The record-union., 1894-03-24
SAVAGES OF CIVILIZATION.
The Stuff Anarchy is Made of and Its
Causes.


To borrow term from the Darwinians.
civilized mans environment now
presses upon him with force some
twenty or twenty-five times greater than
it did before the age of steam. Since the
Reign of Terror, fourfold revolution
has gone swiftly on it's course, in re-
ligious, political, economic and social
ideas; nor have any but the inhabitants
OF sequesiered villages escaped the lnt1u-
ence which was bent on transforming
them. But has the brain developed
power of resistance, or OF reflex action,
equal to the demands upon it? TO keep
the balance of humanity, as III the time
OF Goldsmith and johnson, the present
race of Europeans should have strength
ened their nervous centerS to degree
which would make them men OF genius.
Yet not only have they taken no pains to
strengthen them, but, by the use Of mar
cotics and artificial excitement, they have
deliberately weakened them. Such was
the Judgment Of Morel-a high authority
on mental deterioration. And II, with
BrOuardel, we take into account the con-
centrated evil influence of our large mod
ern cities, it ought not TO astonish us that
| such exhausted temperaments breed hy-
| sierra; or that from hysteria should re-
suit the intense self-consciousness"
| which runs, like a red thread, from be-
ginning TO end Of the literature and the
art now under consideration.
Now, of all the activities which human
nature displays, the most difficult to sus-
tain-and therefore the earliest to waver
In diseased organism-is that course of
moral habits which we term character.
In nearly all the degenerate there is lack
ing the sense OF right and wrong; The
marked incapacity of will from which
they suffer makes them impotent to
| choose the good and reject the evil; and
all, in varying degrees. are infected with
moral insanity" as DR.. Maudsley has
termed it. The want of symmetry OBJ
served in their physical constitution is
apparent also in the impulsive and per-
verse actions TO which they give way.
The handspring of character-a deliber-
ate choice of the better thingS-haS been,
so TO say, omitted in their make. The
emotional temperament, the ''obsession"
of fixed ideas, the imagination open to
every fantastic influence, the depression,
the lack of perseverance in well-doing,
the pessimism, and, behind all this, the
confused incoherent thought which is
guided by no principles and lives by imi-
tation-such are notes of many an artist,
poet, romance writer, but also of crimi-
nails, anarchists and tenants of the asy-
lum as they have been sedulously gath
cred from the facts by Well-qualitied OBJ
servers. Thus, to sum up in a sentence,
tLi6cO IllOIl anu WOl1lGil lldNO ldIlOQ-uOb
necessarily by their own msdeeds-in
adapting themselves to the stage of civili-
zation which we have now reached. They
are not always the "submerged," but, in
every station, from the king to the street
Arab, or the UoyOa of the Paris aubourgs,
they are the ''relapsed."
These furnish the elements. or the
prime stuff, OUT of which anarchy is pro-
duced. Artists, politicians. writer's,
wielders of dynamite or assassins by in
stinct and for the pleasure Of the thing,
they must needs be revolutionary, since,
i'll the social order, they can neither find
nor make a place for themselves. They
are the savagess of civilization-the bar
barians in our midst. NJ. de Vogue has
observed that the spectacle of one of our
great cities cannot but dizzy and over
come the imagination. just as, to a trav-
eler in the East, the confused babel of
tongues, tribes and customs Is for a long
while bewildering. But il is only physi-
cians-and especially alienists-who re-
mark the weakness of will and the chaos
of thought, which in our society are
masked by conventional manners or car
ried off as fashionable frivolity. "All
things" it has been said, ''have become
questionable. since all are called in ques-
ton. ."-London Quarterly Review.