18

Development in Spots, a Monstrosity. [LECT.

developed son must bow to the word of his father, or the mumbling of a dotard grandfather; and thus a whole hemisphere of ideas, of duties, is unknown while the other half is developed and strained, and stretched to monstrosity.

A relationship prior to that of parent and child-the grand principle of all true sociology, given in the very beginning of the Bible, and fundamental in all progressive civilization-is ignored, unknown, viz., the essential equality of the sexes, the husband being first of the two in household rank, and that when the child has become a man he is no longer a child, but a man who may take to himself a wife and these two then set up a new family. In China the woman is but a supplement to the man, and the child an appendix.

The natural duties and relationships of parents and children are reciprocal, like the two arms of the body, which should be balanced, though one may be a little more expert than the other. But in China the relation of father to child is so exaggerated that it is as if the right arm had been developed into a limb six feet long; while on the other hand, the relation of child to parent, from the standpoint of parental responsibility and duty, is so minified that it is as if the left arm had been dwarfed to an inch; and thus as a feeble, flabby body with one arm of an unwieldy length and the other infinitesimally small, would be a monstrosity, so the ethics of relationships in China have grown into a social caricature of a fundamental truth. And then the result of this state of affairs is to preclude all growth. The law of advance is that each generation is like the one preceding it, with some little variety. Now if the variety is an improvement and the little change be allowed to live and grow, it will increase until, in a few generations, there is seen to be a great advance for the better. If, however, all variations from the primitive form be prohibited, all advance is impossible, and a dead uniformity of type results.

I.]

Originality always Antagonized.

19

The tendency to suppress originality is universal. The difficulty in civilizing the world is not to get a people to submit to fixed laws, but to get them out of fixedness of law into a living, growing organism. The tendency is seen even in the west. A Pennsylvania Dutchman of my grandfather's day had a boy who was not satisfied with the old way of carrying wheat to the mill, with the wheat at one end of the sack on one side of the horse and a stone to balance it at the other end of the sack, at the other side of the horse, and put half of the wheat on one side and half on the other. He came running to his father, "O Fader, see! I haf put one half on one side and one on die oder, and it coes just as cood." His father scolded him, saying, "What are you thinking about? Do you dink yourself better as your fader and grandfader? You shust go and put in the shtone, as pefore." Now in civilized lands, the progressive boy becomes his own master before he quite loses his new idea, and he develops it independently to practical results, which even his old father by and by comes to approve, though if he had had his way, it never would have been done.

But in China each rising generation is kept in the rut of its predecessors by the almost absolute control of father over son, until he in turn loses all tendency to vary, and himself becomes conservative. And thus by the tyranny of the past over the present the one type is perennially perpetuated.

II.

WHAT IS CIVILIZATION?

This is a crucial question, the proper understanding of which will materially affect our discussion. One cause of the endless round of polemical warfare, and the bitter wrangles in the world of thought, is the defectiveness of definitions of

20

Definitions of Civilization.

[LECT.

cardinal points. Let us try at the start to understand what true civilization is 21 Dr. Mitchel says it is the arresting of the principle of natural selection in the process of evolution, by which man comes to control himself and his destiny. Buckle makes it out to be the sum or outcome of physical causes, the moral element being insignificant, the mind itself the product of matter. Bagehot tells us that the progress of civilization results from creations of mind conserved and propagated by physical or lower causes. Guizot-whom you all know, and cannot study too much, whose work on European civilization is a masterly philosophy of history-tells us that civilization in its most general idea is an improved condition of man resulting from the establishment of social order in place of individual independence and lawlessness of barbaric life, the progress of the human race towards realizing the idea of humanity.

Now, in attempting to formulate for ourselves a definition of what civilization really is, we must not forget the following facts(1) The state is an aggregation of individual elements, and that there can be no civilized and progressive land without civilized and educated masses of people. (2) No true civilization is in spots or partial developments. A state in which there are few troubles,-all things nicely arranged for everybody, but where the people do not think for themselves, being led by officialdom, like a flock of sheep in intellectual and moral childhood, is not a civilized state. A state that has acquired considerable moral and intellectual advance, but where the masses have little physical comfort and no political liberty, is not a civilized state. A land in which the people have almost perfect liberty, but where might is right, the weak oppressed and violence rules, is not a civilized land. A people in which every individual has almost perfect liberty, and inequality or

1These definitions are rather in substance than in the words of the authors mentioned.

I.]

The Civilized Unit.

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difference is rare, but where there is no national sentiment, no cohesion of state, simply an ever-flowing mass of human individual-is not a civilized people. A land in which refinement and culture make a sort of paradise for the favored classes, but where morality is rare, where effeminacy characterizes the public spirit, where no noble idea or lofty sentiment permeates the masses of the people, cannot be called a civilized state. Thus no one principle alone can make a civilization. (3) Civilization is not a thing that can be manufactured to order, or imported ready made,-a something that men or nations can choose and change, put on and off like a suit of clothes. It is the life and growth of a people, the outcome in social and political life of the principles which actuate and control the individual character. Keeping these points before our minds, it will be seen that a true form of civilization is only to be found in those lands where civilized individual men combine on compatible principles, and evince a matured character in all the various phases of social and political life.

Now what is the character of this unit, this civilized man? It is a man in whom all the elements of human nature are matured, or are progressing in harmonious development towards legitimate maturity. A man in whom the physical alone is developed makes a magnificent savage, but is no complete man. A man may cultivate his mind and possess all the external refinement of the scholar and the gentleman, and yet have in his private life a moral foulness to which he would never dare to introduce his mother or sister, and thus make himself a representative, not of true civilization, but of that gangrene by whose rot many a nascent civilization has fallen into irrecoverable ruin. A man whose moral sense has been aroused, and who follows the bent of his higher nature, who cultures himself into philosophic calm and heroic virtue, but whose soul is still unlightened by eternal hope and the confidence of faith, in

22

True Civilization is occult, internal.

[LECT.

regions where faith alone is rational, is a man whom we can admire, but whose gloomy type is impossible as the ideal of a true civilization. The man whose religious instincts have been so warped and misled as to make him a recluse or a cynic, an ascetic neglecter of physical, mental, social, or political manhood, is an egregious failure as a man, and far from the ideal after which we seek. Our ideal man is one in whom all the elements of manhood have full room for development, nothing suppressed or removed, depriving humanity of any legitimate heritage; the lower, however, subject to the higher powers, and all in conscious subjection, not to any man or combination of men, but to Him who has created the universe and is Father of our spirits. A man who cares for the physical as a valued inheritance, who takes his place as man amongst men in social and political life, whose mind is ever open and earnest in the search after truth in every realm of nature and of thought, whose moral impulses and actions are pure, whose spirit rises unsullied in hope of immortality and in scientific trust upon God, is a civilized man. Let this become the ideal unit, the aim of a people, fully realized perhaps by few, and that people will surely advance in all that is true and abiding in civilization.

What strikes the mind first of all in a country called civilized, is the external refinement, the comforts and conveniences of life, the power of machinery in manufacture, the ramifications of commerce and the engines of war. A step further and the school house and college, the spread of education and its influence, become palpable. It requires deeper penetration, however, to see the occult but still more powerful moral and religious forces behind it all.

That there can be no true civilization without morality is a truism so thoroughly accepted by all that I need spend no time in arguing the point. History tells us, and no one in Japan would doubt the fact, that no amount of outer refinement,