ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CIVILIZED?
TO most persons such a question will seem very absurd. Of course, the American people are civilized. They are probably the most civilized on the face of the earth, not in a material sense merely but in an immaterial sense. Where is there more anxious discussion of ways and means to elevate the condition of the poor both morally and physically, and to alleviate the sufferings of the unfortunate? Where is there so much money given to promote the work of charity and education? But the sympathies of the American people are not confined to their own borders. When there is a great calamity abroad, like an Irish or Russian famine, or an Indian plague, no purse is opened more quickly or widely than theirs; and as to work in the missionary field, have they not contributed countless sums to carry it on?
But these statements betray an inexact knowledge of the essence of civilization. They show how the mind is taken with the ostentatious and dazzling, which may possess a meaning quite different from that attached to them, and how it fails to grasp the more significant but hardly less obvious phenomena of American social and political life. Charity does not necessarily mean a high civilization, for it may be born of vanity, a conspicuous trait of the barbarian, and be so shortsighted as to be utterly destructive of the best interests of the race. Nor does education in the popular sense—that is, the acquisition of facts and the sharpening of the intellect—mean civilization proper, for, as Mr. Morley pointed out in his recent lecture on Machiavelli, rare scholarship and a high degree of aesthetic taste, such as those of the Medici and their associates, may be coupled with unspeakable baseness. The truly civilized man does not refrain simply from conduct that is clearly wrong, such as robbery and murder, but he refrains from conduct that tends in indirect and obscure ways to injure his fellows, depriving them in the long run of their lives and their property. His sympathies are lively in the highest degree. But they are rational. While they respond to immediate suffering, they respond more quickly to the greater remote suffering that unwise philanthropy always inflicts. While, finally, he is resentful of invasions of his own rights, he is invariably considerate and jealous of the rights of others.
When judged by this standard, one that a few persons in every community have already reached, the American people can hardly be said to have attained civilization. In fact, they are, in many respects, still on the level of barbarians, deficient in self-control, oblivious to the rights and feelings of others, incapable of grasping the less obvious but more important results of a given line of conduct, and even given over to actual lawlessness and crime. They may shudder at Armenian massacres, and feel that the Turk deserves the solicitude of the hangman. They may denounce with a Carlylean wealth of epithet the Spanish cruelties in Cuba, which are, in reality, nothing more than the inevitable accompaniment of war, and clamor for an intervention that will put an end to them in the interest of humanity.
