Hubert Howe Bancroft

“ The savage hates civilization as he hates his deadliest foe; its choicest benefits he hates more than the direst ills of his own unfettered life. He is driven to it—driven to it by extraneous influences, without his knowledge and against his will; he is driven to it by this Soul of Progress. It is here that this progressional phenomenon again appears outside of man and in direct opposition to the will of man; it is here that the principle of evil again comes in and stirs men up to the accomplishment of a higher destiny. ”

“ What we term the evils of government are rather its necessities, and are, indeed, no evils at all. The heavy bit which controls the mouth of an untamed horse is to that horse an evil, yet to the driver a necessity which may be laid aside as the temper of the animal is subdued. So despotism, feudalism, slavery, are evils to those under their dominion, yet are they as necessary for the prevention of anarchy, for the restraint of unbridled passions, as the powerful bit to the horse, and will as surely be laid aside when no longer required. ”

“ Of all tyrannies, the tyranny of fashion is the most implacable; of all slaveries the slavery to fashion is the most abject; of all fears the fear of our fellows is the most overwhelming; of all the influences that surround and govern man the forms and customs which he encounters in society are the most domineering. It is the old story, only another turn of the wheel that grinds and sharpens and polishes humanity—at the first a benefit, now a drag. Forms and fashions are essential; we cannot live without them. If we have worship, government, commerce, or clothes, we must have forms ”

“ Despotism is an evil, but despotism is as essential to progress as any good. In some form despotism is an inseparable adjunct of war. An individual or an idea may be the despot, but without cohesion, without a strong central power, real or imaginary, there can be no unity, and without unity no protracted warfare. In the first stages of government despotism is as essential as in the last it is noxious. It holds society together when nothing else would hold it, and at a time when its very existence depends upon its being so held. ”

“ No one can add to his own store of knowledge without adding to the general store; every invention, and discovery, however insignificant, is a contribution to civilization.
In savagism, union and coöperation are imperfectly displayed. The warriors of one tribe unite against the warriors of another; a band will coöperate in pursuing a herd of buffalo; even one nation will sometimes unite with another nation against a third, but such combinations are temporary, and no sooner is the particular object accomplished than the confederation disbands, and every man is again his own master. ”

“ It is this social force, attractive and repulsive, that binds men together, tears them asunder, kneads, and knits, and shapes, and evolves; it is the origin of every birth, the ultimate of every activity. Mechanical forces are manifest in machines, as the lever, the wheel, the inclined plane; professional force is manifest in intellectual ingenuity, literature, art, science, which are the machines of human progress.
How many of all our joys and sorrows, our loves and hates, our good and evil actions, spring from physical causes only? ”

“ We all know that blessings in excess become the direst curses; but few are conscious where the benefit of a blessing terminates and the curse begins, and fewer still of those who are able thus to discriminate have the moral strength to act upon that knowledge. As a good in excess is an evil, so evil as it enlarges outdoes itself and tends toward self-annihilation. If we but look about us, we must see that to burn up the world in order to rid it of gross evil—a dogma held by some—is unnecessary, for accumulative evils ever tend towards reaction. ”

“ An early evil to which civilization is indebted is war; the propensity of man—unhappily not yet entirely overcome—for killing his fellow-man.
The human race has not yet attained that state of homogeneous felicity which we sometimes imagine; upon the surface, we yet bear many of the relics of barbarism; under cover of manners, we hide still more. War is a barbarism which civilization only intensifies, as indeed civilization intensifies every barbarism which it does not eradicate or cover up. The right of every individual to act as his own avenger ”

“ While a member of society he adds his quota to the general fund and there leaves it; while acting as a free agent he performs his part in working out this problem of social development, performs it unconsciously, willing or unwilling he performs it, his baser passions being as powerful instruments of progress as his nobler; for avarice drives on intellect as effectually as benevolence, hate as love, and selfishness does infinitely more for the progress of mankind than philanthropy. Thus is humanity played upon by this principle of progress, and the music sometimes is wonderful ”

