The Story of Mankind Part 29

But while the black man was enjoying an increasing amount of liberty, the "free" workmen of Europe did not fare quite so well. Indeed, it is a matter of surprise to many contemporary writers and observers that the ma.s.ses of workmen (the so-called proletariat) did not die out from sheer misery. They lived in dirty houses situated in miserable parts of the slums. They ate bad food. They received just enough schooling to fit them for their tasks. In case of death or an accident, their families were not provided for. But the brewery and distillery interests, (who could exercise great influence upon the Legislature,) encouraged them to forget their woes by offering them unlimited quant.i.ties of whisky and gin at very cheap rates.

The enormous improvement which has taken place since the thirties and the forties of the last century is not due to the efforts of a single man. The best brains of two generations devoted themselves to the task of saving the world from the disastrous results of the all-too-sudden introduction of machinery. They did not try to destroy the capitalistic system. This would have been very foolish, for the acc.u.mulated wealth of other people, when intelligently used, may be of very great benefit to all mankind. But they tried to combat the notion that true equality can exist between the man who has wealth and owns the factories and can close their doors at will without the risk of going hungry, and the labourer who must take whatever job is offered, at whatever wage he can get, or face the risk of starvation for himself, his wife and his children.

They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which regulated the relations between the factory owners and the factory workers. In this, the reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries.

To-day, the majority of the labourers are well protected; their hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding-room of the cotton mills.

But there were other men who also contemplated the sight of all the belching smoke-stacks, who heard the rattle of the railroad trains, who saw the store-houses filled with a surplus of all sorts of materials, and who wondered to what ultimate goal this tremendous activity would lead in the years to come. They remembered that the human race had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without commercial and industrial compet.i.tion. Could they change the existing order of things and do away with a system of rivalry which so often sacrificed human happiness to profits?

This idea--this vague hope for a better day--was not restricted to a single country. In England, Robert Owen, the owner of many cotton mills, established a so-called "socialistic community" which was a success. But when he died, the prosperity of New Lanark came to an end and an attempt of Louis Blanc, a French journalist, to establish "social workshops"

all over France fared no better. Indeed, the increasing number of socialistic writers soon began to see that little individual communities which remained outside of the regular industrial life, would never be able to accomplish anything at all. It was necessary to study the fundamental principles underlying the whole industrial and capitalistic society before useful remedies could be suggested.

The practical socialists like Robert Owen and Louis Blanc and Francois Fournier were succeeded by theoretical students of socialism like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Of these two, Marx is the best known. He was a very brilliant Jew whose family had for a long time lived in Germany.

He had heard of the experiments of Owen and Blanc and he began to interest himself in questions of labour and wages and unemployment. But his liberal views made him very unpopular with the police authorities of Germany, and he was forced to flee to Brussels and then to London, where he lived a poor and shabby life as the correspondent of the New York Tribune.

No one, thus far, had paid much attention to his books on economic subjects. But in the year 1864 he organised the first international a.s.sociation of working men and three years later in 1867, he published the first volume of his well-known treatise called "Capital." Marx believed that all history was a long struggle between those who "have" and those who "don't have." The introduction and general use of machinery had created a new cla.s.s in society, that of the capitalists who used their surplus wealth to buy the tools which were then used by the labourers to produce still more wealth, which was again used to build more factories and so on, until the end of time. Meanwhile, according to Marx, the third estate (the bourgeoisie) was growing richer and richer and the fourth estate (the proletariat) was growing poorer and poorer, and he predicted that in the end, one man would possess all the wealth of the world while the others would be his employees and dependent upon his good will.

To prevent such a state of affairs, Marx advised working men of all countries to unite and to fight for a number of political and economic measures which he had enumerated in a Manifesto in the year 1848, the year of the last great European revolution.

These views of course were very unpopular with the governments of Europe, many countries, especially Prussia, pa.s.sed severe laws against the Socialists and policemen were ordered to break up the Socialist meetings and to arrest the speakers. But that sort of persecution never does any good. Martyrs are the best possible advertis.e.m.e.nts for an unpopular cause. In Europe the number of socialists steadily increased and it was soon clear that the Socialists did not contemplate a violent revolution but were using their increasing power in the different Parliaments to promote the interests of the labouring cla.s.ses.

Socialists were even called upon to act as Cabinet Ministers, and they co-operated with progressive Catholics and Protestants to undo the damage that had been caused by the Industrial Revolution and to bring about a fairer division of the many benefits which had followed the introduction of machinery and the increased production of wealth.

THE AGE OF SCIENCE

BUT THE WORLD HAD UNDERGONE ANOTHER CHANGE WHICH WAS OF GREATER IMPORTANCE THAN EITHER THE POLITICAL OR THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS.

