Page:The influence of commerce on civilization (IA influenceofcomme00ellerich).pdf/32

26 pretending to be of supernatural origin, has been greatly extended and distorted into the most surprising forms by the perversity of sacerdotal commentators; but, except in a small section of the world, there has been nothing like the gradual amelioration of a legal system. There has been a material civilization, but, instead of the civilization expanding the law, the law has limited the civilization. It may also be remarked that the stationary condition of the human race is the rule, the progressive the exception." This may or may not be a true estimate, but it is none the less true and sad that the greatest commercial organizations the world has seen have led up to highly cultured systems of civilization, again to fall away through what I must call the era of theories and fads which have been the wreck of so many nations. It was the wealth accumulated through commerce which promoted highly graded civilizations which in their turn promoted socialistic and dangerous theories which brought about the fall of Babylon, Egypt, Home. Greece, Carthage, Arabia, and in modern times Spain and Portugal, and from within these Empires their own people were those who hastened their downfall. Gibbon says that one of the causes of the downfall of Greece was the hostility of the people of Athens to outside nations. Their social state, or in other words their civilization, had become inert, aggressive, provocative of retaliation. The same must be recorded of all other ancient and some modern nations. Now, in our great British Empire, the greatest the world has ever acknowledged, with her dependencies extending to every part of the globe, her hand directing through her commerce every movement of finance, the writing is on the wall indicating trouble created from within. In time the pre-eminent position of this great Empire will be challenged. It will not be the fleets and armies of other nations that will strike the first blow. It will be by what Maine calls the law stopping civilization. We see daily the accounts published of the treatment of our own and the subjects of other Asiatic nations by sections of our colonial empire, As this was the cause of the downfall of Greece, it maybe the beginning of the down-