man
lives in politics, economics, and education. The cry of Rousseau, "Back
to Nature!" and all the watchwords of Voltaire and the encyclopaedists,
were so many summonses to revolt against the entire order of organized
society. The same meaning underlay all the writings of Fourier and
Prudhomme, of Owen and the other English communists. It was as if they
all said, "Civilization is a disease; let us rid ourselves of it." With
the socialists, Marx and Lassalle, and the anarchists, like Stepniak
and Kropotkin, the condemnation of society, as it is and always had
been, was equally radical and sweeping. Even humanists less violent in
their protest, not so negative in their criticism, nor so positive in
their offered substitutes, like Carlyle and Emerson, like Shelley and
Whitman and Swinburne, like Henry George and Henry Demorest Lloyd, all
aim to create in us the judgment that civilization, as it has been from
the first, is no friend to the best in any man. No lover of humanity
seems ever to have worshipped the god who rules over the things that
are established. They all agree with the mediaeval theologians that this
world has been given over to the Prince of Darkness.

VIII. TWO INSTANCES OF CIVILIZATION

We may come to wonder the less at this adverse judgment when we have
considered two instances of the effects which the highest types of
civilization have had upon the masses of mankind who were brought under
its sway. Take ancient Egypt and ancient Athens. Go back to the
building of the pyramids. Although they are among the earliest
monuments of civilization, they are yet among the most marvellous
illustrations of the mastery of the human mind over matter. Scarcely
three had passed of the ten thousand years which have constituted the
epoch that superseded barbarism, before these vast tombs, or whatever
they are, began to be erected. Lost in admiration as he stands before
the Great Pyramid, how can any one but resent the suggestion that the
social order, which made it at last possible, was a disease, preying
upon the body and spirit of men?

And yet, if one turns from it to examine that organization of human
labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made
it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures
that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak
thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists
and archaeologists tell us,