The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

Their first laws, both social and religious, are

enacted only as war measures. The laws relating to marriage and

property are intended to increase the fertility and power of

the clan; the laws relating to religion are intended to

preserve the clan from the fury of the gods, against whom, at

an earlier period, they actually went to war. But out of this

feeling of sympathy, which arose in necessity, arises a

secondary sentiment, the love of esteem; and hence wars, which

at first were waged merely in self-defence, or to win food-grounds and females necessary for the subsistence and

perpetuation of the clan, are now waged for superfluities,

power, and the love of glory; commerce, which was founded in

necessity, is continued for the acquisition of ornaments and

luxuries; science, which at first was a means of life, provides

wealth, and is pursued for fame; music and design, which were

originally instincts of the hand and voice, are developed into

arts. It is therefore natural for man to endeavour to better

himself in life, that he may obtain the admiration of his

comrades. He desires to increase his means or to win renown in

the professions and the arts. Thus man presses upon man, and

the whole mass rises in knowledge, in power, and in wealth. But

owing to the division of classes resulting from war, and also

from the natural inequality of man, the greater part of the

human population could not obey their instinctive aspirations;

they were condemned to remain stationary and inert. By means of

caste, slavery, the system of privileged classes, and

monopolies, the people were forbidden to raise themselves in

life; they were doomed to die as they were born. But that they

might not be altogether without hope, they were taught by their

rulers that they would be rewarded with honour and happiness in

a future state. The Egyptian fellah received the good tidings

that there was no caste after death; the Christian serf was

consoled with the text, that the poor would inherit the kingdom

of heaven. This long and gloomy period of the human race may be

entitled Religion. History is confined to the upper classes.

All the discoveries, and inventions, and exploits of ancient

times are due to the efforts of an aristocracy; not only the

Persians and Hindus, but also the Greeks and the Romans, were

merely small societies of gentlemen reigning over a multitude

of slaves. The virtues of the lower classes were loyalty,

piety, obedience.

 

The third period is that of Liberty: it belongs only to Europe and to

modern times. A middle class of intelligence and wealth arises between

the aristocracy and the plebeians. They contend with the monopolies of

caste and birth; they demand power for themselves; they espouse the

cause of their poorer brethren; they will not admit that equality in

heaven is a valid reason for inequality on earth; they deny

that the aristocracy of priests know more of divine matters

than other men; they interpret the sacred books for themselves,

and translate them into the vulgar tongue; they separate

religion from temporal government, and reduce it to a system of

metaphysics and morality. It is in this period that we are at

present. Loyalty to the king has been transformed into

patriotism; and piety, or the worship of God, will give way, to

the reverence of law and the love of mankind. Thus the mind

will be elevated, the affections deepened and enlarged;

morality, ceasing to be entangled with theology, will be

applied exclusively to virtue.

 

It is difficult to find a title for the fourth period, as we

have as yet no word which expresses at the same time the utmost

development of mind and the utmost development of morals. I

have chosen the word Intellect, because by the education of the

intellect the moral sense is of necessity improved. In this

last period the destiny of Man will be fulfilled. He was not

sent upon the earth to prepare himself for existence in another

world; he was sent upon earth that he might beautify it as a

dwelling, and subdue it to his use; that he might exalt his

intellectual and moral powers until he had attained perfection,

and had raised himself to that ideal which he now expresses by

the name of God, but which, however sublime it may appear to

our weak and imperfect minds, is far below the splendour and

majesty of that power by whom the universe was made.

 

We shall now leave the darkness of the primeval times, and

enter the theatre of history. The Old World is a huge body,

with its head buried in eternal snows; with the Atlantic on its

left, the Pacific on its right, the Indian Ocean between its

legs. The left limb is sound and whole; its foot is the Cape of

Good Hope. The right limb has been broken and scattered by the

sea; Australia and the Archipelago are detached; Asia has been

amputated at the thigh. The lower extremities of this Old World

are covered for the most part with thorny thickets and with

fiery plains. The original natives were miserable creatures,

living chiefly on insects and shells, berries and roots;

casting the boomerang and the bone-pointed dart; abject, naked,

brutish, and forlorn. We pass up the body in its ancient state;

through the marsh of Central Africa, with its woolly-haired

blacks upon the left, and through the jungles of India, with

its straight-haired blacks upon the right; through the sandy

wastes of the Sahara, and the broad Asiatic tablelands; through

the forest of Central Europe, the Russian steppes, and the

Siberian plains, until we arrive at the frozen shores of the

open Polar Sea. The land is covered with fields of snow, on

which white bears may be seen in flocks like sheep. Ice

mountains tower in the air, and, as the summer approaches,

glide into the ocean and sail towards the south, The sky is

brightened by a rosy flame, which utters a crisp and crackling

sound. All else is silent, nature is benumbed. The signs of

human habitations are rare; sometimes a tribe of Esquimaux may

be perceived, dwelling in snow huts, enveloped in furs, driving

sledges with teams of dogs, tending their herds of reindeer on

the moss-grounds, or dashing over the cold waters in their

canoes to hunt the walrus and the seal.

