HELLAS \ AND CIVILIZA TION. 



401 



sible. Their inhabitants must not all subsist by 

 growing and manufacturing the self-same articles, 

 or else commercial intercourse can never spring 

 up between them. But as no nation ever gains 

 the wider horizon of intelligent thought except by 

 liberal communication with other nations of vary- 

 ing types, it follows above all things that a con- 

 siderable number of quasi-civilized peoples must 

 live in their neighborhood, within the reach of 

 existing means of transit. Hellas alone, of all 

 countries in the world, combined these various 

 necessities, in an early state of trade and naviga- 

 tion ; and hence it became inevitable that in Hel- 

 las the first great civilized culture should take its 

 rise. 



Clearly to put the problem before the reader, 

 let us ask, "Why could not such a great civilized 

 culture have equally arisen at first over the whole 

 basin of the Mediterranean ? " The reason is 

 plain enough : Because the Mediterranean cannot 

 be traversed from end to end except at a compara- 

 tively developed stage of the art of navigation. So 

 soon as seaman-craft had progressed to the point 

 where the whole of that inland sea, with its two 

 distinct and widely-different basins, could be 

 combined in one organic commercial whole — so 

 soon as Carthage, Cyrene, Alexandria, Cyprus, 

 Crete, Corinth, Syracuse, Rome, and Massilia, to- 

 gether with Gades itself, beyond the Pillars of 

 Hercules, and Sinope or Trapezus in the Euxine, 

 could be united in one vast cycle of trading oper- 

 ations — so soon did the seat of culture shift from 

 the narrow limits of the iEgean to the Mediter- 

 ranean system at large ; and so soon did its cen- 

 tre remove from Hellas to Italy, from Athens 

 or Alexandria to the natural pivot at Rome. No 

 doubt special political and almost accidental cir- 

 cumstances — circumstances, I mean, affecting a 

 particular battle or a particular campaign — had 

 much to do with modifying the details of this 

 westward migration of culture ; but it seems to 

 me an inevitable and foregone conclusion that 

 whenever navigation made possible the easy in- 

 terchange of goods between East and West — be- 

 tween Italy as a central point, and Spain on the 

 one hand or Egypt on the other — an enlargement 

 of the area of culture from the Archipelago to 

 the whole Mediterranean basin must necessarily 

 ensue. Whether Rome or Carthage should be 

 the capital of this wider system might depend 

 upon the particular genius of a Hannibal or a 

 Scipio ; but the main fact of a westward migra- 

 tion of civilization becomes, in my eyes at least, 

 a demonstrable certainty. 



Similarly, in modern times, no one will dis- 



98 



pute that the general improvement in means of 

 transit first brought the Altantic seaboard into 

 communication with the civilized cities of Italy 

 and the South, and afterward transferred the main 

 centres of culture from the shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean to England, France, the Low Countries, 

 and Germany. It is of course a schoolboy com- 

 monplace that the discovery of America, and the 

 exploration of the route to India by the Cape of 

 Good Hope, flung all the wealth of the world, 

 with its concomitant culture, for a while into the 

 lap of Lisbon and Madrid, while it fixed it more 

 permanently on Bordeaux, Havre, Paris, Amster- 

 dam, Hamburg, London, Liverpool, and Glasgow. 

 So, too, in our own day, the arena of culture is 

 widening with the spread of our communications, 

 and the West-European civilization, which al- 

 ready occupied the whole Atlantic system, from 

 St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, London, Paris, and 

 Cape Town, to Montreal, New Yo/k, Havana, 

 and Rio de Janeiro, has lately extended its arms 

 across the Pacific, taking in San Francisco, 

 Lima, and Valparaiso, on the one side, with Yo- 

 kohama, Nagasaki, Hong-Kong, and Manila, on 

 the other. In fact, if we were asked roughly to 

 divide the whole course of advanced culture-his- 

 tory into four epochs, we might fairly character- 

 ize them as the epoch of island navigation in the 

 jEgean ; the epoch of coasting in the Mediterra- 

 nean ; the epoch of open-sea sailing in the Atlan- 

 tic ; and the epoch of steam on all oceans. 



But do the islands of the JSgean really pre- 

 sent such special and peculiar advantages for 

 early navigation ? Might not a similar civiliza- 

 tion to the Hellenic have arisen in some other 

 insular groups, for example, in the West Indies 

 or the Malay Archipelago ? These questions are 

 sure to be asked, yet they betray a simple geo- 

 graphical blunder, almost inevitable from the 

 conditions under which we learn the configuration 

 of our globe in atlases with very varying scales 

 for their different maps. As a matter of fact, the 

 distances between the several islands in these 

 two great groups are immensely greater than 

 those between the Cyclades or Sporades and the 

 surrounding shores. As a matter of fact, too, 

 we find that navigation spontaneously developed 

 in Hellas to the commercial stage ; while in the 

 West Indies and the Malay Archipelago it re- 

 mained at the stage of the war-canoe, until ex- 

 ternal influences introduced the higher industrial 

 form. Now, we may fairly take it for granted 

 (adopting Mr. Herbert Spencer's luminous clas- 

 sification) that a considerable civilization can 

 only arise under those circumstances which pro- 



