Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/31

Rh type. The subconscious activities are not rationalized and humanized, they are in fact more brutalized than ever, inasmuch as under the aegis of military law and under the tacit understanding that necessity knows no law, there is no pity and no mercy in war. The worst of crimes are committed for the benefit of the army and the militant nation. The individual in the army becomes used to holding human life in contempt, in fact, the greater the slaughter, the greater is his merit; and the more medals, ribbons, and honors of hero-worship are showered on him, the more he becomes, after a time, indifferent to all sorts of human suffering and loss of human life. We find this difference in the warlike Assyrians who enjoyed the impaling and flaying alive of their prisoners, and in the case of the military Spartans in the treatment of their unfortunate Helots, more specially in the imperial warlike world-conquerors, the Romans, in their love of the brutalities of gladiatorial combats and the popular delight in the shedding of blood on the arena. Thus Lecky in describing Roman society, says: "The gladiatorial games form indeed one feature which to a modern mind is almost inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, in an advanced period of civilization,—men and women who not only professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals,—should have the carnage of men as their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly normal, while it opens fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep, though painful character." The great Roman phrase-monger and moralizer Cicero, glorifies gladiatorial games. "When guilty men" proclaims Cicero "are compelled to fight, no better discipline against suffering and death can be presented to the eye." It is instructive for us to learn as well as to ponder on the fact that "the very men who looked down with delight, when the sand of the arena reddened with human blood, made the theatre ring with applause when Terence in his famous line: ‘Homo sum, Nihil humani mihi alienum puto’ proclaimed the brotherhood of man." If any protests against those edifying gladiatorial games and ancient forms of movie shows of the arena appeared at all, they came not from the intellectual and ideological classes, but from the despised Jews and from those pariahs of the ancient world, the unwarlike, peace-loving, humble, early Christians who lived by the apparently absurd rule of Christianity: 'Love your enemies and return good for evil.' There is, however, one feeble protest on record, but it is not from imperial Rome,—it is