the growth of the economic or capitalistic spirit. As he puts it, “the stronger type exterminated the weaker, the money-lender killed out the husbandman, the soldiers vanished, and the farms on which they once flourished were left desolate.”

But, curiously enough, Mr. Adams himself shows that all this really occurred during the two centuries, or thereabouts, extending from the end of the second Punic war through the reign of the first of the Roman emperors; and this was a period of currency expansion, not of currency contraction. Moreover, it was emphatically a period when the military and not the economic type was supreme. The great Romans of the first and second centuries before Christ were soldiers, not merchants or usurers, and they could only be said to possess the economic instinct incidentally, in so far as it is possessed by every man of the military type who seizes the goods accumulated by the man of the economic type. It was during these centuries, when the military type was supreme, and when prices were rising, that the ruin, the enslavement and the extermination of the old rural population of Italy began. It was during these centuries that the husbandmen left the soil and became the mob of Rome, clamoring for free bread and the games of the amphitheatre. It was toward the close of this period that the Roman army became an army no longer of Roman citizens, but of barbarians trained in the Roman manner; it was toward the close of this period that celibacy became so crying an evil as to invoke the vain action of the legislature, and that the Roman race lost the power of self-perpetuation. What happened in the succeeding centuries,--the period of the contraction of the currency and the rise of prices,--was merely the completion of the ruin which had already been practically accomplished.

These facts seem to show clearly that the question of the currency had really little or nothing to do with the decay of the Roman fibre. This decay began under one set of currency conditions, and continued unchanged when these conditions became precisely reversed. An infinitely more important cause, as Mr. Adams himself shows, was the immense damage done to the Italian husbandman by the importation of Asiatic and African slaves; which was in all probability the chief of the causes that conspired to ruin him. He was forced into competition with races of lower vitality; races tenacious of life, who possessed a very low standard of living, and who furnished to the great slave-owner his cheap labor. Mr. Adams shows that the husbandman was affected, not only by the importation of vast droves of slaves to compete with him in Italy, but by the competition with low-class labor in Egypt and elsewhere. These very points, if developed with Mr. Adams’s skill, would have enabled him to show in a very striking manner the radical contrast between the present political and social life of civilized states, and the political and social life of Rome during what he calls the capitalistic or closing period. At present, the minute that the democracy becomes convinced that the workman and the peasant are suffering from competition with cheap labor, whether this cheap labor take the form of alien immigration, or of the importation of goods manufactured abroad by low-class working-men, or of commodities produced by convicts, it at once puts a stop to the competition. We keep out the Chinese, very wisely; we have put an end to the rivalry of convict contract labor with free labor; we are able to protect ourselves, whenever necessary, by heavy import duties, against the effect of too cheap labor in any foreign country; and, finally, in the civil war, we utterly destroyed the system of slavery, which really was threatening the life of the free working-man in a way in which it cannot possibly be threatened by any conceivable development of the “capitalistic” spirit.

Mr. Adams possesses a very intimate knowledge of finance, and there are many of his discussions on this subject into which only an expert would be competent to enter. Nevertheless, on certain financial and economic questions, touching matters open to discussion by the man of merely ordinary knowledge, his terminology is decidedly vague. This is especially true when he speaks of “the producer.” Now the producer, as portrayed by the Populist stump orator or writer of political and economic pamphlets, is a being with whom we became quite intimate during the recent campaign; but we have found it difficult to understand at all definitely who this “producer” actually is. According to one school of Populistic thinkers the farmer is the producer; but according to another and more radical school this is not so, unless the farmer works with his hands and not his head, this school limiting the application of the term “producer” to the working-man who does the immediate manual work of production. On the other hand those who speak with scientific precision must necessarily class as producers all men whose work results directly or indirectly in production. Under this definition, inventors and men who improve the methods of transportation, like railway presidents, and men who enable other producers to work, such as bankers who loan money wisely, are all themselves to be classed as producers, and often indeed as producers of the most effective kind.

The great mass of the population consists of producers; and in consequence the majority of the sales by producers are sales to other producers. It requires one set of producers to make a market for any other set of producers; and in consequence the rise or fall of prices is a good or a bad thing for different bodies of producers according to the different circumstances of each case. Mr. Adams says that the period from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth centuries was an interval of “almost unparalleled prosperity,” which he apparently ascribes to the expansion of the currency, with which, he says, “went a rise in prices, all producers grew rich, and for more than two generations the strain of competition was so relaxed that the different classes of the population preyed upon each other less savagely than they are wont to do in less happy times.” It is not exactly clear how a rise in the prices both of what one producer sells another, and of what he in return buys from that other, can somehow make both of them rich, and relax the strain of competition. Certainly in the present century, competition has been just as severe in times of high prices; and some of the periods of greatest prosperity have coincided with the periods of very low prices. There is reason to believe that low prices are ultimately of great benefit to the wage-earners. A rise in prices generally injures them. Moreover, in the century of which Mr. Adams speaks, the real non-producers were the great territorial feudal lords and the kings and clergymen; and these were then supreme. It was the period of the ferocious Albigensian crusades. It is true that it ushered in a rather worse period,--that of the struggle between England and France, with its attendant peasant wars and Jacqueries, and huge bands of marauding free-companies. But the alteration for the worse was due to a fresh outbreak of “imaginative” spirit; and the first period was full of recurring plagues and famines, besides the ordinary unrest, murder, oppression, pillage, and general corruption. Mr. Adams says that the different classes of the population during that happy time “preyed upon each other less savagely” than at other times. All that need be said in answer is that there is not now a civilized community, under no matter what stress of capitalistic competition, in which the different classes prey upon one another with one-tenth the savagery they then showed; or in which famine and disease, even leaving war out of account, come anywhere near causing so much misery to poor people, and above all to the wage-earners, or working-men, the under strata and base of the producing classes.

From many of the statements in Mr. Adams’s very interesting concluding chapter I should equally differ; and yet this chapter is one which is not merely interesting but soul-stirring, and it contains much with which most of us would heartily agree. Through the cold impartiality with which he strives to work merely as a recorder of facts, there break now and then flashes of pent-up wrath and vehement scorn for all that is mean and petty in a purely materialistic, purely capitalistic, civilization. With his scorn of what is ignoble and base in our development, his impatient contempt of the deification of the stock-market, the trading-counter, and the factory, all generous souls must agree. When we see prominent men deprecating the assertion of national honor because it “has a bad effect upon business,” or because it “impairs the value of securities”; when we see men seriously accepting Mr. Edward Atkinson’s pleasant theory that patriotism is of no consequence when compared with the price of cotton sheeting or the capacity to undersell our competitors in foreign markets, it is no wonder that a man who has in him the stuff of ancestors who helped to found our Government, and helped to bring it safely through the Civil War should think blackly of the future. But Mr. Adams should remember that there always have been men of this merely huckstering type, or of other types not much higher. It is not a nice thing that Mr. Eliot, the president of one of the greatest educational institutions of the land, should reflect discredit upon the educated men of the country by his attitude on the Venezuela affair, carrying his desertion of American principles so far as to find himself left in the lurch by the very English statesman whose cause he was championing; but Mr. Adams by turning to the “History” of the administration of Madison, by his brother, Henry Adams, would find that Mr. Eliot had plenty of intellectual ancestors among the “blue lights” federalists of that day. Timothy Pickering showed the same eager desire to stand by another country to the hurt of his own country’s honor, and Timothy Pickering was a United States Senator whose conduct was far more reprehensible than that of any private individual could be. We have advanced, not retrograded, since 1812.