Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1884-03-08
ais OUR CIVILIZATION PBRIsHABLE ?"
TO WHAT EXTENT PEREICIoUs LITER
AZURE Is RESPONSIBLE FOR AN Az
sWER.

Judge Jameson, in the North american
ReUie,g, asks a question that has very otter
been propounded-"I is our civilization
rerishable ~ Abstractly it may be replied
that any form Of civilization is perishable
that as its forms have been CELEBRATED sc
they may be again But such reply would
not be true of the civilizing elements.
Judge Jameson, however, casts the horo
scope of our system by reasoning upon
what we know of existing civilization,
since he holds that it cannot be assumed
that civilization having the elements OF
vitality discernable in ours ever before
existed, because those involved in any pre-
ViOus one are not precisely known, Though
this is debatable ground, and we do not
admit the exception to be at all well taken,
since the elements Of truth are non. de.
stTuctable, and always active and repro.
ductive, we pass it to ascertain exactly
what the reply Of the essayist is to his own
inquiry.
Commissions of nature might work phys
zeal changes that would blot out our civil.
cation, but this is mere speculation, and we
do not conceive that the scholarly writer
has proftably occupied several pages in
conjectures as to what may result by re-
currence of the age of ice, or the deluging
of the globe with water, or a harvesting Of
men and their works by an enveloping
wave of fire. These cosmicaI speculations
are more curious than profitable What
moral causes threaten our civilization ?
The Judge replies, Current literature Of
principles hostile to the lie of society, 4"
an answer that is simply open to no repli-
cation, It states the case, marshals the
proof and closes the debIts. The moral
character corrupted, the civilization pro.
ducing forces eaten away, there must come
decay OF systems, though, as at the outset
we held, there must remain the indestruct-
able germs of truth from which shall spring
new forms OF civilization.
The moral causes threatening civiliza.
tion are such as tend to undermine the
principles essential TO its psrmanence,
and these are the principles of morality,
and so he joins in the warning cry of
Matthew Arnold against the destructive
tendency of French imaginative literature.
It's impurity is reflected in our pernicious
literature against which we have so fire.
quently inveighed the progress of the pro-
ductions of lola are the stimulants to such
vile publications as contaminate our youth,
and offend the gaze of our daughters upon
the streets, and the whole tendency Of
which is to produce moral paralysis.
As this literature must, to some extent,
reflect the motive principles of society
that produces and tolerates it, we are
driven to the conclusion that a cancer
is at the core, and that the knife
alone can remove it. " The vice in the
French novel consists in its perverted
views of the sexual relations. This shows
a proclivity to sensual indulgence, uncon.
sciously treated as normal and harmless,
which can coexist only with obtuseness of
the moral sense.
But the Judge should have added that
in this country mental obliquity and moral
strabismus are being stimulated by
class of publications that directly, not in.
directly, assail the most sacred relations
between men and women that infame
the passions by half revealment that
stimulate the blser part by appeals to sll
that is gross and animal and last, but by