“ Religion, not that natural cultus instinctive in humanity, the bond of union as well under its most disgusting form of fetichism, as under its latest, loveliest form of Christianity; but those forms and dogmas of sect and creed which stifle thought and fetter intellect,—how men have lived lives of sacrifice and self-denial as well as died for the right to free themselves from unwelcome belief! ”

“ Without leisure, there can be no culture, without wealth no leisure, without labor no wealth, and without a suitable soil and climate no remunerative labor.
Now, throughout the material universe, there is no object or element which holds its place, whether at rest or in motion, except under fixed laws; no atom of matter nor subtle mysterious force, no breath of air, nor cloudy vapor nor streak of light, but in existing obeys a law. The Almighty fiat, Be fruitful and multiply, fruitful in increase, intellectual as well as physical, was given alike to all mankind ”

“ Men talk of civilization and call it liberty, religion, government, morality. Now liberty is no more a sign of civilization than tyranny; for the lowest savages are the least governed of all people. Civilized liberty, it is true, marks a more advanced stage than savage liberty, but between these two extremes of liberty there is a necessary age of tyranny, no less significant of an advance on primitive liberty than is constitutional liberty an advance on tyranny. ”

“ Granted that it is absolutely essential to the first step toward culture that society should be strongly governed, how is the first government to be accomplished; how is one member of a passionate, unbridled heterogeneous community to obtain dominion absolute over all the others? Here comes in another evil to the assistance of the former evils, all for future good,—Superstition. Never could physical force alone compress and hold the necessary power with which to burst the shell of savagism. The government is but a reflex of the governed. ”

“ Who can believe that so mighty and powerful a prince will be found wanting in charity toward the orphan and the widow? Who can doubt that the Mexican people are favored of the gods, in having for a king one to whom the great Creator has imparted so much of his own glory that by simply looking upon his face we are made to partake of that glory? ”

“ Who can picture the mighty tide of humanity, which, while the eastern hemisphere has been developing so high a state of culture, in America has ebbed and flowed between barbarisms and civilizations? Through what long and desperate struggles, continuing age after age through the lives of nations, now advancing, now receding, have these peoples passed? Asia, from its central position and favorable climate, would seem naturally to encourage a redundant population and a spontaneous civilization ”

“ Civilization as an exotic seldom flourishes. Often has the attempt been made by a cultivated people to civilize a barbarous nation, and as often has it failed. True, one nation may force its arts or religion upon another, but to civilize is neither to subjugate nor annihilate; foreigners may introduce new industries and new philosophies, which the uncultured may do well to accept, but as civilization is an unfolding, and not a creation, he who would advance civilization must teach society how to grow, how to enlarge its better self ”

“ Shallow-minded politicians talk of kingcraft, arbitrary rule, tyrants, the down-trodden masses, the withholding of just rights; as though the government was some independent, adverse element, wholly foreign to the character of the people; as though one man was stronger than ten thousand; as though, if these phases of society were not the fittest, they would be tolerated for a moment. The days of rigorous rule were ever the best days of France and Spain, and so it will be until the people become stronger than the strength of rulers. ”

“ And so with any of the arts or inventions of man. Societies, like individuals, are born, mature, and decay; they grow old and die; they may pause in their progress, become diseased, and thereby lose their strength and retrograde, but they never turn around and grow backward or ungrow,—they could not if they would.
In the brute creation this element of progress is wanting. The bird builds its nest, the bee its cell, the beaver its dam, with no more skill or elaboration to-day, than did the bird or bee or beaver primeval. The instinct of animals does not with time become intellect ”

“ What wilt thou do if God on a sudden should send forth armies of enemies against thee, from the wilderness or from the sea, from the waste and barren places where men wage war and shed blood that the thirst of the sun and the earth may be slaked? Manifold are the punishments of God for those that offend him. Wherefore, O our king, it behoves thee with all thy strength to do that which is right in the fulfilment of thine office, taking care that this be done with tears and sighs, and continual prayer to the Lord our God, the invisible, the impalpable. ”

