The Unity of Western Civilization

by Unknown

One large aspect of the united action of the western world has received no notice in this volume, though it might very well be the subject of a detailed study in itself. This is the relation of the more advanced and powerful nations of the West towards the weaker and less progressive peoples. It might, indeed, be treated as the touchstone of our civilization, just as the education of the young is a good, perhaps the best, test of the advancement of any single people. For it involves some joint action of the western nations; it shows how far they are disinterested and how far skilful in their treatment of the less advanced.

The record is not a good one, but it confirms, on the whole, the view we have suggested that a growth of the sense and conception of humanity may be traced from the time when modern science was born in the sixteenth century. The Middle Ages hardly furnish us with any examples of the action of Christendom towards heathen and weaker people until the Crusades, in which, with rare examples of personal chivalry, the earlier attitude was one of contempt and hatred of the unbeliever. In the conquest of the New World, which was to some of its earliest conquerors a new Crusade, there is the same general savagery marked by rare cases of Christian kindness, such as Las Casas showed. But after the Reformation, when the Church itself had been purified and more human tolerance and care and interest in life prevailed, we find the enlightened Jesuit missions to China and Paraguay, St. Francis Xavier's work in India, and the Quaker dealings with Red Indians in the New World. From the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery, which had fallen into abeyance during the Middle Ages as a domestic institution, began to be denounced as a trade. We are on the threshold of the great humanitarian outburst of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to believe that this growth of human feeling in dealing with other men is unconnected with that new gospel of human power which Bacon and Descartes had just proclaimed. Except for the occasional superman, the greater the powers a man possesses and the higher he rates human capacity at its best, the more careful he is to cherish and develop the germs of humanity in the young and weak.

This was undoubtedly the case with the 'philosophers' of the eighteenth century; it is equally true of the nineteenth century, an age wonderful alike for its unexampled development of science and for the rise of activities, national and international, for the betterment of the race. Jointly the western nations have in this period put down the slave trade, and in the Brussels Conference of 1890 we see the highest point yet reached by the united humanity of the West expressed by the assembled states in regard to backward people. The point therefore is a notable one, and Englishmen will be glad to remember that it was Lord Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary, who took the first step. The previous Conference at Berlin, in 1884, had secured freedom of trade for the basins of the Congo and the Niger, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury, through the Belgian Government, called the Powers together to consider questions relating to the slave trade in Africa. For Africa, home of the black race, last exploited of the continents, discovered after the white man had discovered science, was pre-eminently the part of the world where the co-operation of leading peoples in civilizing backward races was most needed and most to be expected. The Congo, the Herreros, Morocco, Tripoli, Omdurman, offer a blood-stained record in reply.

But the general act of the Brussels Conference is clear and adequate as to what the purpose of the Powers should be. "To put an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves, to protect effectively the aboriginal populations of Africa, to ensure for that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilization", is in fact the whole duty of a united western civilization when dealing with the less civilized. The results achieved may well seem small compared with the magnitude of the purpose, but those who know most about it do not despise them. Slave-raiding and tribal wars have been diminished and some check put on importing arms and spirits.

It is not a topic on which it is easy to keep a cheerful mind. Some Putumayo will constantly occur to remind us of the fierce brutality of strength unsupervised and unrestrained. We compare the actual performance of mankind when free to try their best or wreak their worst on comparatively defenceless folk, with the noble rivalry which we can imagine between the nations of the world in leading the weaker people to develop their resources and themselves, on paths which may tend to the greatest prosperity and happiness of all, advanced and backward together: and the comparison leaves us sick at heart. But a sober judgement will not deny that even here advance is being made. The ideal has been admitted. The rights of smaller States are being made, as in the present conflict, the subject of the concern of their strongest neighbours. Steps are being taken all over the world to preserve and ameliorate the remnants of primitive people. Horrors when revealed are more strongly reprobated. Missionaries are pursuing their labours with more enlightenment and zeal, and in wider spheres. In spite of cynics and doubters, it is true in this as in the other activities of a united mankind, e pur si muove. And as the work moves on it is seen to involve the same guiding thoughts that inspire us in the case of the young and feeble at home—pity for their weakness, love for their humanity, hope for the future.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Kant's Perpetual Peace (new edition just published).

International Policy. Chapman & Hall.

Fayle, The Great Settlement. Murray.

The Leadership of the World. (Oxford pamphlet.)