As I have attempted to show, civilization is not an end attained, for man is never wholly civilized,—but only the effort to escape from an evil, or an imaginary evil—savagism. I say an evil real or imaginary, for as we have seen, the question has been seriously discussed whether civilization is better or worse than savagism. For every advantage which culture affords, a price must be paid,—some say too great a price. The growth of the mind is dependent upon its cultivation, but this cultivation may be voluntary or involuntary, it may be a thing desired or a thing abhorred.
Every nation, every society, and every person has its or his own standard of happiness. The miser delights in wealth, the city belle in finery, the scholar in learning. The Christian's heaven is a spiritual city, where they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; the Norse-man's a Valhalla of alternate battle and wassail; the Mahometan's, a paradise of houris and lazy sensuality. The martyr at the stake, triumphant in his faith, may be happier than the man of fashion dying of ennui and gout; the savage, wandering through forest and over plain in pursuit of game, or huddled in his hut with wives and children, may be happier than the care-laden speculator or the wrangling politician. Content, the essence of all happiness, is as prevalent among the poor and ill-mannered, as among the rich, refined and civilized. Ubi bene, ibi patria, where it is well with me, there is my country, is the motto of the Indian,—and to be well with him signifies only to be beyond the reach of hunger and enemies. Ask the savage which is preferable, a native or a cultured state, and he will answer the former; ask the civilized man, and he will say the latter. I do not see any greater absurdity in the wild man saying to the tamed one: Give up the despotisms and diseases of society and throw yourself with me upon beauteous, bounteous nature; than in the European saying to the American: If you would find happiness, abandon your filth and naked freedom, accept Christianity and cotton shirts, go to work in a mission, rot on a reservation, or beg and starve in civilized fashion!
Of all animals, man alone has broken down the barriers of his nature in civilizing, or, as Rousseau expresses it, in denaturalizing himself; and for this denaturalization some natural good must be relinquished; to every infringement of nature's law, there is a penalty attached; for a more delicate organism the price is numberless new diseases; for political institutions the price is native freedom. With polished manners the candidate for civilization must accept affectation, social despotism; with increasing wealth, increasing wants; civilization engenders complexity in society, and in its turn is engendered thereby. Peoples the most highly cultured are moved by the most delicate springs; a finer touch, the result of greater skill, with a finer tone, the result of greater experience, produces music more and yet more exquisite.
SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE HUMANITY.
Were man only an animal, this denaturalization and more, would be true. The tamed brute gives up all the benefits of savagism for few of the blessings of civilization; in a cultured state, as compared to a state of wild freedom, its ills are numberless, its advantages infinitesimal. But human nature is twofold, objective and subjective, the former typical of the savage state, the latter of the civilized. Man is not wholly animal; and by cultivating the mind, that is, by civilizing himself, he is no more denaturalized than by cultivating the body, and thereby acquiring greater physical perfection. We cannot escape our nature; we cannot re-create ourselves; we can only submit ourselves to be polished and improved by the eternal spirit of progress. The moral and the intellectual are as much constituents of human nature as the physical; civilization, therefore, is as much the natural state of man as savagism.
Another more plausible and partially correct assertion is, that by the development of the subjective part of our nature, objective humanity becomes degenerated. The intellectual cannot be wrought up to the highest state of cultivation except at the expense of the physical, nor the physical fully developed without limiting the mental. The efforts of the mind draw from the energies of the body; the highest and healthiest vigor of the body can only be attained when the mind is at rest, or in a state of careless activity. In answer to which I should say that beyond a certain point, it is true; one would hardly train successfully for a prize fight and the tripos at the same time; but that the non-intellectual savage, as a race, is physically superior, capable of enduring greater fatigue, or more skillful in muscular exercise than the civilized man is inconsistent with facts. Civilization has its vices as well as its virtues, savagism has its advantages as well as its demerits.
The evils of savagism are not so great as we imagine; its pleasures more than we are apt to think. As we become more and more removed from evils their magnitude enlarges; the fear of suffering increases as suffering is less experienced and witnessed. If savagism holds human life in light esteem, civilization makes death more hideous than it really is; if savagism is more cruel, it is less sensitive. Combatants accustomed to frequent encounter think lightly of wounds, and those whose life is oftenest imperiled think least of losing it. Indifference to pain is not necessarily the result of cruelty; it may arise as well from the most exalted sentiment as from the basest.
Civilization not only engenders new vices, but proves the destroyer of many virtues. Among the wealthier classes energy gives way to enjoyment, luxury saps the foundation of labor, progress becomes paralyzed, and with now and then a noble exception, but few earnest workers in the paths of literature, science, or any of the departments which tend to the improvement of mankind, are to be found among the powerful and the affluent, while the middle classes are absorbed in money-getting, unconsciously thereby, it is true, working toward the ends of civilization.
That civilization is expedient, that it is a good, that it is better than savagism, we who profess to be civilized entertain no doubt. Those who believe otherwise must be ready to deny that health is better than disease, truth than superstition, intellectual power than stupid ignorance; but whether the miseries and vices of savagism, or those of civilization are the greater, is another question. The tendency of civilization is, on the whole, to purify the morals, to give equal rights to man, to distribute more equally among men the benefits of this world, to melioriate wholesale misery and degradation, offer a higher aim and the means of accomplishing a nobler destiny, to increase the power of the mind and give it dominion over the forces of nature, to place the material in subservience to the mental, to elevate the individual and regulate society. True, it may be urged that this heaping up of intellectual fruits tends toward monopoly, toward making the rich richer and the poor poorer, but I still hold that the benefits of civilization are for the most part evenly distributed; that wealth beyond one's necessity is generally a curse to the possessor greater than the extreme of poverty, and that the true blessings of culture and refinement like air and sunshine are free to all.
Civilization, it is said, multiplies wants, but then they are ennobling wants, better called aspirations, and many of these civilization satisfies.