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An English court of law gives me no assurance of a fair trial or rather I am certain that in matters of art or morality an English court is about the worst tribunal in the civilised world." He shook his head impatiently. "I cannot help it, I cannot alter it," he said. "You must listen to me," I insisted. "You remember the Whistler and Ruskin action. You know that Whistler ought to have won.
"The bombardment of Paris was nothing else," said Flannigan; "yet the whole civilised world agreed to look on with folded arms, and change the ugly word 'murder' into the more euphonious one of 'war. It seemed right enough to German eyes; why shouldn't dynamite seem so to the Fenian?" "At any rate their empty vapourings have led to nothing as yet," said the Captain.
"'If I were a landowner on that scale, I said, 'do you know what I should do I should make a vegetarian colony; a self-supporting settlement of people who ate no meat, drank no alcohol, smoked no tobacco; a community which, as years went on, might prove to the world that there was the true ideal of civilised life health of mind and of body, true culture, true humanity!" The eyes glowed in his fleshless, colourless face; he spoke with arm raised, head thrown back the attitude of an enthusiastic preacher.
There were various sports; drinking and gambling ran riot. Blasphemous words filled the air. Men swore without the least thought. But profanity is not alone restricted to a frontier or border community, where laws and a sense of propriety are wanting. One may hear it in old and civilised towns, as he walks the streets, and sometimes from the lips of boys.
I do not mean that such scrutiny of life is wholly undesirable; depression, though it exaggerates our sinfulness, has a wonderful way of laying its finger on what is amiss, but we must not wilfully continue in sadness; and sadness is often a combination of an old instinct with the staleness which comes of civilised life; and a return to nature, as it is called, is often a cure, because civilisation has this disadvantage, that it often takes from us the necessity of doing many of the things which it is normal to man by inheritance to do fighting, hunting, preparing food, working with the hands.
Whatever you choose to call them democratic instinct, Christian aspiration, or the conscience of the civilised world they will do their work relentlessly, every day of the year, every hour of the day. It is their doing that, in spite of the immense financial influence and the most active propaganda, Germany has become unpopular all over the world.
But the eternal principles of that Arabian faith, which moulded them from savages into civilised men when they descended from their northern forests fifteen hundred years ago, and spread all over the world, can alone breathe new vigour into them, now that they are decaying in the dust and fever of their great cities.
The various royalist, imperialist and republican governments and municipalities of modern France have often been described as 'paternal, but no governments and municipalities in the whole civilised world have done less for the very poor. The official Poor Relief Board L'Assistance Publique has for fifty years been a by-word, a mockery and a sham, in spite of its large revenue.
Many people still think, if they think at all, of the South African Native as a being of the kind imagined by Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him, after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the corrupting influence of the civilised invaders.
Another great advantage proposed by this invention was, that it would serve as a universal language, to be understood in all civilised nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended.
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