The cheapest form of labour is thus being bred on a gigantic scale, and this labour is being accelerated by an industrial development which is stimulated by eviction of the farmers, as the “industrial revolution” was stimulated in England one hundred and thirty years ago. For many years the cotton mills of Bombay have undersold Lancashire in the coarser fabrics, and when, by means of a canal to the Pacific, American cotton can be imported cheaply, they will spin the finer also. Moreover, Hindostan is full of iron and coal which has never been utilized because of the immense difference in the rapidity of European and Asiatic labour, but the steadily falling range of Western prices must force the cheapest product on the market, and when the Indian railways have been assumed by the government, a new era will have opened. The same causes are affecting China and Japan, and, under precisely similar conditions, the centre of exchanges passed from the Tiber to the Bosphorus sixteen hundred years ago.
Such uniformity of development in the most distant times, and among the most divergent peoples, points to a progressive law of civilization, each stage of progress being marked by certain intellectual, moral, and physical changes. As the attack in war masters the defence, and the combative instinct becomes unnecessary to the preservation of life, the economic supersedes the martial mind, being superior in bread-winning. As velocity augments and competition intensifies, nature begins to sift the economic minds themselves, culling a favoured aristocracy of the craftiest and the subtlest types; choosing, for example, the Armenian in Byzantium, the Marwari in India, and the Jew in London. Conversely, as the costly nervous system of the soldier becomes an encumbrance, organisms, which can exist on less, successively supplant each other, until the limit of endurance is reached. Thus the Slavs exterminated the Greeks in Thrace and Macedonia, the Mahrattas and the Moslems dwindle before the low caste tribes of India, and the instinct of self-preservation has taught white races to resist an influx of Chinese. When nature has finished this double task, civilization has reached its zenith. Humanity can ascend no higher.
In view of this possible extermination of the martial blood in the higher stages of civilization, the attention necessarily becomes concentrated on what is, perhaps, the main point of divergence between ancient and modern society,—the presence and the absence of a supply of barbaric life. All the evidence points to the conclusion that the infusion of vitality which Rome ever drew from territories beyond her borders, was the cause both of her strength and of her longevity. Without such aid she could never have consolidated the world. On the other hand, the lack of this resource has been the weakness of modern nations. One after another they have dreamed of universal conquest, and one after another they have fallen through exhaustion in war.
Spain levied never a pikeman in America, and her colonies were a source of debility in so far as they drained her of her youth. Had Rome been similarly situated, she could hardly have carried the eagles beyond the Bosphorus and the Alps. Perhaps Cæsar’s army was the best an ancient general ever put in the field, and yet it was filled with barbarians. All his legions were raised north of the Po, and most of them, including the tenth, north of the Alps.[380] When pitted against this force native Italians broke in rout, and one of the most striking pages of Plutarch is the story of the gradual awakening of Pompey to a sense of the impotence of Romans. Pompey himself was a commander of high ability, and, until he split upon the rock of the pure martial blood, battle had been with him synonymous with victory.
At first he felt such confidence, he laughed at the suggestion of an attack within the Rubicon. With the conviction of the conqueror he said: “Whenever I stamp with my foot in any part of Italy, there will rise up forces enough in an instant, both horse and foot.”[381] A very short experience of the men of the north sufficed to sober him; for, though Cæsar’s command amounted to only twenty-two thousand, and his to twice as many, he not only declined an action, but took what care he could to keep the threats of the Gauls from his men, “who were out of heart and despondent, through terror at the fierceness and hardiness of their enemies, whom they looked upon as a sort of wild beasts.”[382] Pharsalia stunned him. When the tenth legion routed his left wing, he went to his tent and sat speechless until the invasion of the camp; then he walked away “softly afoot, taken up altogether with thoughts such as probably might possess a man that for the space of thirty-four years together had been accustomed to conquest and victory, and was then at last, in his old age, learning for the first time what defeat and flight were.”[383]
Thus, in reality, barbarians consolidated the ancient world, and the force which created the Empire, afterward upheld it. With each succeeding century the drafts of centralized society upon the blood of the country beyond the Danube and the Rhine increased, but the supply proved limitless; and, when the Western provinces disintegrated, a new imaginative race poured over Italy and France, creating a new religion, a new art, a new literature, and new institutions. Among modern nations the Russians alone have developed this power of absorbing kindred conquered peoples; and yet, obviously, Napoleon would have fought his campaigns under very different circumstances, and, perhaps, brought them to a different end, had he, like Cæsar, had an exhaustless supply of the best soldiers, altogether independent of the population of France.
Religious phenomena become explicable when viewed from the same standpoint. Unquestionably scepticism has been to the full as rife in Paris since 1789 as it ever was in Rome, and yet no new religion has been born. Supposing, however, that a vast and highly emotional emigration flowed annually into France, the aspect of life would be completely changed. Christian saints and martyrs were not begotten by the usurers of Constantinople or of Rome, but by barbarian soldiers and Asiatic serfs, and Christianity could hardly have become a State religion had the composition of society, as it existed under Trajan, remained unaltered. Even in the reign of Justinian the aristocracy carped at faith, and Byzantine architecture did not bloom until the invasions of Alaric and Attila.
If, then, although nature never precisely repeats herself, she operates upon the human mind according to immutable laws, it should be possible by comparing a living civilization with a dead, to estimate in some degree the course which has been run. For such an attempt an infinite variety of standards might be suggested, but few, perhaps, are more suitable than the domestic relations which lie at the basis of the reproduction of life.
In a martial and imaginative age, where energy vents itself through fear, and every man must be a soldier, the family generally forms a unit; the women and children being under the control of the father, as they were under the control of the patriarchs in the Bible, or of the paterfamilias in Rome. In such periods the woman is sought after by the man, and even commands a high money value; “And Shechem said unto her father, ... Ask me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according as ye shall say unto me: but give me the damsel to wife.”[384] The Homeric heroes bought their wives, and, moreover, were very fond of them—an affection the women returned, for in all classical literature there are few more charming legends than that of Penelope. Divorce was unknown to Hector and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Achilles. Marriage, in these simple ages, is usually a rite half sacred, half warlike. When Abraham’s servant found Rebekah at the well, he bowed his head, and blessed the Lord God of his master Abraham, which had led him in the right way. A Roman wedding was a solemn religious function accompanied by prayer and sacrifice, and, at the end, the bride was carried to her husband’s house, where she was violently torn from her mother’s arms.
Aristotle, with his unerring acumen, made this observation: “That all warlike races are prone to the love of women,” and also that they tend to “fall under the dominion of their wives.”[385] Undoubtedly this is the instinct of the soldier, and, in martial ages, women are idealized. When a foreigner asked the wife of Leonidas, “Why do you Lacedæmonian wives, unlike all others, govern your husbands?” the Spartan answered, “Because we alone are the mothers of men.” When at Rome Tiberius killed the male serpent, thereby devoting himself to death to save Cornelia, Plutarch, telling the story, remarked, “that Tiberius seemed to all men to have done nothing unreasonable, in choosing to die for such a woman; who, when King Ptolemy himself proffered her his crown, and would have married her, refused it, and chose rather to live a widow.”[386]