h, and that what has
sprung up only overnight cannot have taken deep root (as if it were a
thing practically eternal), and could not be very difficult to replace
by something more deliberately thought out--by something learned
through ten thousand years of the tragic effects experienced by
thousands of millions of human beings. Civilization, I say, is a mere
mushroom growth, as compared with the whole life-period of man's
existence on earth. It is only ten thousand years old; while, by the
most modest and cautious calculation, man has existed one hundred
thousand years; and during the ninety thousand which preceded the last
ten, he made gigantic progress towards self-knowledge and
self-reverence. Let us, therefore, not be browbeaten by civilization on
account of its antiquity.

XI. EDWARD CARPENTER'S INDICTMENT OF CIVILIZATION

Equally must we guard against the fallacy of attributing only the
beneficent effects of civilization to its inherent principle, while we
trace all the evils which have arisen in its train to extrinsic
causes--to human nature, or to superficial and local obstructions. This
word of warning brings me back to Mr. Edward Carpenter's essay on
_Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_; for when I first read it he
appeared to me to exaggerate out of all proportion the evils in modern
life as compared with the good in it: especially did I feel that he
erred in that he accounted the evils as permanent and organic
characteristics of the civilizing process itself, and believed that
they must increase with its development and could not be eradicated
except with its extinction. During the last twenty-six years, however,
I have learned a thing or two. I have not lost one jot or tittle of my
early faith in man, and I have even gained fresh hope for a speedy
issue of the human race out of most of its sufferings and sins; but I
have gained this fresh hope only because I have been drawn by wider and
closer observation of economic events--and especially of the new
developments of trade and politics the world over--to the conclusion
that the evils, however great, are to be traced to the false principle
that animates the civilizing process, and that they will fall away of
themselves when once that principle has been exchanged for another that
is already well known, and which, as I have remarked, began four
centuries ago to disintegrate the established order.

Carpenter's indictment of civilization seems to me inco