CIVILIZATION AND MORALS. 559 



In ancient Greece, even at the golden prime of that splendid nar- 

 row culture which exhibited itself so incomparably in art, in literature, 

 and in civic virtue, the moral rules which concern liberty and life, and 

 the simpler of the moral rules which concern rights of property, were 

 defined very perfectly as between the fellow-citizens of each state, and 

 between the kindred states, but very imperfectly beyond that strict 

 limit of familiar association. The stranger, the alien, the enslaved 

 captive, the barbarian of the non-Hellenic world, were not human 

 fellows to the Greek ; at the most they were only human creatures of 

 some different variety, having that similitude and approaching some- 

 what to that relation, but quite excluded from his cognition of fellow- 

 ship by all the habits of his feeling and his thought. According to 

 his perception, they were clearly proper subjects of predatory warfare 

 and piracy; he could kill them, plunder them, enslave them, with no 

 more compunction of conscience than the modern hunter feels in capt- 

 uring or killing the game-animals of the forest. And yet the same 

 conscience was acting in the Greek that acts in men to-day ; but only 

 with more narrowness of range in the perceptions upon which it acted. 



We shall have to pass far beyond the Greek in history to find much 

 of a moral change in these respects. The Englishman of the Eliza- 

 bethan age was a tolerably cultured man, as well morally as other- 

 wise. So far as his fellow-Englishmen were concerned, he had notions 

 of right conduct that were quite accurately formed. But he found it 

 hard to carry many of these notions beyond the shore-bounds of his 

 little island. The sea in that time not only the Spanish Main, but 

 the English Channel, and the very Thames itself was swarming with 

 English pirates and buccaneers, who were the contemporaries of Shake- 

 speare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Coke ; who boasted the best 

 names of the English gentry in their ranks ; who received more than 

 half countenance from the public sentiment and the public policy of 

 the English nation ; and who pillaged Spanish, French, and Flemish 

 traders with serene impartiality, killing captains and crews without 

 remorse when it suited their convenience to kill. In fact, Mr. Fronde 

 tells us that the well-encouraged piracy of the sixteenth century was 

 " the very source and seed-vessel " of the future naval power of Eng- 

 land. 



This insulation of moral ideas, which established one code of con- 

 duct for fellow-citizens and another for foreigners, one code for 

 neighbors and another for strangers, characterized every people until 

 recent times ; but it has been disappearing rapidly among all the fore- 

 most races since the modern growth of universal commerce began. 

 There is no mistaking the reason why. In the footsteps of commerce, 

 every kind of communication and intercourse between men has closely 

 followed, like the threads behind a weaver's shuttle. By travel, by 

 migration, by correspondence through the post, the newspaper, and 

 the telegraph men are fetched nowadays from the farthest corners 