AFTER GENERATIONS OF OPPRESSION AND PERSECUTION, THE SCIENTIST HAD AT LAST GAINED LIBERTY OF ACTION AND HE WAS NOW TRYING TO DISCOVER THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS WHICH GOVERN THE UNIVERSE

THE Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, the Greeks and the Romans, had all contributed something to the first vague notions of science and scientific investigation. But the great migrations of the fourth century had destroyed the cla.s.sical world of the Mediterranean, and the Christian Church, which was more interested in the life of the soul than in the life of the body, had regarded science as a manifestation of that human arrogance which wanted to pry into divine affairs which belonged to the realm of Almighty G.o.d, and which therefore was closely related to the seven deadly sins.

The Renaissance to a certain but limited extent had broken through this wall of Mediaeval prejudices. The Reformation, however, which had overtaken the Renaissance in the early 16th century, had been hostile to the ideals of the "new civilisation," and once more the men of science were threatened with severe punishment, should they try to pa.s.s beyond the narrow limits of knowledge which had been laid down in Holy Writ.

Our world is filled with the statues of great generals, atop of prancing horses, leading their cheering soldiers to glorious victory. Here and there, a modest slab of marble announces that a man of science has found his final resting place. A thousand years from now we shall probably do these things differently, and the children of that happy generation shall know of the splendid courage and the almost inconceivable devotion to duty of the men who were the pioneers of that abstract knowledge, which alone has made our modern world a practical possibility.

Many of these scientific pioneers suffered poverty and contempt and humiliation. They lived in garrets and died in dungeons. They dared not print their names on the t.i.tle-pages of their books and they dared not print their conclusions in the land of their birth, but smuggled the ma.n.u.scripts to some secret printing shop in Amsterdam or Haarlem. They were exposed to the bitter enmity of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic, and were the subjects of endless sermons, inciting the paris.h.i.+oners to violence against the "heretics."

Here and there they found an asylum. In Holland, where the spirit of tolerance was strongest, the authorities, while regarding these scientific investigations with little favour, yet refused to interfere with people's freedom of thought. It became a little asylum for intellectual liberty where French and English and German philosophers and mathematicians and physicians could go to enjoy a short spell of rest and get a breath of free air.

In another chapter I have told you how Roger Bacon, the great genius of the thirteenth century, was prevented for years from writing a single word, lest he get into new troubles with the authorities of the church.

And five hundred years later, the contributors to the great philosophic "Encyclopaedia" were under the constant supervision of the French gendarmerie. Half a century afterwards, Darwin, who dared to question the story of the creation of man, as revealed in the Bible, was denounced from every pulpit as an enemy of the human race.

Even to-day, the persecution of those who venture into the unknown realm of science has not entirely come to an end. And while I am writing this Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast mult.i.tude on the "Menace of Darwinism,"

warning his hearers against the errors of the great English naturalist.

All this, however, is a mere detail. The work that has to be done invariably gets done, and the ultimate profit of the discoveries and the inventions goes to the ma.s.s of those same people who have always decried the man of vision as an unpractical idealist.

The seventeenth century had still preferred to investigate the far off heavens and to study the position of our planet in relation to the solar system. Even so, the Church had disapproved of this unseemly curiosity, and Copernicus who first of all had proved that the sun was the centre of the universe, did not publish his work until the day of his death.

Galileo spent the greater part of his life under the supervision of the clerical authorities, but he continued to use his telescope and provided Isaac Newton with a ma.s.s of practical observations, which greatly helped the English mathematician when he dis-covered the existence of that interesting habit of falling objects which came to be known as the Law of Gravitation.

That, for the moment at least, exhausted the interest in the Heavens, and man began to study the earth. The invention of a workable microscope, (a strange and clumsy little thing,) by Anthony van Leeuwenhoek during the last half of the 17th century, gave man a chance to study the "microscopic" creatures who are responsible for so many of his ailments. It laid the foundations of the science of "bacteriology"

which in the last forty years has delivered the world from a great number of diseases by discovering the tiny organisms which cause the complaint. It also allowed the geologists to make a more careful study of different rocks and of the fossils (the petrified prehistoric plants) which they found deep below the surface of the earth. These investigations convinced them that the earth must be a great deal older than was stated in the book of Genesis and in the year 1830, Sir Charles Lyell published his "Principles of Geology" which denied the story of creation as related in the Bible and gave a far more wonderful description of slow growth and gradual development.

At the same time, the Marquis de Laplace was working on a new theory of creation, which made the earth a little blotch in the nebulous sea out of which the planetary system had been formed and Bunsen and Kirchhoff, by the use of the spectroscope, were investigating the chemical composition of the stars and of our good neighbour, the sun, whose curious spots had first been noticed by Galileo.

Meanwhile after a most bitter and relentless warfare with the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to subst.i.tute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the guesswork of the mediaeval quack.

Within a single generation (between 1810 and 1840) more progress was made in every branch of science than in all the hundreds of thousands of years that had pa.s.sed since man first looked at the stars and wondered why they were there. It must have been a very sad age for the people who had been educated under the old system. And we can understand their feeling of hatred for such men as Lamarck and Darwin, who did not exactly tell them that they were "descended from monkeys," (an accusation which our grandfathers seemed to regard as a personal insult,) but who suggested that the proud human race had evolved from a long series of ancestors who could trace the family-tree back to the little jelly-fishes who were the first inhabitants of our planet.