 

This gloomy region, where the year is divided into one day and

one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history. We

descend through the land of the pine to the land of the oak and

beech. Huge woods and dismal fens covered Europe in the olden

time; by the banks of dark and sullen rivers the beavers built

their villages; the bears and the wolves were the aristocracy

of Europe; men paid them tribute in flesh and blood. A people,

apparently of Tartar origin, had already streamed into this

continent from Asia; but the true aborigines were not extinct;

they inhabited huts built on piles in the lakes of Switzerland;

they herded together in mountain caves. They were armed only

with stone weapons; but they cultivated certain kinds of grain,

and had tamed the reindeer, the ox, the boar, and the dog. In

ancient history Europe has no place. Even the lands to the

south of the Alps were inhabited by savages at a time when Asia

was in a civilised condition.

 

It is therefore Asia that we must first survey; it is there

that the history of books and monuments begins. The Tigris and

Euphrates rise in a tableland adjoining the Black Sea, and

flow into the Persian Gulf. On the right is a desert extending

to the Nile; on the left, a chain of hills. A shepherd people

descended from the plateau, occupied the land between the

rivers, the plains between the Tigris and the hills, and the

alluvial regions at the lower course of the Euphrates. They

wandered over the Arabian desert with their flocks and herds,

settled in Canaan and Yemen, crossed over into Africa, extended

along its northern shores as far as the Atlantic, overspread

the Sahara, and made border wars upon the Sudan. In the course of

many centuries the various branches of this people diverged

from one another. In Barbary and Sahara they were called

Berbers; in the valley of the Nile, Egyptians; Arabs, in the

desert and in Yemen; Canaanites, in Palestine; Assyrians, in

Mesopotamia and the upper regions of the Tigris; Chaldeans or

Babylonians, in the lower course of the Euphrates. The

Canaanites, the Arabs of Yemen, and the Berbers of Algeria

adopted agricultural habits and lived in towns; the Berbers of

Sahara, the Bedouins of the Syro-Arabian desert and of the

waste regions in Assyria, remained a pastoral and wandering

people. But in Chaldea and in Egypt the colonists were placed

under peculiar conditions. Famines impelled the shepherds to

make war on other tribes; famines impelled the Chaldeans and

Egyptians to contend with the Euphrates and the Nile, to

domesticate the waters, to store them in reservoirs, and to

distribute them, as required, upon the fields. It is not

improbable that the Egyptians were men of Babylonia driven by

war or by exile into the African deserts; that they were

composed of two noble classes, the priests and the military

men; that they took with them some knowledge of the arts and

sciences, which they afterwards developed into the peculiar

Egyptian type; that they found the valley inhabited by a negro

race, fishing in papyrus canoes, living chiefly on the lotus

root, and perhaps growing doura corn; that they reduced those

negroes to slavery, divided them into castes, allowed them to

retain in each district the form of animal worship peculiar to

the respective tribes:, making such worship emblematical, and

blending it with their own exalted creed; and finally, that

they married the native women, which would thus account for the

dash of the “tar-brush” plainly to be read by the practised eye

in the portraits, though not in the conventional faces of the

monuments. On the other hand it may he held that Egypt was

colonised by a Berber tribe; that its civilisation was entirely

indigenous; that the distinction of classes arose from natural

selection, and was afterwards petrified by law, and that the

negro traits in the Egyptian physiognomy were due to the

importation of Ethiopian girls, who have always been favourites

in the harems of the East. But whichever of these hypotheses

may be true, the essential point is this, that civilisation

commenced in the application of mechanics to the cultivation of

the fields, and that this science could only have been invented

under pressure of necessity.

 

Let us now pass beyond the Tigris and climb up the hills which

bound it on the left. We find ourselves on the steppes of

Central Asia, in some parts lying waste in salt and sandy

plains, in others clothed with fields of waving grass. Over

these broad regions roamed the Turks or Tartars, living on

mares’ milk, dwelling in houses upon wheels. Beyond the steppes

towards the east is another chain of hills, and beyond them

lies the Great Plain of China, watered by two majestic rivers,

the Yang-tse Kiang and the Hoang Ho. The people of the steppes

and the mountains poured down upon this country, subdued the

savage aborigines, covered the land with rice fields, irrigated

by canals, and established many kingdoms which were afterwards

blended into one harmonious and civilised empire.

 

To the right hand of the Tartar steppes, as you travel towards

China, is a lofty tableland, the region of the sources of the

Oxus and Jaxartes. Thence descended a people who called

themselves the Aryas, or “the noble”; they differed much in

appearance from the slit-eyed, smooth-faced, and fleshy-limbed

Mongols; and little in appearance, but widely in language, from

the people of the tableland of