Henry George

“ For in social development, as in everything else, motion tends to persist in straight lines and therefore, where there has been a previous advance, it is extremely difficult to recognize decline, even when it has fully commenced; there is an almost irresistible tendency to believe that the forward movement, which has been advance and is still going on, is still advance. The web of beliefs, customs, laws, institutions and habits, constantly being spun by each community and producing, in the individual environed by it, all the differences of national character, is never unravelled. ”

“ It is startling to think how slight the traces that would be left of our civilization did it pass through the throes that have accompanied the decline of every previous civilization. Paper will not last like parchment, nor are our most massive buildings and monuments to be compared in solidity with the rock-hewn temples and titanic edifices of the old civilizations. And invention has given us not merely the steam engine and the printing press, but petroleum, nitroglycerine and dynamite. ”

“ Yet to hint today that our civilization may possibly be tending to decline seems like the wildness of pessimism. The special tendencies to which I have alluded are obvious to thinking men, but with the majority of thinking men, as with the great masses, the belief in substantial progress is yet deep and strong - a fundamental belief that admits not the shadow of a doubt. ”

“ But as sure as the turning tide must soon run full ebb, as sure as the declining sun must bring darkness, so sure it is that though knowledge yet increases and invention marches on, and new states are being settled, and cities still expand, civilization has begun to wane when, in proportion to population, we must build more and more prisons, more and more almshouses, more and more insane asylums. It is not from top to bottom that societies die ”

“ And the general law is shown by the fact that just as this tendency has asserted itself civilization has advanced, while just as it has been repressed or forced back civilization has been checked.
Where there is anything like an equal distribution of wealth the more democratic the government the better it will be; but where there is gross inequality in the distribution of wealth, the more democratic the government the worse it will be; for while rotten democracy may not in itself be worse than rotten autocracy, its effects upon national character will be worse. ”

“ Voting is done more recklessly; it is harder to arouse the people to the necessity of reforms and more difficult to carry them out; political differences are ceasing to be differences of principle, and abstract ideas are losing their power; parties are passing into the control of what in general government would be oligarchies and dictatorships. These are all evidences of political decline. ”

“ The accidents of hereditary succession or of selection by lot (the plan of some of the ancient republics) may sometimes place the wise and just in power - but in a corrupt democracy the tendency is always to give power to the worst. Honesty and patriotism are weighted and unscrupulousness commands success. The best gravitate to the bottom, the worst float to the top, and the vile will only be ousted by the viler. ”

“ While literature breathes but the belief that we have been, and for the future must be, leaving the savage state farther and farther behind us, there are indications that we are actually turning back again toward barbarism.
Though we may not speak it openly, the general faith in democratic institutions, where they have reached their fullest development, is narrowing and weakening; it is no longer the confident belief in democracy as the source of national blessings that it once was. Thoughtful men are beginning to see its dangers, without seeing how to escape them ”

“ Strong, unscrupulous men, rising up upon occasion, will become the exponents of blind popular desires or fierce popular passions, and dash aside forms that have lost their vitality. The sword will again be mightier than the pen, and in carnivals of destruction brute force and wild frenzy will alternate with the lethargy of a declining civilization. ”

“ The people at large are becoming used to the growing corruption; the most ominous political sign is the growth of a sentiment which either doubts the existence of an honest man in public office or looks on him as a fool for not seizing his opportunities. ”

“ Nothing seems exempt from this tendency. Industry everywhere tends to assume a form in which one is master and many serve. And when one is master and the others serve, the one will control the others, even in such matters as votes.
The very foundations of society are being sapped before our eyes while we ask how it is possible that such a civilization as this, with its railways, and dally newspapers, and electric telegraphs, should ever be destroyed? ”

“ What change may come, no mortal man can tell, but that some great change must come, thoughtful men begin to feel. The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward, which will carry us back towards barbarism. ”

“ That is to say, in the decline of civilization, communities do not go down by the same paths as those by which they came up.
And how the retrogression of civilization, following a period of advance, may be so gradual as to attract no attention at the time; nay, how that decline must necessarily, by the great majority of men, be mistaken for advance, is easily seen. ”

“ As corruption becomes chronic; as public spirit is lost; as traditions of honour, virtue and patriotism are weakened; as law is brought into contempt and reforms become hopeless; then in the festering mass will be generated volcanic forces which will shatter and rend when seeming accident gives them vent. ”

“ Since national character must gradually assimilate the qualities that win power and consequently respect, that demoralization of opinion goes on which in the long panorama of history we may see over and over again transmuting races of freemen into races of slaves. ”

“ Chapter XXV How modern civilization may decline The conditions of social progress, as we have traced the law, are association and equality. The general tendency of modern development, since the time when we can first discern the gleams of civilization in the darkness that followed the fall of the Western Empire, has been towards political and legal equality - to the abolition of slavery ”

“ Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges! ”

“ But now the development of manufactures and exchange, acting in a social organization in which land is made private property, threatens to compel every worker to seek a master, just as the insecurity which followed the final break-up of the Roman Empire compelled every freeman to seek a lord. ”

“ When the tide turns in bay or river from flood to ebb, it is not all at once; but here it still runs on, though there it has begun to recede. When the sun passes the meridian, it can only be told by the way the short shadows fall- for the heat of the day yet increases. ”

“ The under-currents of the times seem to sweep us back again to the old conditions from which we dreamed we had escaped. The development of the artisan and commercial classes gradually broke down feudalism after it had become so complete that men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and ranked the first and second persons of the Trinity as suzerain and tenant-in-chief. ”