35 Civilization and Decay 



Incidentally, it may be mentioned that one of Mr. 

 Adams's many merits is his contemptuous refusal to 

 be misled by modern criticism of Macaulay. He sees 

 Macaulay's greatness as a historian, and his essen- 

 tial truthfulness on many of the very points where 

 he has been most sharply criticised. 



Mr. Adams's book, however, is far more than a 

 mere succession of brilliant episodes. He fully sees 

 that the value of facts lies in their relation to one 

 another; and from the facts as he sees them he de- 

 duces certain laws with more than a Thucydidean 

 indifference as to his own individual approval or 

 disapproval of the development. The life of nations, 

 like any other form of life, is but one manifestation 

 of energy; and Mr. Adams's decidedly gloomy phi- 

 losophy of life may be gathered from the fact that 

 he places fear and greed as the two forms of energy 

 which stand conspicuously predominant; fear in the 

 earlier, and greed in the later, stages of evolution 

 from barbarism to civilization. Civilization itself 

 he regards merely as the history of the movement 

 from a condition of physical distribution to one of 

 physical concentration. During the earlier stages 

 of this movement the imaginative man the man 

 who stands in fear of a priesthood is, in his opin- 

 ion, the representative type, while with him, and al- 

 most equally typical, stand the soldier and the artist. 

 As consolidation advances, the economic man the 

 man of industry, trade, and capital tends to sup- 

 plant the emotional and artistic types of manhood, 

 and finally himself develops along twoJines, "the 



