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The difficulty of transport alone must have forced the Russians to consider how they could do away with such anomalies. Their main idea is that the transport of coal in a modern State is an almost inexcusable barbarism.
Thus the law has been confined, and drawn up into a narrow and inglorious study, and that which should be the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth remained in all the barbarism of the rudest times, whilst every other advanced by rapid steps to the highest improvement both in solidity and elegance; insomuch that the study of our jurisprudence presented to liberal and well-educated minds, even in the best authors, hardly anything but barbarous terms, ill explained, a coarse, but not a plain expression, an indigested method, and a species of reasoning the very refuse of the schools, which deduced the spirit of the law, not from original justice or legal conformity, but from causes foreign to it and altogether whimsical.
Yet this is substantially true; though the attraction towards the South is of a moral, not of a physical nature, yet an attraction there is, and a huge conglomeration of destructive elements hangs over us, and from time to time rushes down with an awful irresistible momentum. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world.
He must not come down from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him as it has undone us! With reverence be it spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him.
Civilized selfishness leads to a worse kind of barbarism than that of rude and primitive states of society, because it has more resources at its command, as cruelty with refinement has more resources for inflicting pain than cruelty which can only strike hard.
The provincial towns dwindled; thousands and tens of thousands perished; but Omdurman continually grew, and its ruler still directed the energies of a powerful army. Thus for the present we might leave the Dervish Empire. Yet the gloomy city of blood, mud, and filth that arose by the confluence of the Niles deserves a final glance while still in the pride of independent barbarism.
It ought to be the aim, therefore, of the larger institutions of learning to offer every inducement in their power to students from all parts of the Union, and more especially from the South, as the region which is most seriously threatened by barbarism, and in which the sense of national unity and the hold of national traditions on the popular mind are now feeblest.
As late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not settle the western territory "for ages," and that the region must be given up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as unstable as the Scythians and Tartars.
Or, of course, it may have been vice versa: that the Atlanteans were the older stock, nearer the soil, and Plebeians; and that the Patricians were later conquerors lured or driven down from Central Europe. At any rate, as their empire diminished, Etruria stood like some alien civilized Granada in the midst of surrounding medieval barbarism; for Italy, in 500 B.C., was simply medieval.
The current of sound practice with ourselves is, I believe, setting fast in the direction I have indicated in the above proposition. To uphold the exhibition of noxious agents in disease, as the rule, instead of admitting them cautiously and reluctantly as the exception, is, as I think, an eddy of opinion in the direction of the barbarism out of which we believe our art is escaping.
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