The dignified world of the well-to-do middle cla.s.s, which dominated the nineteenth century, was willing to make use of the gas or the electric light, of all the many practical applications of the great scientific discoveries, but the mere investigator, the man of the "scientific theory" without whom no progress would be possible, continued to be distrusted until very recently. Then, at last, his services were recognised. Today the rich people who in past ages donated their wealth for the building of a cathedral, construct vast laboratories where silent men do battle upon the hidden enemies of mankind and often sacrifice their lives that coming generations may enjoy greater happiness and health.

Indeed it has come to pa.s.s that many of the ills of this world, which our ancestors regarded as inevitable "acts of G.o.d," have been exposed as manifestations of our own ignorance and neglect. Every child nowadays knows that he can keep from getting typhoid fever by a little care in the choice of his drinking water. But it took years and years of hard work before the doctors could convince the people of this fact. Few of us now fear the dentist chair. A study of the microbes that live in our mouth has made it possible to keep our teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth be pulled, then we take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the newspapers of the year 1846 brought the story of the "painless operation" which had been performed in America with the help of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To them it seemed against the will of G.o.d that man should escape the pain which was the share of all mortals, and it took a long time before the practice of taking ether and chloroform for operations became general.

But the battle of progress had been won. The breach in the old walls of prejudice was growing larger and larger, and as time went by, the ancient stones of ignorance came crumbling down. The eager crusaders of a new and happier social order rushed forward. Suddenly they found themselves facing a new obstacle. Out of the ruins of a long-gone past, another citadel of reaction had been erected, and millions of men had to give their lives before this last bulwark was destroyed.

ART

A CHAPTER OF ART

WHEN a baby is perfectly healthy and has had enough to eat and has slept all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how happy it is. To grown-ups this humming means nothing. It sounds like "goo-zum, goo-zum, goo-o-o-o-o," but to the baby it is perfect music. It is his first contribution to art.

As soon as he (or she) gets a little older and is able to sit up, the period of mud-pie making begins. These mud-pies do not interest the outside world. There are too many million babies, making too many million mud-pies at the same time. But to the small infant they represent another expedition into the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor.

At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey the brain, the child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives him a box of coloured chalks and every loose bit of paper is rapidly covered with strange pothooks and scrawls which represent houses and horses and terrible naval battles.

Soon however this happiness of just "making things" comes to an end.

School begins and the greater part of the day is filled up with work.

The business of living, or rather the business of "making a living,"

becomes the most important event in the life of every boy and girl.

There is little time left for "art" between learning the tables of multiplication and the past participles of the irregular French verbs.

And unless the desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of creating them without any hope of a practical return be very strong, the child grows into manhood and forgets that the first five years of his life were mainly devoted to art.

Nations are not different from children. As soon as the cave-man had escaped the threatening dangers of the long and s.h.i.+vering ice-period, and had put his house in order, he began to make certain things which he thought beautiful, although they were of no earthly use to him in his fight with the wild animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his grotto with pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and out of a piece of stone, he hacked the rough figures of those women he thought most attractive.

As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Persians and all the other people of the east had founded their little countries along the Nile and the Euphrates, they began to build magnificent palaces for their kings, invented bright pieces of jewellery for their women and planted gardens which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright flowers.

Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the mighty deeds of their great leaders and invented a form of poetry which has survived until our own day. A thousand years later, when they had established themselves on the Greek mainland, and had built their "city-states," they expressed their joy (and their sorrows) in magnificent temples, in statues, in comedies and in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of art.

The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy administering other people and making money to have much love for "useless and unprofitable" adventures of the spirit. They conquered the world and built roads and bridges but they borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks. They invented certain practical forms of architecture which answered the demands of their day and age. But their statues and their histories and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imitations of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to-define something which the world calls "personality," there can be no art and the Roman world distrusted that particular sort of personality. The Empire needed efficient soldiers and tradesmen. The business of writing poetry or making pictures was left to foreigners.

Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the proverbial bull in the china-shop of western Europe. He had no use for what he did not understand. Speaking in terms of the year 1921, he liked the magazine covers of pretty ladies, but threw the Rembrandt etchings which he had inherited into the ash-can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried to undo the damage which he had created a few years before. But the ash-cans were gone and so were the pictures.

But by this time, his own art, which he had brought with him from the east, had developed into something very beautiful and he made up for his past neglect and indifference by the so-called "art of the Middle Ages" which as far as northern Europe is concerned was a product of the Germanic mind and had borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins and nothing at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and a.s.syria, not to speak of India and China, which simply did not exist, as far as the people of that time were concerned. Indeed, so little had the northern races been influenced by their southern neighbours that their own architectural products were completely misunderstood by the people of Italy and were treated by them with downright and unmitigated contempt.