[09] And so come new dangers. The rude society resembles the creatures
that though cut into pieces will live; the highly civilized society
is like a highly organized animal: a stab in a vital part, the suppression
of a single function, is death. A savage village may be burned and
its people driven off — but, used to direct recourse to nature,
they can maintain themselves. Highly civilized man, however, accustomed
to capital, to machinery, to the minute division of labor, becomes
helpless when suddenly deprived of these and thrown upon nature. Under
the factory system, some sixty persons, with the aid of much costly
machinery, cooperate to the making of a pair of shoes. But, of the
sixty, not one could make a whole shoe. This is the tendency in all
branches of production, even in agriculture. How many farmers of the
new generation can use the flail? How many farmers' wives can now make
a coat from the wool? Many of our farmers do not even make their own
butter or raise their own vegetables! There is an enormous gain in
productive power from this division of labor, which assigns to the
individual the production of but a few of the things, or even but a
small part of one of the things, he needs, and makes each dependent
upon others with whom he never comes in contact; but the social organization
becomes more sensitive. A primitive village community may pursue the
even tenor of its life without feeling disasters which overtake other
villages but a few miles off; but in the closely knit civilization
to which we have attained, a war, a scarcity, a commercial crisis,
in one hemisphere produces powerful effects in the other, while shocks
and jars from which a primitive community easily recovers would to
a highly civilized community mean wreck.
[11] In a simpler state master and man, neighbor and neighbor,
know each other, and there is that
touch of the elbow which, in times
of danger, enables society to rally.
But present tendencies are to the
loss of this. In London, dwellers
in one house do not know those in the next; the tenants of adjoining
rooms are
utter
strangers to
each
other. Let civil conflict break
or paralyze the authority that preserves order and the vast population
would
become
a terror-stricken mob, without
point of rally or principle of
cohesion,
and
your London would
be sacked and burned by an army of
thieves.
London is only the greatest of great
cities. What is true of London
is true of New York, and in the same measure true of the many cities
whose
hundreds
of
thousands
are steadily
growing toward millions. These
vast
aggregations
of humanity, where
he who seeks isolation may find
it more truly
than in the desert; where wealth and poverty
touch
and jostle;
where one
revels and
another starves
within a few feet of each other,
yet separated
by as great a gulf as that fixed between
Dives in Hell and Lazarus
in Abraham's
bosom — they
are centers and types of our civilization.
Let jar or shock dislocate the complex
and delicate organization,
let the policeman's
club
be thrown down or wrested from him,
and the fountains of the great deep
are opened, and quicker than ever
before chaos comes
again. Strong as it may seem, our civilization
is evolving destructive
forces.
Not desert and forest, but city slums
and country roadsides are nursing the
barbarians who may
be to the new what Hun
and Vandal
were to
the
old.
[16] These dangers, which menace not one country alone, but modern
civilization itself, do but show that a higher civilization is struggling
to be born — that the needs and the aspirations of men have outgrown
conditions and institutions that before sufficed. ...
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