Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/218

206, than the civilized man, is inconsistent with facts. Civilization has its vices as well as its virtues, savagism has its advantages as well as its demerits.

The evils of savagism are not so great as we imagine; its pleasures more than we are apt to think. As we become more and more removed from evils, their magnitude enlarges; the fear of suffering increases as suffering is less experienced and witnessed. If savagism holds human life in light esteem, civilization makes death more hideous than it really is; if savagism is more cruel, it is less sensitive. Combatants accustomed to frequent encounter think lightly of wounds, and those whose life is oftenest imperilled think least of losing it. Indifference to pain is not necessarily the result of cruelty; it may arise as well from the most exalted sentiment as from the basest.

Civilization not only engenders new vices, but proves the destroyer of many virtues. Among the wealthier classes energy gives way to enjoyment, luxury saps the foundation of labor, progress becomes paralyzed, and, with now and then a noble exception, but few earnest workers in the paths of literature, science, or any of the departments which tend to the improvement of mankind, are to be found among the powerful and the affluent, while the middle classes are absorbed in money-getting, unconsciously thereby, it is true, working toward the ends of civilization.

That civilization is expedient, that it is a good, that it is better than savagism, we who profess to be civilized entertain no doubt. Those who believe otherwise must be ready to deny that health is better than disease, truth than superstition, intellectual power than stupid ignorance; but whether the miseries and vices of savagism, or those of civilization, are the greater, is another question. The tendency of civilization is, on the whole, to purify the morals, to give equal rights to man, to distribute more equally among men the benefits of this world, to meliorate wholesale misery and degradation, offer a higher aim and the means of accomplishing a nobler destiny, to increase the power of the mind and give it dominion over the forces of Nature, to place the material in subservience to the mental, to elevate the individual and regulate society. True, it may be urged that this heaping up of intellectual fruits tends toward monopoly, toward making the rich richer and the poor poorer, but I still hold that the benefits of civilization are for the most part evenly distributed; that wealth beyond one's necessity is generally a curse to the possessor greater than the extreme of poverty, and that the true blessings of culture and refinement, like air and sunshine, are free to all.

Civilization, it is said, multiplies wants, but then they are ennobling wants, better called aspirations, and many of these civilization satisfies.

If civilization breeds new vices, old ones are extinguished by it. Decency and decorum hide the hideousness of vice, drive it into dark corners, and thereby raise the tone of morals and weaken vice. Thus