xi SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS 229 



fact alone destroys any attempt to conceive social evolution 

 as from the first a unitary process. Its beginning is with 

 many separate strands, which are but gradually woven 

 together, and this weaving is itself an important part of 

 progress. Or we may think of development as a line along 

 which many societies make independent advances, reaching 

 a certain point and then resting or perhaps turning back. 

 Yet over long periods the result is an advance in the general 

 level, because with the rise of intercommunication one 

 advance on the average helps another, and the highest point 

 of one date becomes the mean point of another. 



Into the causes of arrest and decay I shall not here make 

 any general enquiry. It is the bare fact which is important 

 to notice. One thing, however, lies on the surface, and yet 

 is too often ignored. The earlier civilisations were mere 

 islands in the sea of barbarism, and they were liable to 

 constant submersion. In fact in the early history of 

 Egypt, Babylonia and China we come across frequent traces 

 of barbaric incursion, and even where barbarism is over- 

 come in war, the contact with it, as plentiful evidence of 

 our own time shows, tends to lower the standard of civilisa- 

 tion. The Greek state perished in the main no doubt 

 through intestine warfare and the spirit of faction, which 

 were inherent defects of its organisation. But it is also 

 true that it was overwhelmed by semi-barbarous Macedon 

 and afterwards by Rome, whose greatest merit was that she 

 could absorb and apply Greek ideas. It is the fashion 

 to conceive the barbarian conquest of the Roman empire 

 again as a beneficent flood sweeping away a corrupt civilisa- 

 tion. But, in fact, the corruptness of Rome has been 

 greatly exaggerated, and if the Ostrogoths were semi- 

 civilised, the crowd of contemporary and later invaders 

 were true barbarians, like the Franks, Lombards and 

 Northmen, or mere destroyers, like the Huns. From the 

 age of Alexander Severus onwards a real process of re- 

 barbarisation began, heralded by the Gothic irruptions of 

 the middle of the third century, arrested by the efforts of a 

 series of vigorous emperors, but destined to go forward till 

 the last of the barbarians were absorbed. This absorption 

 forms a far greater part of history than is as yet understood* 



