The first period in every nation has been that called the heroic or golden age. Whether this was, in reality, or only in poetic dream, the best age, depends upon another question: What is the true aim in the life of men and nations? If it be but to live comfortably and without confusion, then the architecture and laws of later times are a proof of progress; but if the great end be to develop the whole man, and live a brave, thoughtful, truthful life, with or without tumult, then is the first the golden age; for, entering on a new mode of life, undirected by habits of thought or action from his ancestors, each man makes use of his personal thought in finding out, and volition in choosing, his method of life. No history has recorded the internal state of such a nation, but only the fact that it has always been successful in preserving its liberties against invasion.
The next is the age of leaders, when individual thought has so far departed that they begin to look to others not yet as governors, but directors. This, to a superficial view the noblest age, marks the beginning of a decline. Its great power of invasion, as under Pericles or Cæsar, comes from the fact that, while strength enough is left to carry out the details, there is not enough of independence in thought to mar the unity in the plan of its leader. Its brilliant literature springs from division of labor; life has become so complex that each man cannot comprehend it all—so one takes the department of thought, another of action. The man of thought tries to bring back that courage and virtue which he sees are departing, by singing beautiful songs in their praise; while the man of action, feeling their waning power in himself, makes up, by repeating these praises, the lack of a heroic life.
The next is the mechanical age of society, which life has so outgrown the mind that the man cannot attend to both his own affairs and the state, which latter, therefore, he gladly yields to others. This is the age of standing armies, hired to protect a people too careless to protect themselves. This is the age of tyrants, as the lesser Cæsars or Philip of Macedon. This is the age which ushers in the last period of the nation, a mechanical state of the individual, when thought has so departed that the man is not able to attend even to his own life, and, like a passive machine, the state is impelled and directed in even the least things by one tyranny from without. It is hardly necessary to add that Alexander in Greece, Elagabalus in Rome, Louis XVI in France, were followed by a destruction as certain as the fact that God meant the earth to be inhabited by men and not machines.
Having shown the grave consequence that lies beneath it, we come now to the all-important consideration, whether our own social state has this mechanical tendency. The preceding sketch not only shows the truth which we have deduced from it, that this tendency is a prelude to a nation's death, but it also points out another, namely, that civilization contains within itself certain causes which finally work its destruction. We may, by a diligent study, find out these causes, such as increase of outward knowledge, division of labor, a complexity of outward relations, and a consequent hurried life that leaves no time for thought; but a careful analysis of all these reduces them to one great cause—an undue attention to physical prosperity. This cause existed among ancient nations in sufficient force to bring about their destruction, but it possessed not a tithe of the universality and strength which it holds among the modern, for, whereas it was once individual, it is now national, pervading every part of the social state.
Before the world was thickly settled and the nations established, it was held that the power of a nation consisted in the extent of its dominions, so that while the individual strove for wealth in agriculture, manufactures, or commerce, the state despised such low pursuits, and turned its attention to increase of territory. But when, after the fall of Rome, it was found that the earth was too fully peopled and national power too well established for such means of strength, attention was turned to another source of power in the cultivation of a people's own resources and increase of its wealth. Wealth is obtained by the addition of mental power to physical products, increasing their value for supplying the wants of man. So that attention to physical comfort and prosperity which was despised by the brave nations of antiquity, is now the leading object of government: treaties are made, wars are declared, rebellions break out, not on account of national glory or right, but in consideration of cotton manufacture, facilities of commerce, or freedom of trade. Nations as well as men are absorbed in the same great pursuit, adding mind to matter for production of wealth.
From this undue attention to physical prosperity spring certain subordinate causes, which, upon examination, are found to be the exact differentia of modern times. The characteristics which distinguish our age from all others are the very ones which have been found so destructive to preexistent civilizations. The first characteristic of this kind is the abundance of outward knowledge. In the pursuit of wealth, the ocean, the desert, the isles of the sea have been ransacked for commodities to gratify the desires of man, and, in order that nature may be pliable for the same purpose in the hands of the artisan, its laws have been studied with the greatest success; the bowels of the earth, the depths of the air, the prison of the arctic seas, have all been subject to the same strict scrutiny in this design.
The knowledge thus obtained comes pouring in by lightning and steam, and is scattered over the world within the reach of the poorest by means of the printing press. The man of to-day is a citizen of the world; he seems to be ubiquitous. It is as though he had a thousand eyes and ears, and, alas! only one mind. Thought has two conditions: first, knowledge, as food and stimulus; second, time for distributing and digesting that knowledge. But the first is so superabundantly fufilled that it entirely obliterates the second. Knowledge comes pouring in from all quarters so rapidly, that the man can hardly receive, much less arrange and think out, the enormous mass of facts daily accumulating upon him. The boasted age of printing presses and newspapers, of penny magazines, and penny cyclopædias, is not necessarily the age of thought. There is a world-
Transcriber's Note: It is regretted that page 354 is missing and cannot be traced.
will be the result; but to the working-man division of labor is mental death. The ancients might call these masses the ignobile vulgus, the French nobles might sneer at them as sans-culottes, we may deride them as the 'common herd,' all attempting to ignore their existence in history or politics; but it will be all in vain—for in the end it is the people that rule, be the government of the surface what it may. Either they will raise their rulers by their intelligent freedom, or drag the brilliant crowd down with them to destruction in spite of theory or law. Not only in mad sedition and revolution, but always, the masses govern.
The next great characteristic of the age is the increased complexity of outward relations, while the inner mental power does not increase in the same ratio. The former causes had a mechanical tendency in that they lessened the mental strength, for all volition must have its foundation in thought; but this has the same tendency, inasmuch as it increases the objects of thought beyond the power of the mind to satisfy the demand. If any intelligent man should stop in the midst of his life, and consider the relations by which he is surrounded, and for the satisfying of which he is responsible, he will shrink amazed from their enormous complexity: demands from the state for support and thoughtful fidelity, demands from his fellow men for love and charity, children demanding education and training, his own nature demanding cultivation and development, and, last of all, or rather first of all, his God demanding thoughtful love and service. When he proceeds to consider how he may best satisfy all these, there pours in upon him knowledge unbounded, schemes, theories, and methods innumerable, so that he retreats at last in despair and returns to his business—so he calls it, as though to make money were all that a man was sent into the world for, as though his children, his country, his fellow man, were not all his business. The outer world seems to have risen to overwhelm him, and the reason of it lies in this same great cause of undue attention to outward prosperity.