causes are so
familiar that their statement is a commonplace.

Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute
this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in
the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with
the advance of democratic institutions. Undoubtedly, the excessive
emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of
the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
has contributed to this malady of the age. Men talked, and still talk,
loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties. And yet if we
were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would
again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause.

To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is
coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative
throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social
conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the
change must, therefore, be of environment.

I know of but one such change that is sufficiently widespread and
deep-seated to account adequately for this malady of our time.

Beginning with the close of the eighteenth century, and continuing
throughout the nineteenth, a prodigious transformation has taken place
in the environment of man, which has done more to revolutionize the
conditions of human life than all the changes that had taken place in
the 500,000 preceding years which science has attributed to man's life
on the planet. Up to the period of Watt's discovery of steam vapour as a
motive power, these conditions, so far as the principal facilities of
life, were substantially those of the civilization which developed
eighty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile and later on the
Euphrates. Man had indeed increased his conquest over Nature in later
centuries by a few mechanical inventions, such as gunpowder, telescope,
magnetic needle, printing-press, spinning jenny, and hand-loom, but the
characteristic of all those inventions, with the exception of gunpowder,
was that they still remained a subordinate auxiliary to the physical
strength and mental skill of man. In other words, man still dominated
the machine, and there was still full play for his physical and mental
faculties. Moreover, all the inventions of preceding ages, from the
first fashioning of the flint to the spinning-wheel and the hand-lever