[162] Confessions, book i, chap. 16.
[163] See his life by H. F. Brown, passim.
[164] J. R. Lowell, The Cathedral.
[165] Ibid.
[166] The American Commonwealth, chap. 80.
CHAPTER XXXIII
DISORGANIZATION: OTHER TRADITIONS
Disorder in the Economic System—In Education—In Higher Culture——In the Fine Arts.
This same idea, of confusion and inefficiency in social functions arising from the breaking up of old structures, might find illustration in almost any phase of life which one might choose to investigate. The economic system, for example, is in a state somewhat analogous to that of the family and the church, and indeed the “industrial revolution” is the chief seat of those phases of decay and reconstruction which most affect the daily life of the people.
Location itself—to begin with man’s attachment to the soil—has been so widely disturbed that possibly a majority of the people of the civilized world are of recent migratory origin; they themselves or their parents having moved from one land to another or from country to city. With this goes a severing of traditions and a mixture of ideas and races.
Still more subversive, perhaps, is the change in occupations, which is practically universal, so that scarcely anywhere will you find people doing the things which their grandparents did. The quiet transmission of handicrafts in families and neighborhoods, never much interrupted before, is now cut off, and the young are driven to look for new trades. Nor is this merely one change, to which the world may adapt itself once for all, but a series, a slide, to which there is no apparent term. Seldom is the skill learned in youth available in age, and thousands of men have seen one trade after another knocked out of their hands by the unforeseen movement of invention. Even the agriculturist, heretofore the symbol for traditionalism, has had to supple his mind to new devices.