Brooks Adams

“ Thus, in reality, barbarians consolidated the ancient world, and the force which created the Empire, afterward upheld it. With each succeeding century the drafts of centralized society upon the blood of the country beyond the Danube and the Rhine increased, but the supply proved limitless; and, when the Western provinces disintegrated, a new imaginative race poured over Italy and France, creating a new religion, a new art, a new literature, and new institutions. Among modern nations the Russians alone have developed this power of absorbing kindred conquered peoples ”

“ Even in the reign of Justinian the aristocracy carped at faith, and Byzantine architecture did not bloom until the invasions of Alaric and Attila.
If, then, although nature never precisely repeats herself, she operates upon the human mind according to immutable laws, it should be possible by comparing a living civilization with a dead, to estimate in some degree the course which has been run. For such an attempt an infinite variety of standards might be suggested, but few, perhaps, are more suitable than the domestic relations which lie at the basis of the reproduction of life. ”

“ Thus the history of art coincides with the history of all other phenomena of life; for experience has demonstrated that, since the Reformation, a school of architecture, like the Greek or Gothic, has become impossible. No such school could exist in a society where the imagination had decayed, for the Greek and Gothic represented imaginative ideals. In an economic period, like that which has followed the Reformation, wealth is the form in which energy seeks expression; therefore, since the close of the fifteenth century, architecture has reflected money. ”

“ Since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended to sink more and more into a paid official, receiving his orders from financiers with his salary, without being allowed a voice even in questions involving peace and war. The same fate has overtaken the producing classes; they have failed to maintain themselves, and have become subjects of the possessors of hoarded wealth. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars, and, among capitalists, the money-lenders form an aristocracy. ”

“ In Rome and in Byzantium such women were the stronger or the more fortunate; their counterparts are easily to be found in any economic age. The fate of the weaker there was slavery; now they are forced by competition into the ranks of the cheapest labour,—a lot, perhaps, hardly preferable.
And yet art, perhaps, even more clearly than religion, love, or war, indicates the pathway of consolidation; for art reflects with the subtlest delicacy those changes in the forms of competition which enfeeble or inflame the imagination. Of Greek art, in its zenith, little need be said ”

“ For these reasons Gothic architecture, in its prime, was spontaneous, elevated, dignified, and pure.
The advent of portraiture has usually been considered to portend decay, and rightly, since the presence of the portrait demonstrates the supremacy of wealth. A portrait can hardly be the ideal of an enthusiast, like the figure of a god, for it is a commercial article, sold for a price, and manufactured to suit a patron's taste; were it made to please the artist, it might not find a buyer. When portraits are fashionable, the economic period must be well advanced. ”

“ No poetry can bloom in the arid modern soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals. The ecstatic dream, which some twelfth-century monk cut into the stones of the sanctuary hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a warehouse ”

“ Thus the Slavs exterminated the Greeks in Thrace and Macedonia, the Mahrattas and the Moslems dwindle before the low caste tribes of India, and the instinct of self-preservation has taught white races to resist an influx of Chinese. When nature has finished this double task, civilization has reached its zenith. Humanity can ascend no higher. ”

“ In view of this possible extermination of the martial blood in the higher stages of civilization, the attention necessarily becomes concentrated on what is, perhaps, the main point of divergence between ancient and modern society,—the presence and the absence of a supply of barbaric life. All the evidence points to the conclusion that the infusion of vitality which Rome ever drew from territories beyond her borders, was the cause both of her strength and of her longevity. ”

“ As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age; until, finally, the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. ”

“ In France every diocese had a temple magnificent according to its means, some of which exceeded in majesty that of Paris; and the cause was that, in France, the artistic and imaginative caste formed a theocracy, who were not hired by king or emperor, but who were themselves the strongest force in all the land. In the East, the imaginative inroad was not strong enough to cause disintegration, and the artists always remained wage-earners. In the West, society fell back a thousand years, and consolidation began afresh. ”

“ With each invention, with each acceleration of movement, prose has more completely supplanted poetry, while the economic intellect has grown less tolerant of any departure from those representations of nature which have appealed to the most highly gifted of the monied type among successive generations. ”

“ The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legions were a toy; a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. ”

“ But, as each special faculty which, for a time, enables its possessor to excel in competition, seems to bear with it the seeds of its own decay, so the inventive, which once enabled the Western races to undersell the Eastern in their homes seems destined to reduce all to a common economic level, as Rome sank to the level of Egypt. ”

“ Apparently nature needs to consume about three generations in perfecting the selection of a new type. Accordingly the money-lenders did not become absolute immediately after Waterloo, and a period of some sixty years followed during which the adventurers kept up a struggle, wherein they were aided by the discoveries of gold near the middle of the century. Seemingly they met their final defeat at Sedan, for the decay of the soldier, which had been in progress since the fall of Napoleon, reached a point, after the collapse of the Second Empire, even lower than after the consolidation of Rome. ”

“ Roman civilization was less complex than modern because of the relative inflexibility of the Latin mind. Unable to quicken his motions by inventions, the ancient Italian failed to discover America or absorb India, and, for the same reason, collapsed without an effort under the insidious attack of Asiatic and African labour. No industrial expansion followed the influx of bullion under Caesar, and therefore, when the value of cereals fell, the evicted farmer either sank into slavery or begged for bread from the magnates of the Senate. In modern times an industrial period has intervened ”

