As for you,
sir, who also laugh, let some man come and strike you in the
face whilst you are enjoying that marvellous-looking dish, and
we shall soon see how much of the savage there is in _you_.
There, I might go on for ever, but what is the good? Civilization
is only savagery silver-gilt. A vainglory is it, and like a
northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.
Out of the soil of barbarism it has grown like a tree, and,
as I believe, into the soil like a tree it will once more, sooner
or later, fall again, as the Egyptian civilization fell, as the
Hellenic civilization fell, and as the Roman civilization and
many others of which the world has now lost count, fell also.
Do not let me, however, be understood as decrying our modern
institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience
of humanity applied for the good of all. Of course they have
great advantages -- hospitals for instance; but then, remember,
we breed the sickly people who fill them. In a savage land they
do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How many of
these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from civilization?
And so the balance sways and the story runs -- here a gain,
there a loss, and Nature's great average struck across the two,
whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty
equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity
of her purpose.
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