The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History

by Brooks Adams

For many years farming land has fallen throughout the West, as it fell in Italy in the time of Pliny. Everywhere, as under Trajan, the peasantry are distressed; everywhere they migrate to the cities, as they did when Rome repudiated the denarius. By the census of the United Kingdom taken in 1891, not only did it appear that over seventy-one per cent of the inhabitants of England and Wales lived in towns, but that, while the urban districts had increased above fifteen per cent since the last census, the population of the purely agricultural counties had diminished.[368]

Moreover, within a generation, there has been a marked loss of fecundity among the more costly races. The rate of increase of the population has diminished. In the United States it is generally believed that the old native American blood is hardly reproducing itself; but, in all social phenomena, France precedes other nations by at least a quarter of a century, and it is, therefore, in France that the failure of vitality is most plainly seen. In 1789 the average French family consisted of 4.2 children. In 1891 it had fallen to 2.1,[369] and, since 1890, the deaths seem to have equalled the births.[370] In 1889 legislation was attempted to encourage productiveness, and parents of seven children were exempted from certain classes of taxes, but the experiment failed. Levasseur, in his great work on the population of France, has expressed himself almost in the words of Tacitus: “It can be laid down as a general law that, if in such a social condition as that of the French of the nineteenth century, the number of children is small, it is because the majority of parents wish it should be small.”[371]

Such signs point to the climax of consolidation. And yet, even the rise of the bankers is not the only or the surest indication that centralization is culminating. The destruction, wrought by accelerated movement, of the less tenacious organisms, is more evident below than above, is more striking in the advance of cheap labour, than in the evolution of the financier.

CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION

Apparently nature needs to consume about three generations in perfecting the selection of a new type. Accordingly the money-lenders did not become absolute immediately after Waterloo, and a period of some sixty years followed during which the adventurers kept up a struggle, wherein they were aided by the discoveries of gold near the middle of the century. Seemingly they met their final defeat at Sedan, for the decay of the soldier, which had been in progress since the fall of Napoleon, reached a point, after the collapse of the Second Empire, even lower than after the consolidation of Rome.

From Alaric to Napoleon the soldier had served as an independent vent to energy. Often, even when opposed to capital, he had been victorious, and the highest function of a leader of men had been, in theory at least, military command. The ideal statesman had been one who, like Cromwell, Frederic the Great, Henry IV., William III., and Washington, could lead his followers in battle, and, on the Continent, down to 1789, the aristocracy had professedly been a military caste. In France and Germany the old tradition lasted to within a generation. Only after 1871 came the new era, an era marked by many social changes. For the first time in their history the ruler of the French people passed admittedly from the martial to the monied type, and everywhere the same phenomenon appeared; the whole administration of society fell into the hands of the economic man. Nothing so radical happened at Rome, or even at Byzantium, for there the pressure of the barbarians necessitated the retention of the commander at the head of the State; in Europe he lost this importance. Since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended to sink more and more into a paid official, receiving his orders from financiers with his salary, without being allowed a voice even in questions involving peace and war. The same fate has overtaken the producing classes; they have failed to maintain themselves, and have become subjects of the possessors of hoarded wealth. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Cæsars, and, among capitalists, the money-lenders form an aristocracy. Debtors are in reality powerless, because of the extension of that very system of credit which they invented to satisfy their needs. Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men. That basis is gold; in gold debts must be paid; therefore, when gold is withdrawn, the debtor is helpless and becomes the servant of his master. The elasticity of the age of expansion has gone.

The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legions were a toy; a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or to bribe.

On looking back over long periods of time, the sequence of causes may be followed which have led to this result. First, inventions from the East facilitated trade; then, the perfection of weapons of attack made police possible, and individual bravery unnecessary; on this followed the abasement of the martial and exaltation of the economic type; and finally that intense acceleration of movement by machinery supervened, which, in annihilating space, has destroyed the protection that the costly races long enjoyed against the competition of simpler organisms.

Roman civilization was less complex than modern because of the relative inflexibility of the Latin mind. Unable to quicken his motions by inventions, the ancient Italian failed to discover America or absorb India, and, for the same reason, collapsed without an effort under the insidious attack of Asiatic and African labour. No industrial expansion followed the influx of bullion under Cæsar, and therefore, when the value of cereals fell, the evicted farmer either sank into slavery or begged for bread from the magnates of the Senate. In modern times an industrial period has intervened; the evicted long found employment in the factories of the towns, and it has only been as contraction has reduced the demand for merchandise, by diminishing the purchasing power of the agricultural population, that those stagnant pools of the unemployed have collected, which exactly correspond to the proletariat. But, as each special faculty which, for a time, enables its possessor to excel in competition, seems to bear with it the seeds of its own decay, so the inventive, which once enabled the Western races to undersell the Eastern in their homes seems destined to reduce all to a common economic level, as Rome sank to the level of Egypt.