“ Unquestionably scepticism has been to the full as rife in Paris since 1789 as it ever was in Rome, and yet no new religion has been born. Supposing, however, that a vast and highly emotional emigration flowed annually into France, the aspect of life would be completely changed. Christian saints and martyrs were not begotten by the usurers of Constantinople or of Rome, but by barbarian soldiers and Asiatic serfs, and Christianity could hardly have become a State religion had the composition of society, as it existed under Trajan, remained unaltered. ”

“ Portraiture, like other economic phenomena, blossomed during the Renaissance, and it was then also that the artist, no longer shielded by his convent or his guild, stood out to earn his living by the sale of his wares, like the Venetian merchants whom he met on the Rialto, whose vanity he flattered, and whose palaces he adorned. ”

“ If unmarried, the economic woman competes with the man on nearly equal terms, and everywhere, and in all ages, the result is not dissimilar. The stronger and more fortunate members of the sex have grown rich and have bought social and political power. Roman politics under Septimius Severus and Caracalla was much in the hands of women, and Julia Massa, who was enormously wealthy, carried through a most famous intrigue by purchasing the throne for Elagabalus.
In Rome, however, there was always a strong admixture of barbaric blood, and, to the last, the barbarians married for love. ”

“ For hundreds of years it has been impossible to imitate the work of the monks of Saint Denis. In Italy, the economic phenomena were yet more striking; for Italy, even in the Middle Ages, was always a commercial community, which looked on art with the economic eye. ”

“ Following her immutable law, nature, having changed the form of competition, proceeded to select a quality of mind to correspond with the new conditions of life. She demanded improved vents for her energy. Forthwith, under the pressure of accelerated movement and advancing consolidation, the trammels of caste relaxed, the population fused, and a new aristocracy arose, composed of the strongest economic types culled from all the peoples who inhabit the plains south of the Himalayas. ”

“ In France and Germany the old tradition lasted to within a generation. Only after 1871 came the new era, an era marked by many social changes. For the first time in their history the ruler of the French people passed admittedly from the martial to the monied type, and everywhere the same phenomenon appeared; the whole administration of society fell into the hands of the economic man. Nothing so radical happened at Rome, or even at Byzantium, for there the pressure of the barbarians necessitated the retention of the commander at the head of the State ”

“ In many ways the female seems to serve as a vent for the energy of capital almost as well as men; in the higher planes of civilization they hold their property in severalty, and, by means of money, wield a power not unlike Faustina's. ”

“ Herein, likewise, may be plainly perceived the destructive effects of the policy of the Western usurers upon the population subject to them. By enhancing the value of their own money they have nearly doubled the intensity of this Asiatic competition. In India, silver has substantially retained its purchasing power, therefore the ryot now, as in the days of Captain Cunningham, can exist on two rupees a month, but he cannot live on less. Accordingly, the severity of his competition with Europeans must be measured by the value of his wages when reckoned on the European scale. ”

“ Primitive Christianity was incompatible with the existence of Roman society, against which it was a protest, for it "fully accepted the idea that the rich, if he did not surrender his superfluity, kept what belonged to another." ”

“ When, toward the close of the last century, the British were pushing their conquests inland, the most formidable enemy they met were the Mahrattas; and, perhaps, the most renowned battle, next to Plassey, ever fought by Europeans against natives, was Assaye, where Wellesley defeated Sindhia in 1803. These Mahrattas were tribes of Hindoo farmers, who inhabited the mountainous country about one hundred miles to the east of Bombay; a territory of which Poona has always been considered the capital. ”

“ The same phenomena were noticed among Frenchmen at the collapse of the Empire, since when like symptoms have become notorious in London.
Taking history as a whole, women seem never to have more than moderately appealed to the senses of the economic man. The monied magnate seldom ruins himself for love, and chivalry would have been as foreign to a Roman senator under Diocletian, as it would be now to a Lombard Street banker. On the other hand, in proportion as women's influence has declined when measured by their power over men, it has increased when measured by the economic standard. ”

“ The ideal statesman had been one who, like Cromwell, Frederic the Great, Henry IV., William III., and Washington, could lead his followers in battle, and, on the Continent, down to 1789, the aristocracy had professedly been a military caste. ”

“ Debtors are in reality powerless, because of the extension of that very system of credit which they invented to satisfy their needs. Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men. ”

“ Marriage, in these simple ages, is usually a rite half sacred, half warlike. When Abraham's servant found Rebekah at the well, he bowed his head, and blessed the Lord God of his master Abraham, which had led him in the right way. ”

“ On men the action of natural selection is, at least, as drastic. The change wrought in Roman character in about three hundred years has always been one of the problems of history. In the words of Aristotle, the primitive Roman "was prone to the love of women." Strong in his passions, austere in his life, fierce in his jealousy, he set the undisputed possession of the female as his supreme happiness. Virginius slew his daughter to keep her from Appius Claudius, and his comrades in the legions washed out his wrong in the Decemvir's blood ”