Barbary

“ You, who know the noble barbarian in his African retreats, appear to retain more than most men of his fresh natural imagination. We are all savages under our white skins; but you alone recall to us the delights and terrors of the world’s nonage. We are hunters again, trappers, adventurers bold, while we study you, and the blithe barbarian wakens even in the weary person of letters. He forgets proof-sheets and papers, and the “young lion” seeks his food from God, in the fearless ancient way, with bow or rifle. ”

“ You Barbarians, who, a few generations ago, were cattle-thieves on the frontier of our empire, whom we slaughtered, enslaved, threw to the beasts by hundreds of thousands,--naked, starving beggars who gratefully picked up the crumbs flung to them by Roman generosity,--hence with you all, all, you wolves, you bulls, you bears, whom only bestial strength and God's permission--as a punishment for our sins--allowed to break into the Roman Empire! ”

“ The soldiers, enraged, began to gather in angry groups, rebuking one another for their over-patience in submitting to be ruled by such a coward. "How? Are we men, and have we swords in our hands, and shall we any longer bear with such disgraceful effeminacy, by which the might of this great Empire is sapped, so that every barbarian who chooses may carve out a slice from it?" ”

“ But it was barbarians, without defensive armor, without discipline, without prestige, attacking legions which had been a thousand years learning the art of war. Proh Pudor! The soldiers of the empire must have lost their ancient spirit. They must have represented a most worthless people. We lose our pity in the strength of our indignation and disgust. A civilized nation that will yield to barbarians must deserve their fate. Noble as were the elements of character among the Germanic tribes, they were yet barbarians in arts, in manners, in knowledge, in mechanisms. ”

“ Once more life resumed its normal course; but those times were the most wretched that mankind had yet experienced. The barbarians swarmed over the whole Empire. Their ways were uncouth, and as they nurtured feelings of vengeance and greed, they firmly believed in the ransom of sin. ”

“ Ignorance as well as anarchy veiled Europe in darkness. The rust of barbarism became harder and thicker. The last hope of man had fled, and glory was succeeded by shame. Even slavery, the curse of the Roman Empire, was continued by the barbarians; only, brute force was not made subservient to intellect, but intellect to brute force. The descendants of ancient patrician families were in bondage to barbarians. The age was the jubilee of monsters. Assassination was common, and was unavenged by law. Every man was his own avenger of crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law. ”

“ There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war. ”

“ The Great Barbarity has passed by, the modern barbarism from beyond the Rhine, a thousand times worse than the ancient, because it is stupidly and outrageously self-satisfied, and, in consequence, fundamental, incurable, final—destined, if it be not crushed, to throw a sinister night of eclipse over the world.... ”

“ Barbarous in origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous in the instruments it employs, barbarous in consequences, barbarous in spirit, barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism. ”

“ Like yourself, I wish to labor for the overthrow of barbarism; like yourself I wish to put an end to the craven besottedness of the oppressed; but I wish to destroy barbarism with civilization, ignorance with enlightenment, poverty with labor, slavery with the sense of national worth—a sense, alas! now almost wholly uprooted, and yet once so powerful, in the days of our fathers, when our venerated druids aroused the peoples to arms against the Romans. ”

“ But on the edges of the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even [Pg 17] in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. ”

“ Actuated by great passions, the love of glory, and the desire of victory; roused by the menaces of an enemy, or stung with revenge; in suspense between the prospects of ruin or conquest, the barbarian spends every moment of relaxation in sloth. He cannot descend to the pursuits of industry or mechanical labour: the beast of prey is a sluggard; the hunter and the warrior sleeps, while women or slaves are made to toil for his bread. But shew him a quarry at a distance, he is bold, impetuous, artful, and rapacious; no bar can withstand his violence, and no fatigue can allay his activity. ”

“ The term barbarian, in this state of manners, could not be employed by the Greeks or the Romans in that sense in which we use it: to characterize, a people regardless of commercial arts; profuse of their own lives, and those of others; vehement in their attachment to one society, and implacable in their antipathy to another. This, in a great and shining part of their history, was their own character, as well as that of some other nations, whom, upon this very account, we distinguish by the appellations of barbarous or rude. ”

“ One has only to go into the streets of any great city in England to see how we, with all our boast of civilisation, are yet but one step removed from barbarism. Is that a hard word? Only there are the barbarians round us at every street corner—grown barbarians, it may be, now all but past saving, but bringing into the world young barbarians whom we may yet save, for God wishes us to save them. ”

“ The codes of the Barbarians who sat on the ruins of the Roman Empire—the Burgundians, Bavarians, the Allemanni, with the Visigoths and their northern kin—have left enactments certainly more terrible in themselves. But the darkness of that period shrouds all those barbarian legislations in a general and homogeneous gloom; and here, it is "the freest and most enlightened nation of the world," who keeps, extends, and intensifies the dreadful statutes which make men only things, binds them and sells them as brute cattle. ”

“ We willed it not. We have not lived in hate,
Loving too well the shires of England thrown
From sea to sea to covet your estate,
Or wish one flight of fortune from your throne.
We had grown proud because the nations stood
Hoping together against the calumny
That, tortured of its old barbarian blood,
Barbarian still the heart of man should be.
Builders there are who name you overlord,
Building with us the citadels of light,
Who hold as we this chartered sin abhorred,
And cry you risen Cæsar of the Night. ”