“ As I have attempted to show, civilization is not an end attained, for man is never wholly civilized,—but only the effort to escape from an evil, or an imaginary evil—savagism. I say an evil real or imaginary, for as we have seen, the question has been seriously discussed whether civilization is better or worse than savagism. For every advantage which culture affords, a price must be paid,—some say too great a price. The growth of the mind is dependent upon its cultivation, but this cultivation may be voluntary or involuntary, it may be a thing desired or a thing abhorred. ”

“ Republicanism is as unfit for stupid and unintellectual populations, as despotism would be for the advanced ideas and liberal institutions of Anglo-Saxon America. The subject of a liberal rule sneeringly crying down to the subject of an absolute rule his form of government, is like the ass crying to the tiger: Leave blood and meat; feed on grass and thistles, the only diet fit for civilized beasts! Our federal government is the very best for our people, when it is not so it will speedily change ”

“ How many wanderings one might save the reason, how many vices might be hindered birth, if one could but force the animal economy to favor the moral order that it troubles so often. Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, repose, all act on our bodily frame, and, by consequence, on our soul; all offer us a thousand firm holds to govern, in their origin, those sentiments by which we allow ourselves to be dominated. ”

“ Old things are passing away, all things are becoming new; new philosophies, new religions, new sciences; the industrial spirit springs up and overturns time-honored customs; theories of government must be reconstructed. Thus, says experience, republicanism, as a form of government, can exist only in small states; but steam and electricity step in and annihilate time and space. The Roman republic, from a lack of cohesive energy, from failure of central vital power sufficient to send the blood of the nation from the heart to the extremities, died a natural death. ”

“ This is why civilizations will not coalesce; this is why the Spaniards could make the Aztecs accept their civilization only at the point of the sword. Development engendered by one set of phenomena will not suit the developments of other circumstances. The government, religion, and customs of one people will not fit another people any more than the coat of one person will suit the form of another. Thought runs in different channels; the happiness of one is not the happiness of another; development springs from inherent necessity, and one species cannot be engrafted on another. ”

“ Our daily salutations are but modified acts of worship, and our parting word a benediction; and from blood, tomahawks, and senseless superstitions we turn and find all the world of humanity, with its still strong passions and subtle cravings, held in restraint by a force of which its victims are almost wholly unconscious,—and this force is Fashion. In tribunals of justice, in court and camp etiquette, everywhere these relics of barbarism remain with us. ”

“ Since which time the fierce fanaticism that overwhelmed the New World empire, has pressed like an incubus upon the dominant race, and held it fast while all the world around were making the most rapid strides forward.
No indigenous civilization exists in America to-day, yet the effects of a former culture are not altogether absent. The descendant of the Aztec, Maya, and Quiché, is still of superior mind and haughtier spirit than his roving brother who boasts of none but a savage ancestry. ”

“ Those nations raised the highest by their wealth and culture, were the first to fall before the invader, their superior attainments offering a more shining mark to a rapacious foe; and falling, they were the soonest lost,—absorbed by the conquering race, or disappearing in the surrounding darkness. Although the savage nations were rapidly annihilated, traces of savagism lingered, and yet linger; but the higher American culture, a plant of more delicate growth and more sensitive nature, withered at the first rude touch of foreign interference. ”

“ As to the nature of these laws, the subtle workings of which we see manifest in every phase of society, I cannot even so much as speak. An infinite ocean of phenomena awaits the inquirer—an ocean bottomless, over whose surface spreads an eternity of progress, and beneath whose glittering waves the keenest intellect can scarcely hope to penetrate far. The universe of man and matter must be anatomized ”

“ True, it may be urged that this heaping up of intellectual fruits tends toward monopoly, toward making the rich richer and the poor poorer, but I still hold that the benefits of civilization are for the most part evenly distributed; that wealth beyond one's necessity is generally a curse to the possessor greater than the extreme of poverty, and that the true blessings of culture and refinement like air and sunshine are free to all. ”