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Updated: June 7, 2025
It has watched kings succeed and die, it has watched empires spread and collapse, it has watched civilisations ripen and wither away. All the known history of mankind has unrolled before it, not the short history of a few trifling centuries which we call ours, but the history of the world. The crouching figure is lion-like in attitude, but how human of face in spite of its broken nose.
The absence, or rather the rarity, of mother-right survivals in some civilisations cannot be counted as proof that the maternal system never existed. As I have shown in the earlier chapters of this book, the mother-age was a transitional stage, between the very early brute-conditions of the family and the second firmly established patriarchate.
It is seldom, indeed, that the question has been considered of sufficient importance to receive accurate attention. Not infrequently conflicting accounts are given by different authorities, and even by the same writer. Westermarck, “The Position of Women in Early Civilisations,” Sociological Papers, 1904. I wish it to be understood that mother-right does not necessarily imply mother-rule.
Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectual and moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations that the Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for the Latin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from their ancestors.
There would have been one supreme world-power; and that a power whose attitude towards backward races has been illustrated by the ruthless massacre of the Hereros; whose attitude towards ancient but disorganised civilisations has been illustrated by the history of Kiao-chau and by the celebrated allocution of the Kaiser to his soldiers on the eve of the Boxer expedition, when he bade them outdo the ferocity of Attila and his Huns; whose attitude towards kindred civilisations on the same level as their own has been illustrated before the war in the treatment of Danes, Poles, and Alsatians, and during the war in the treatment of Belgium, of the occupied districts in France, of Poland and of Serbia.
Also I remembered that he had loved Tommy and for his sake had spared our lives. Lastly, I do not altogether wonder that he came to certain hasty conclusions as to the value of our modern civilisations.
The curled darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicate apparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whose severest labour is the search after pleasure, and for whom even the chase, which was for his remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil essential for the meat and life of his people, becomes a luxurious and farcical amusement; this male, whether found in the later Roman Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in our Northern civilisations, is possible only because generations of parasitic women have preceded him.
In fact, all the modern civilisations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of "divide and rule" in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature.
Times had changed; it behoved him to change the methods which hitherto had held together his hapless inheritance. Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a wise man, and the ability which has been attributed to him, in view of the manner in which he successfully defied the civilisations of Europe, is based on premisses altogether false.
"I know of no study which is so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in the annals of history.... Man is a brute, only more intelligent than other brutes"; and "even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability."
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