They roused whole
peoples into action, and stirred the depths of human life, they
powerfully affected ethnography, they let loose rivers of blood, and
renewed the face of things. The Quakers will not see that there is a law
of tempests in history as in nature. The revilers of war are like the
revilers of thunder, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do.
Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the
air.
"Nos patimur longae pacis mala."
Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put
the world brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to
ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet
been discovered. No civilization can bear more than a certain proportion
of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and crime. When this proportion
has been reached, the boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding
breaks down; institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The
evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon it, and if it
is not eliminated ends by destroying it. And as nothing is perfect,
nothing can escape death.
May 19, 1880.--_Inadaptibility_, due either to mysticism or stiffness,
delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all events the
characteristic of my life.
Pages:
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607