We forget, when we read—perhaps with an exclamation that man is as much a savage as ever—how the onlookers at the burning of the Shanghai made no effort to save lives but only to secure spoil, that it is only a short time since such scenes must have been common enough on all the shores of Europe; we forget, when we shudder with horror at an exceptional case of unjust or brutal punishment on the borders of our civilization, that it is not long since torture and mutilation, barbarities of every sort, were practised among the foremost nations of the world, and for the most trivial offences. Nor do we always remember, when we grow indignant at the hard case of our poor, that there was a time when the excess of indigent population was prevented only by famines and pestilences which killed their thousands upon thousands, and of which we very seldom see the like in modern times; we forget that there was a time when the desperate rising of the continental peasantry against the bitter oppression of the landowners drew from even the reformer Luther the exclamation that the revolters ought to be throttled collectively. I have no intention to underrate present evils or to excuse them by past ones. I see no reason for believing that the present age should rest upon its laurels; on the contrary, I believe that we are only at the beginning of civilization; but I see no need for denying past evolution in order to make this assertion. Starvation is not easier to a man to-day, because it is proved to him that many more men died of hunger in the past than die of it in the present century. But just for this reason, I fail to understand why there should be so much effort expended by certain reformers in the attempt to disprove what history and observation yet so plainly show,—namely, that the condition of the masses at present, taken for all in all, is much better than it has ever been before; that misery is not so extreme or proportionately so widely spread; that the worst sorts of crime are decreasing; that justice is more general, and that sympathy is warmer, than in any previous age. It is true that we have new methods of exploiting the poor; but we need to consider how our ancestors would have used those opportunities had they possessed them; and we need also to remember, with regard to a particular form of evil, that some time is necessary for society as a whole to grow to a comprehension of its increase and importance, and to reach unanimity of opinion as to action for its removal. As forms of evil change, some one particular form may increase for a time, swallowing up in itself, as the larger wave accumulates several small ones, various other forms, until the slowly gathered resistance of public opinion brings the reaction.
We may gather valuable evidence as to our progress, even in comparison with recent times, by reference to our artistic literature. True, the great writers have often been far ahead of their times. But if we regard the average, we shall soon perceive the signs to which I refer. The stilted mannerisms of the ancient novel mark the absence of democratic feeling, and witness to the less general diffusion of true kindness, which, wherever it appears, tends to simplicity, having no need of mannerisms. Nothing, too, is more indicative of our advancement than the change in conceptions of humor; for to know what a nation laughs about is to know what are its ideals and shortcomings. Earlier humor is often mere vulgarity or brutality, or a mixture of the two; obscenity, vice, and the heartless torture of the weak and helpless are its favorite themes, and appear in the characters of its heroes and ideals. The truthfulness of Victor Hugo's description of earlier British "fun," in his "L'Homme qui rit," is borne witness to by English literature.
All modern literature marks the progress of the democratic idea. Our history and our art are full of the people. The very unrest and dissatisfaction of the time are signs of a more general and a better education, an increase of sympathy in degree and extent, and, I believe, of better nourishment and a more energetic physique. The higher ideals which were once the property of the few are become the property of the many. Our institutions are grown more democratic and humane. We have our free hospitals and dispensaries, our soup-kitchens and cheap lodging-houses, our asylums for the deaf, the dumb, the blind, old people and orphans, the weak and afflicted of all kinds, our guilds, "Settlements," and "Open-air" charities, our crêches, our refuges and reformatories, our societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and to Animals, our "Open Doors," and "Midnight Missions," our trade and industrial schools, and our free schools and scholarships and free libraries. In times of famine, disease, and disaster, we band together to aid, and funds for the distressed pour in from every side, and not only from people of the nation to which the sufferers belong, but often also from those of distant parts of the world. Fancy the Greeks subscribing to a fund in aid of cholera-stricken barbarians; imagine the Romans, even, clubbing together, in every part of the world to which they had wandered, to succour the sufferers by a Johnstown flood; or conceive of the wealthy classes of the Middle Ages furnishing fires and food as did the Parisians during the unusual winter cold of 1890-91!
Not only has sympathy become more wildly diffused within the state; it has spread outside it also. National narrowness is slowly disappearing. The federation of the states of Europe and of the civilized world is no longer looked upon as a mad-man's fancy but as a sober possibility or even a probability. It is now agreed that war between the English-speaking nations of the earth,—between England and her colonies, or England and the United States, is very nearly, if not quite, an impossibility. The union of three of the most powerful nations of Europe, not for war but for peace, is assuredly of great political importance in itself; but of even more importance in the influence insensibly exerted by its continuance upon the opinions of the world. The masses of the people themselves are becoming more and more cosmopolitan, and we have an ever-increasing number of international unions and congresses, political, scientific, artistic, and ethical.
On the whole, it is, perhaps, as much a lack of imagination as anything which makes us fall into the mistake of underestimating our own age and overestimating all others. The crimes and abuses far away in times different from our own are difficult to conceive, and stir our blood even less than those distant in space; the sufferings of the Middle Ages, or even of one or two centuries ago, are more difficult to realize and move us less than a famine or flood in China or a murder in the heart of Africa. The things immediately before our eyes affect us most; and it is well, for many reasons, that this is so. Nevertheless, idealization of the past is evil in its consequences. For, if present progress is to some men an excuse for easy-going inactivity, the extent of existing evil is even more often an excuse for the same selfish course.
Man has had, in all periods, the tendency, in his discontent with the present, to invest with ideal attributes of every sort some past period in which the special evils he deplores did not, perhaps, exist; the dissatisfied of all times have imagined a golden age somewhere in the past. The old, who look on the innovations of a younger generation with distrust, and are likely to mistake, in remembrance, the gold of their own life's morning for an outer radiance independent of their youth, add to our delusion; while the young confuse their increasing knowledge of the evil of the world with an increase of the evil itself. But the more science progresses, and the greater our acquaintance with the facts of history becomes, the more these delusions tend to disappear. The much-praised simplicity of our ancestors was, in truth, a half-savagery, where the higher forms of justice were not practised, that finer tact and consideration which makes life best worth living was unknown, and many of the faults which we most deplore in our own day were considered rather virtues than otherwise. It is a moral pity that poets and philosophers have lent the beauty of their verse and the dignity of their eloquence to the idealization of the past. Indeed,
"I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing—oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive i' the ditch there,—'twere excusable,
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones."[255]
It is an especial pity that the reformer should ever devote his effort to the upholding of the old idea of the inferiority of the present to the past. Not in the past, but in the future, lies the Golden Age of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[183] "The Origin of Civilization," pp. 397, 398.