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Updated: June 3, 2025
Century after century has seen it danced by the youths and maidens of successive generations, on the self-same spots always the most beautiful in the neighbourhood both on the islands and on the main, since the time when Greece was young and strong the fit cradle of the arts and sciences; when that literature was produced which will last as long as the world exists; when those temples arose, and those statues came forth from their native rock, which subsequent ages have never been able to equal; when all that the human mind could conceive most elegant had its birth; when her ships traversed all known seas, and her colonies went forth to civilise the earth; when her sages gave laws to the world, and a handful of her sons were sufficient to drive back thousands upon thousands of the vaunted armies of the East; from those glorious epochs to the time when, sunk in effeminacy and vice, despising the wisdom of her ancestors, she fell under the sway of the most savage of the tribes she had once despised yet still, in abject slavery, while all that man cared for was destroyed, the sports of their youth were not forgotten; and what was learned in youth, the parents taught their children to revive, as their only consolation in their misery and degradation.
Now they organise games and lay claim to a special morality and to a special mission; they send out missionaries to civilise us savages; and if our people resent having an alien creed stuffed down their throats, they take our hand and burn our homes in the name of Charity, Progress, and Civilisation. They seek for one thing gold; they preach competition, but competition for what?
Let everyone try to civilise himself; depend upon it, it's the best work he can do for the world at large." "And yet," put in Lord Dymchurch, "the world can't do without apostles. Do you think mere example has ever availed much?" "Perhaps not. I would say that I don't care. Do you really believe that the world ever will be much more civilised than it is?
But the colonists of North America should recollect, when they indulge in such comparisons, that their British ancestors took many centuries to civilise themselves, before they could send free and intelligent settlers to America.
Although the Carthaginians had had frequent intercourse with these islands and a Port of the smaller of the two still bears a Punic name, they had done little to civilise the native inhabitants.
I had a saying about the place, that it was "built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks." What an example for Sylvia of the futility of charity the effort on the part of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using them for the storage of coals!
They see a girl, too, now woman-grown in whom the change, though less extreme, is still strikingly sadly for the worse. In both, the transformation is so complete, so retrograde, so contrary to all experience, that they can scarcely realise it. It is difficult to believe that any nature, however savage, after such pains had been taken to civilise it, could so return to itself!
But their visits to the city do not civilise them; the outing only broadens the horizon of their views in regard to foreigners, and makes them more ambitious to secure one, and see what he is like, and cut off his ears, and get his money. Do not suppose that the shepherd of the Abruzzi lies all day on the rocks in the sun, waiting for the foreign gentleman to come within reach.
To colonise the lunar regions, to cultivate them, people them, to take them all the wonders of art, science, and industry! To civilise the Selenites, unless they are more civilised than we are, and to make them into a republic if they have not already done it for themselves!"
Whether it was the persistent rain and the mud and the weariness and the squalid surroundings, or the fact that the tribe she had come to civilise and evangelise were given over to the service of the devil, or that her faith had weakened, or whether it was all of these together, her first Sunday in Okoyong was one of the saddest she ever experienced. More than once she was on the verge of tears.
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