When Mr. Adams speaks of the change in the relations of women and men he touches on the vital weakness of our present civilization. If we are, in truth, tending toward a point where the race will cease to be able to perpetuate itself, our civilization is of course a failure. No quality in a race atones for the failure to produce an abundance of healthy children. The problem upon which Mr. Adams here touches is the most serious of all problems, for it lies at the root of, and indeed itself is, national life. But it is hard to accept seriously Mr. Adams’s plea that “martial” men loved their wives more than “economic” men do, and showed their love by buying them. Of course the only reason why a woman was bought in early times was because she was looked upon like any other chattel; she was “loved” more than she is now only as a negro was “loved” more by the negro-trader in 1860 than at present. The worship of women during the Middle Ages was, in its practical effects, worship of a very queer kind. The “economic man” of the present day is beyond comparison gentler and more tender and more loving to women than the “emotional man” of the Middle Ages.
Mr. Adams closes with some really fine paragraphs, of which the general purport is, that the advent of the capitalist and the economic man, and especially the advent of the usurer, mark a condition of consolidation which means the beginning of utter decay, so that our society, as a result of this accelerated movement away from emotionalism and towards capitalism, is now in a condition like that of the society of the later Roman Empire. He forgets, however, that there are plenty of modern states which have entirely escaped the general accelerated movement of our time. Spain on the one hand, and Russia on the other, though alike in nothing else, are alike in being entirely outside the current of modern capitalistic development. Spain never suffered from capitalists. She exterminated the economic man in the interest of the emotional and martial man. As a result she has sunk to a condition just above that of Morocco—another state, by the way, which still clings to the martial and emotional type, and is entirely free from the vices of capitalistic development, and from the presence of the usurer, save as the usurer existed in the days of Isaac of York. Soldiers and artists have sunk lower in Spain than elsewhere, although they have had no competition from the economic man. Russia is in an entirely different position. Russia is eminently emotional, and her capitalists are of the most archaic type; but it is difficult to say exactly what Russia has done for art, or in what respect her soldiers are superior to other soldiers; and certainly the life of the lower classes in Russia is on the average far less happy than the life of the workingman and farmer in any English-speaking country. Evidently, as Spain and Russia show, national decay, or non-development may have little to do with economic progress.
Mr. Adams has shown well that the progress of civilization and centralization has depended largely upon the growing mastery of the attack over the defence; but when he says that the martial type necessarily decays as civilization progresses, he goes beyond what he can prove. The economic man in England, Holland, and the United States has for several centuries proved a much better fighter than the martial emotionalist of the Spanish countries. It is Spain which is now decaying; not the nations with capitalists. The causes which make Russia formidable are connected with the extent of her territory and her population, for she has certainly failed so far to produce fighting men at all superior to the fighting men of the economic civilizations. In a pent-up territory she would rise less rapidly, and fall more rapidly, than they would; and her freedom from centralization and capitalization would not help her. Spain, which is wholly untouched by modern economic growth, suffers far more than any English-speaking country from maladies like those of Rome in its decadence; and Rome did not decay from the same causes which affect modern America or Europe; while Russia owes her immunity from a few of the evils that affect the rest of us, to causes unconnected with her backwardness in civilization, and moreover has worse evils of her own to contend with. The English-speaking man has so far out-built, out-fought, and out-administered the Russian; and he is as far as the poles away from the Roman of the later Empire.
Moreover, instead of the mercenary or paid police growing in relative strength, as Mr. Adams says, it has everywhere shrunk during the last fifty years, when compared with the mass of armed farmers and wage-earners who make up a modern army. The capitalist can no longer, as in ages past, count upon the soldiers as being of his party; he can only count upon them when they are convinced that in fighting his battle they are fighting their own; although under modern industrial conditions this is generally the case. Again, Mr. Adams is in error in his facts, when he thinks that producers have prospered in the silver-using, as compared with the gold-using, countries. The wage-earner and small farmer of the United States, or even of Europe, stand waist high above their brothers in Mexico and the other communities that use only silver. The prosperity of the wage-earning class is more important to the state than the prosperity of any other class in the community, for it numbers within its ranks two-thirds of the people of the community. The fact that modern society rests upon the wage-earner, whereas ancient society rested upon the slave, is of such transcendent importance as to forbid any exact comparison between the two, save by way of contrast.
While there is in modern times a decrease in emotional religion, there is an immense increase in practical morality. There is a decrease of the martial type found among savages and the people of the Middle Ages, except as it still survives in the slums of great cities; but there remains a martial type infinitely more efficient than any that preceded it. There are great branches of industry which call forth in those that follow them more hardihood, manliness, and courage than any industry of ancient times. The immense masses of men connected with the railroads are continually called upon to exercise qualities of mind and body such as in antiquity no trade and no handicraft demanded. There are, it is true, influences at work to shake the vitality, courage, and manliness of the race; but there are other influences which tell in exactly the opposite direction; and, whatever may come in the future, hitherto the last set of influences have been strongest. As yet, while men are more gentle and more honest than before, it cannot be said that they are less brave; and they are certainly more efficient as fighters. If our population decreases; if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain above national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life; then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay. But at present no comparison could be less apt than that of Byzantium, or Rome in its later years, with a great modern state where the thronging millions who make up the bulk of the population are wage-earners, who themselves decide their own destinies; a state which is able in time of need to put into the field armies, composed exclusively of its own citizens, more numerous than any which the world has ever before seen, and with a record of fighting in the immediate past with which there is nothing in the annals of antiquity to compare.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] The Forum, January, 1897.
