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.

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    peace, to ensure safety from sudden attack, and the larger this supply needs to be, the quicker the attack can be deliv- ered.? This long period of peace, to repeat, broken only by a few quick wars, is a period of enjoyment and of lavish consump- tion. Luxury enters even the army, and the soldiers become discontented and refuse to fight unless they be well paid and well provisioned. In time the natives become so degenerate that outsiders, mercenaries, have to be hired. All through this period power is in the hands of those who have the ready money to pay the men. No longer the land-owners, but the financiers are the directing class. The time comes when the supplies, not only of delicacies, but of such necessaries as the metals needed for arms, begin to give out. At last not even mercenaries can be obtained, or they, not being regularly paid, behave worse than enemies. ‘The degenerate upper classes are then thrown back on their own resources. Great distances hav- ing to be covered, and men being too feeble to make long marches on foot, cavalry again comes into use. Artillery fail- ing, the defence behind stone walls (masons now vieing with smiths in popular favour), again becomes not only equal but superior to the attack, and decentralisation sets in.» For now those who before were the weaker have become the stronger, and parts of great states which up till now were held together either through fear from without if they were to stand by themselves, or through internal coercion at the hands of those whose interest lay in collecting the widest contributions, fall apart through mutual repulsion and jealousy. Also less fa- voured outsiders, barbarians, whose armies are not encumbered with luxuries, and whose weapons by this time are equal, if not superior, to those of the civilised, may overrun the territory of the latter, who find protection only in walled cities or in 1Cf. Petrie: “The real fact is that great armaments are like great states, a needful condition of the new speed of communication. When it took two or three months to move an army from central Europe to Eng- land, we had two or three months to prepare; when it takes only two or three days we must be always prepared. .. . Within a generation of quick transport being started, big armaments were found needful,” op cit., 98. 2¥For the influence of the varying superiority of the attack and the de- fence upon consolidation and decentralisation, see Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilisation and Decay, 55, 70, 156, 184.