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Maybe this man Dunnan will do the same for us on Marduk." "You have troubles?" "You've seen decivilized planets. How does it happen?" "I know how it's happened on a good many: War. Destruction of cities and industries. Survivors among ruins, too busy keeping their own bodies alive to try to keep civilization alive. Then they lose all knowledge of how to be civilized."
What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor of an Ireland consummately civilized.
He mingled with rough, brutal, decivilized creatures; his ears were assaulted by obscene language, spoken as to an equal; he saw the ugliest side of humanity, and the blackest phases of savagery. Yet through it all, sharing these experiences with no trace of condescension, his soul was like a lily.
The difficulty of dealing in the course of any critical duty with decivilized man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity sparing him no doubt the word he defends himself against the charge of barbarism. Especially from new soil remote, colonial he faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthfulness of race.
There are guides and porters to carry the blankets for beds, the raw provisions, and the camp equipage; and the motley party of the temporarily decivilized files into the woods, and begins, perhaps by a road, perhaps on a trail, its exhilarating and weary march.
Ornament strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilized was in the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has something even more severe than modertion: she has an innumerable singleness.
Even now English voices are constantly calling upon America to begin to begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead a fine and admirable continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained advance. But decivilized man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too, knows him in all his dailiness.
I've seen planets that decivilized both ways. Tanith, I think, is one of the latter." That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the way out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers who had joined the company after the piracy of the Enterprise and the murder, had asked: "But some of them survived. Don't they know what happened?"
And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilized have every grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities.
You heard what I was telling those very people at Karvall House, the day I met you. And you've seen what's been happening on Gram since we came out here. Otto, the Sword-Worlds are finished; they're half decivilized now. Civilization is alive and growing here on Tanith. I want to stay here and help it grow." "Look, Lucas," Harkaman said. "You're Prince of Tanith, and I'm only the Admiral.
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