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Rotten aeroplanes for fools to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other devices which are always out of order our civilisation after all is not made up of these. I take up Le Rire and I gaze at its coloured pictures again and again.
Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with animals. The races which consent to be domesticated prosper and multiply.
We Europeans are busy with our multifarious interests and duties, while Egyptian Moslems are either entangled in the web of their environment, as are the fellahin, or eager snatchers at the gifts of civilisation, as are the more or less cultured effendis, or mere hair-splitters in futile religious controversy, as are too many of the ulema or sages at the great collegiate mosque of al-Azhar.
Then, again, it was obvious to me, though I could not hope to explain it to my host, that the Moor, having served his time, had to go under before the wave of Western civilisation. Morocco has held out longer than any other kingdom of Africa, not by reason of its own strength, but because the rulers of Europe could not afford to see the Mediterranean balance of power seriously disturbed.
Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking a habit with Holroyd and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of them. To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology.
Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilisation, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilised nations.
It was all very well to keep within the bounds of the law and civilisation, but where the whole existence of her best friend was at stake, Lady Maud was much too simple, primitive, and feminine to be hampered by any such artificial considerations, and she turned naturally to a man who did not seem to be a slave to them either.
The great experiment was, during this period, singularly successful. And the Civil War produced in Abraham Lincoln a national hero, and an exponent of the national character and ideals, worthy to be set beside Washington. The America of Lincoln manifestly stood for Liberty and Justice, the fundamental ideals of Western civilisation.
There are some who hold that the British Empire has made its last if most glorious effort in the Great War, and that in it Western civilisation proclaimed itself bankrupt and committed suicide. That cannot be. The cause for which the British people fought and made such appalling sacrifices was not unworthy of them or of our civilisation.
Then they clambered into the great thorough-brace wagon, where they all sat in gloomy silence for ten minutes, while Dicky's tan terrier was found for the fourth time that morning; and the long train, with its baggage-carts, its saddle-horses and its dogged little pack- mules, moved down the rocky steeps that led to civilisation.
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