468 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



successive small stages, the ocean-bottom has subsided. The mass 

 produced by these brainless and almost nerveless animals — each by its 

 tentacles slowly drawing in such food as the water occasionally brings, 

 and at intervals budding out, plant-like, a new individual — is a mass 

 exceeding in vastness any built by men, and defies the waves in a way 

 which their best breakwaters fail to do : the whole structure being 

 entirely undesigned, and, indeed, absolutely unknown to its producers, 

 individually or in their aggregate. 



Prepared by these analogies, every one will see what is meant by 

 the paradox that civilization, whether contemplated in its great organ- 

 ized societies or in their material and mental products, can be credited 

 neither to any ideal " Great Being Humanity," nor to the real beings 

 summed up under that abstract name. Though we can not in this case 

 say that neither the aggregate nor its units have had any consciousness 

 of the results wrought out, yet we may say that only after considerable 

 advances of civilization, has this consciousness existed on the part of a 

 few. Communities have grown and organized themselves through the 

 attainment of private ends, mostly pursued with entire selfishness, and 

 in utter ignorance of any social effects produced. If we begin with 

 those early stages in which, among hostile tribes, one more numerous 

 or better led than the rest, conquers them, and, consolidating them into 

 a larger society, at the same time stops inter-tribal wars ; we are shown 

 that this step in advance is made, not only without thought of any ad- 

 vantage to Humanity, but often under the promptings of the basest 

 motives in the mind of the most atrocious savage. And so onward. 

 It needs but to glance at such wall-paintings as those of the conquering 

 Rameses at Karnac, or to read the inscriptions in which Assyrian kings 

 proudly narrated their great deeds, to see that personal ambitions were 

 pursued with absolute disregard of human welfare. But for that ad- 

 miration of military glory with which classical culture imbues each 

 rising generation, it would be felt that whatever benefits these kings 

 unknowingly wrought, their self-praising records have brought them 

 not much more honor than has been brought to the Fijian king Tanoa 

 by the row of nine hundred stones recording the number of victims he 

 devoured. And though the outcome of those struggles for supremacy 

 in which, during European history, so many millions have been sacri- 

 ficed, has been the formation of great nations fitted for the highest 

 types of structure ; yet when, hereafter, opinion is no longer swayed 

 by public-school ethics, it will be seen that the men who effected these 

 unions did so from desires which should class them with criminals 

 rather than with the benefactors of mankind. With governmental or- 

 ganizations it was the same as with social consolidations : they arose 

 not to secure the blessings of order, but to maintain the ruler's 

 power. As the original motive for preventing quarrels among sol- 

 diers was that the army might not be rendered inefficient before the 

 enemy, so, throughout the militant society at large, the motive for 



