As far as outward splendor and wealth were concerned, Babylon had no rival among the nations of ancient times. She was a vast and rich empire. She embraced the most fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed all others in magnificence. Her hanging gardens were the wonder of the world; but her people stood not upon their terraces to observe the stars, or to reach a higher civilization through the realization of the nobler ends of their being. These were used as places of revelry and sensual enjoyment. Thus the only work of art that made them famous was used to make them stupid and depraved. Of her wealth she made an end. Putting no estimate upon men, through the relations of whom her wealth was created, she found at last that among all her people she had produced no man amply endowed enough to give permanent mental setting to her civilization and her faith. Her heart throbs, whatever they were, got explained in no history, interpreted in no philosophy, and lived in no life. For knowledge of her, we are dependent upon her ruins, her pottery, her broken columns. Into oblivion has fallen all that bejeweled and pampered life that reveled in her palaces and amid her far-famed hanging gardens. Among none of her luxurious inhabitants did she develop a man to commit the keeping of her secrets and the record of her progress. Over her history has settled the stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night.
On the other hand, how secure is the Greece, that flowered in her great men! It was in the two centuries between 500 and 300 B. C., when she emphasized men more than the things they created, that she produced the men who have been the teachers of the human race. She has been despoiled of her art treasures, her temples have fallen, her Parthenon is in ruins; but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in her great men, are immortal.
No tooth of time, no war’s bloody hand, no devastation of the years, can take from her the glory which she lifted and locked in the genius of her generals, her statesmen, her orators, and her philosophers. Epaminondas and Pericles still fight for her, and guard with sleepless vigilance her fair name. Plato and Aristotle still interpret her problems of destiny. Sophocles and Pindar still sing her glory. Herodotus and Thucydides still keep the record of her victories. Demosthenes and Æschines still give imperishable expression to her conceptions of form and symmetry. She deposited her riches in the spirits of her great men, and they are forever secure. No thief can steal them, no rust can corrupt them. The unfolding centuries may look in upon them and enjoy them, but they cannot arrest them. The spirits of great men, like immortal ships, sail the ocean of time, bearing the treasures of the civilizations which gave them birth. They outride the fury of all the storms, and will sail on, till
The stars grow old,
The sun grows cold,
And the leaves of the Judgment book unfold.
But when Greece came to think more of the results than of the living men, she lost not only the power to produce the men, but the capacity to appreciate the results which had been created by them. Thinking more of the temple than the builder, she soon had no architect to conceive, and no son to understand the temple. Turning her national power into the spirits of her living men, she utilized the mountains and the mines in the service of beauty. But when life got cheaper than art, she no longer had power to create new art, or to protect from vandalism the old. By removing the emphasis from men to things, she descended from the Crœsus to the pauper of civilization.
As long as Israel expended her national energy in the production of men, she had Moses, greater than the Tabernacle; David, greater than his harp; and Isaiah, greater than his song. But when the forms of her worship were emphasized beyond the spirits of her people she lost the devotion which created her church and the manhood that guided it. The men who formulated the laws that made Rome the mistress of the world, grew at a period when a Roman was the center of interest in the empire. But when her laws were stressed to the obliteration of her men, she had them still, without the ability to make more laws, or to execute the ones she had. Religion in India is emphasized more than character; hence her men are lost in a wanton and luxurious surrender to a modeless, transcendental, pure being, and she is practically without a history.
III.
The ultimate reasons, then, for the existence of social relations, brought about among human beings by exchange of products, is not the satisfaction of hunger, or the enrichment of individuals in material wealth, but the making of men. This being so, we are able to determine the law by which the production and distribution of commercial products are to be regulated. It must be a law that does not put the emphasis on the products, but upon the men who are to be elevated through their exchange. It must not be a law leaning to extreme individualism on the one side, or to extreme socialism on the other. It must have proper respect to the individual, and to the social organism to which he is indebted for whatever of power he possesses. That law has already been formulated for us. It is this: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is the coordination of self-love and good-will. As has been well said, this saves for us the strength of private enterprise, and individual initiative, the vigor of the self-regarding motives; yet enthrones by their side as co-equal and co-regent powers, the principle of benevolence, the obligation to promote the common weal. Self-support, self-help, self-reliance, are still cardinal virtues, but philanthropy is given co-ordinate authority with them in the commercial world. This is the law most favorable to the growth of men.