The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

VII.

The universal organization of the human race into one social whole has been the grand, far-off event, toward which the whole creation and the whole process of history has moved. Toward this the race has been moving through all the fierce antagonisms and bloody wars of the past.

Pestilences, which have decimated the ranks of men, and earthquakes, which have swallowed up great cities, have contributed toward this consummation.

The genius of men like Alexander the Great has been used to break up the narrow and provincial groupings into which men had settled, that a way might be opened for the distribution of products and the circulation of ideas.

In the early history of the race, the process of organization began. Every great man and every great movement helped toward its enlargement. Abraham, getting up from Ur of the Chaldees, and moving with his family and his herds across the plains of Syria, to plant a government in Palestine, widened its sphere. Phœnicia, the strongest maritime power of ancient times, while she had no motive but gain for crowding every port with her ships, and for turning the world into an exchange, did augment the knowledge of men and increase the relations of men. The Jews, by their compact, social organization, lifted their national life into a great civilization. This civilization they sought to make provincial; they sought to fence themselves off, with all they had accumulated of devotion and law and literature, from the rest of mankind. But their social pulverization, due to their sins, helped forward universal companionship. They moved out into other parts of the world. They settled along the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. They went into Asia Minor and back into Syria. They took up their abode in Alexandria and along the Mediterranean coast. Wherever they went, they carried their civilization; their synagogue, in which to teach their knowledge of the one God; their Moses, to guide by his law their conduct; and their David, to soothe, with his songs, their sorrow.

The marvelous productions of Grecian thought and skill were kept, for a time, from the barbarians. They attempted a monopoly of beauty. But the breaking up of their Commonwealth hastened the coming of universal fraternity. They planted their civilization in Asia Minor. They went over to Syria, down to Alexandria, and around the Mediterranean Sea. Wherever they went they carried their language and their philosophy. The Romans broke down the walls between different tribes, and brought them under one law. They built roads into all parts of the civilized world, and thus prepared the first great highways of travel.

Looking from this distance, back upon the movements of these great peoples, it seems as if they might have been, on set purpose, devising schemes and laying plans for bringing the world of mankind together. It really looks as if all peoples above the grade of the savage had been unconsciously and in spite of themselves working for the unity of the race. The very walls that have been raised to keep men apart have been battered down and used to make roads to bring them together. The mountains, that served as barriers to separate them, have been tunneled to unite them. The oceans, that seemed absolutely to insure isolation, are now the favorite means of communication. All inventions and discoveries have helped to the practical oneness of the race.

The mariner’s compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph, the sewing machine, the spectroscope, the electric light, the telephone, with the phonograph and microphone, have wrought for this end. The discovery of the sun’s place in the heavens, and of the shape and movements of the earth; the discovery of America and of the law of gravitation; the discovery of the circulation of the blood and of the wonderful remedies in nature which relieve the ills of the body, have all reduced differences and augmented unity. Theologies, which have divided men into religious partisans, fomenting strife, and producing wars; which have separated men into parties bitter and revengeful; have grown kinder and humaner as the years have passed, and tend now to unite men, rather than to divide them. Philosophies, which kept men apart under the heads of nominalist and realist, sensationalist and idealist, are now deduced from a broader survey of the facts, and tend to harmony rather than conflict.

From the beginning nature and human effort have wrought together for universal good will and social organization. Lapses have been frequent and the net gain of fraternity small, but from age to age, without cessation and without intermission, in volume and sweep, it has been increasing.