Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/482

468 successive small stages, the ocean-bottom has subsided. The mass produced by these brainless and almost nerveless animals—each by its tentacles slowly drawing in such food as the water occasionally brings, and at intervals budding out, plant-like, a new individual—is a mass exceeding in vastness any built by men, and defies the waves in a way which their best breakwaters fail to do: the whole structure being entirely undesigned, and, indeed, absolutely unknown to its producers, individually or in their aggregate.

Prepared by these analogies, every one will see what is meant by the paradox that civilization, whether contemplated in its great organized societies or in their material and mental products, can be credited neither to any ideal "Great Being Humanity," nor to the real beings summed up under that abstract name. Though we can not in this case say that neither the aggregate nor its units have had any consciousness of the results wrought out, yet we may say that only after considerable advances of civilization, has this consciousness existed on the part of a few. Communities have grown and organized themselves through the attainment of private ends, mostly pursued with entire selfishness, and in utter ignorance of any social effects produced. If we begin with those early stages in which, among hostile tribes, one more numerous or better led than the rest, conquers them, and, consolidating them into a larger society, at the same time stops inter-tribal wars; we are shown that this step in advance is made, not only without thought of any advantage to Humanity, but often under the promptings of the basest motives in the mind of the most atrocious savage. And so onward. It needs but to glance at such wall-paintings as those of the conquering Rameses at Karnac, or to read the inscriptions in which Assyrian kings proudly narrated their great deeds, to see that personal ambitions were pursued with absolute disregard of human welfare. But for that admiration of military glory with which classical culture imbues each rising generation, it would be felt that whatever benefits these kings unknowingly wrought, their self-praising records have brought them not much more honor than has been brought to the Fijian king Tanoa by the row of nine hundred stones recording the number of victims he devoured. And though the outcome of those struggles for supremacy in which, during European history, so many millions have been sacrificed, has been the formation of great nations fitted for the highest types of structure; yet when, hereafter, opinion is no longer swayed by public-school ethics, it will be seen that the men who effected these unions did so from desires which should class them with criminals rather than with the benefactors of mankind. With governmental organizations it was the same as with social consolidations: they arose not to secure the blessings of order, but to maintain the ruler's power. As the original motive for preventing quarrels among soldiers was that the army might not be rendered inefficient before the enemy, so, throughout the militant society at large, the motive for