CHAPTER XV
CIVILISATION
What tremendous import lies behind the single word that heads this final chapter! Indeed, it may be the key-word to the whole future of the universe, for civilisation, or rather, over-civilisation, is swaying the world from all reasonable balance, while we drift with the tide, or struggle unheard: and no plan evolves to set back the engulfing flood.
I have a dictionary before me which clearly states that to civilise is:
“To reclaim from barbarism; to instruct in arts and refinements.”
If civilisation succeeded to that end alone it would be a happy world indeed. But has not the so-called civilisation of to-day decidedly turned toward other intents altogether, where greed and selfishness largely play an absorbing part?
This may be said not only of our own land, but of the whole of the civilised world, which feels the weight of industrial despondency, and I dwell on these thoughts without rancour toward my fellows, for no one can foretell the purpose of evolution.
Fortunate are those who can accept the circumstances of life with grave thoughtfulness rather than consternation; and that is a rich teaching, learned, so far as I am concerned, in the world’s wilderness, where life is sweet and realities naked. To those whose lot it is to look on, how empty seems the frantic blame of parliament that succeeds parliament in the government of countries, and how like the howlings of wolves who have lost the trail to more successful competitors who have gone ahead. For parliaments, when all is said and done, strive to make the best of the material in their hands; and that material is largely concerned with complex humanity, which no human power shall ever completely content.
Wherefore it is the clamourings of the wolves that is, as an empty noise, to be condemned as wholly unworthy of any peace-loving community that would prosper. It is they who are out to prey, and, dissatisfied, unscrupulous, hungry for spoil, they care neither for honour nor what they wreck to gain their gluttonous ends.