Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



Civilisation touches them, they die like flies from 

 the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along 

 with it, and often its mere contact is sufficient to 

 destroy whole races. 



But the word Disease is applicable to our social 

 as well as to our physical condition. For as in 

 the body disease arises from the loss of the physical 

 unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the 

 form of warfare or discord between the various 

 parts, or of the abnormal development of individual 

 organs, or the consumption of the system by pre- 

 datory germs and growths ; so in our modern 

 life we find the unity gone which constitutes 

 true society, and in its place warfare of classes 

 and individuals, abnormal development of some 

 to the detriment of others, and consumption of 

 the organism by masses of social parasites. If 

 the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should 

 say it is — both in its direct and its derived sense — 

 to the civilised societies of to-day. 



Again, mentally, is not our condition most 

 unsatisfactory ? I am not alluding to the number 

 and importance of the lunatic asylums which 

 cover our land, nor to the fact that maladies of 

 the brain and nervous system are now so common; 

 but to the strange sense of mental unrest which 

 marks our populations, and which amply justifies 

 Ruskin's cutting epigram : that our two objects 

 in life are, " Whatever we have — to get more ; 

 and wherever we are — to go somewhere else." 

 This sense of unrest, of disease, penetrates down 

 even into the deepest regions of man's being — into 



17 B 



