The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    140/170 (page 126)
    upon the doers or non-doers. Humanitarianism is showing signs of becoming maudlin.? New religions are invading us from the East, or are being invented around us every day. Labour is decreasing; amusement is increasing; and the num- ber of legal holidays has begun to grow.$ Worst of all, we see already emergence of the two great evils that accompany the efflorescence of civilisation and foreshadow its end. Attendant upon humanitarianism and discontent, there seem to be coming on a collapse of competition and a lessening of labour, already begun, which are fostered by socialism, seeking complete equality between all men. And attendant upon an already begun breach of the contrast between men and women and the surfeit of abundant amusements, there are a falling off of marriages and a decrease of the birth- rate, which are fostered by a woman movement, seeking com- plete equality between the sexes. These two companion evils, essentially of diminishing competition and of diminishing birth- rate, indicate that it is becoming pleasanter to put down the burden of civilisation and to enjoy what it offers, than to carry on and transmit it. The better to understand the appearance of these two evils and the danger to be apprehended from them, we need a re- view of the immediate past and a forecast of the not distant future. The era in which we to-day live has had three stages of de- velopment, each dating from a period of expansion. The first was the period commencing with the Crusades, the second with the discovery of America, the third with the American and French revolutions, the so-called industrial revolution, in which 2Cf. Greg: “Nous avons les défauis de nos qualités. Our growing tenderness to suffering is accompanied with a corresponding gentleness to- wards wrong. Our morality grows laxer as our hearts grow softer. We are nearly as charitable to the sinner as to the sufferer. We condemn noth- ing very bitterly. We punish nothing very severely. We scarcely regard anything as wicked which is not cruel. ... We are not exactly bad, but neither are we strong nor true,” op. cit., 52-4. This was written forty years ago, in England, and things are still more so, and in a wider area, to-day. 3 Socialists, when elected to office, have at Roubaix, in France, distributed bread freely to the poor, and at Lille they have given to working people free tickets to the municipal theatre. Is this the beginning again of “ panem et circenses”? And even without thinking ourselves socialists, we Ameri- cans, in many of our cities, give free breakfasts to our public-school children.