“ The spirit of barbarism lingers about its mortal remains. Barbaric wars are hushed, the dead having buried their dead;--Barbaric shows are fading in splendour, and are as much mocked at as admired;--Barbaric usurpations are being resisted and supplanted day by day ”

“ Such are the barbarians, henceforward to be subdued, converted, baptized once more by Christianity, unless the world itself be condemned to rock and totter to and fro between anarchy and despotism. Take it as you will—consider it as you please—run over England, or France, or Germany, or Italy, or the eastern wastes of Russia,—everywhere you will descry and bear the ground-swell of the huge human tides as if awaiting but the breath of the blast to foam, and surge, and lash itself into fury. ”

“ What civilized poet can don the barbarian sufficiently to revel, or seem to revel, in the ghastly details of carnage, in hideous wounds described with surgical gusto, in the butchery of captives in cold blood, or even in those particulars of the shambles and the spit which to the troubadour of barbarism seem as delightful as the images of the harvest and the vintage? ”

“ Do not reject the title of Barbarians. It is the only one that suits you. You might have been fine Barbarians, but for a long time to come you will be only shabby civilised men. I had rather see you stand on a pedestal, and hear you shout, exaggerating your misdeeds, overstraining your cruelty, your vices, your animality:
"Yes, we are Barbarians! ”

“ If the empire had withstood the shock of barbarians, a state would have existed unfavorable to the higher and future triumphs of the cross. Where was hope, when imperial despotism, and disproportionate fortunes, and slavery, and the reign of conventional forms and traditions, and the tyranny of foolish fashions were likely to be perpetuated? How could Christianity have subverted these monstrous evils without producing revolutions more blasting than even barbaric violence? There seem to be some evils so subtle, poisonous, and deeply-rooted that nothing but violence can remove them. ”

“ But now, still another generation is rising up to witness and suffer a yet more perplexing and painful lapse into barbarism. Looking round the whole circuit of Christendom, we perceive, not only symptoms of disturbance and imminent peril of a general war in Europe, but a character of barbarism in both the warfare itself, and in the political facts which occasion it, which make us ask whether we are really living in the nineteenth century, and in the Commercial Period of civilisation. ”

“ Barbarians records the adventures of these men, not together, but singly or in groups, along the whole western battle front, from the Belgian coast to the mountains of Alsace. It is filled with unusual character sketches of the lives of the men in the Trenches, and of life in the little towns just inside the lines of Battle. Through it all there is great beauty and wonderful sense of justice and right that is indeed more precious than peace. ”

“ Language had attained such development that poetry of the highest structural form was about to embody the inspirations of genius. The closing period of barbarism brought this portion of the human family to the threshold of civilization, animated by the great attainments of the past, grown hardy and intelligent in the school of experience, and with the undisciplined imagination in the full splendor of its creative powers. Barbarism ends with the production of grand barbarians. ”

“ What an inexpressibly feeble phrase for anything one wants to attack--a relic of barbarism! It is as if a man walked naked down the street to-morrow, and we said that his clothes were not quite in the latest fashion. There is nothing particularly nasty about being a relic of barbarism. Man is a relic of barbarism. Civilisation is a relic of barbarism. ”

“ It is a remnant of that spirit of barbarity, which formerly induced men to fight for conquest and territory, in the palmiest days of the ancient Eastern empires, when the fields of the earth, fair mother of our existence, were made fertile by the rich streams of blood, flowing from the mangled corpses, strewn upon its surface, by the fiendish barbarity of a Sennacherib, a Cyrus, a Xerxes, and an Alexander. ”

“ Such a mode of obtaining “satisfaction” is so repugnant to the spirit of our age that it is perhaps not to be wondered at if its advocates should endeavor to affiliate it upon the ancient wager of battle. Both relics of barbarism, it is true, are developments from the same primitive habits and customs, yet they are essentially distinct and have coexisted as separate institutions; and, however much occasionally intermingled by the passions of periods of violence, they were practised for different ends, and were conducted with different forms of procedure. ”

“ No, under the thin veneer which civilization plasters over us, lie the old savage instincts, and if you scratch your man of refinement deep enough, you will find the passions of the barbarian still existing. ”

“ These pious Barbarians are kindled into rage: they thirst to avenge the persecution of the East. Abandon your rash and fatal enterprise; reflect, tremble, and repent. If you persist, we are innocent of the blood that will be spilt in the contest ”

“ The Barbarians trust to their overwhelming numbers, and to the deafening clamour with which they charge, but if you resist them bravely, you will find them—it shames me to say so—nothing but a cowardly mob. ”

“ With all the misery we have to suffer, we tear ourselves with our own hands besides—the war of the classes, the war of the nations, whether you look at us from afar or from above, we are barbarians and madmen. ”

“ In the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us. ”

“ Compared with the brutality of her armies in America, looking at her in the light of even a civilized nation, savage barbarity is thrown in the distance so far that it could not be seen through a microscope of a million power. ”

“ Eyes have been opened, spirits have been illuminated: never did barbarism, in all its brutality and destructiveness, attain results as monstrous as those of which our industrial and scientific civilization has proved itself capable. ”

“ Suppose you were to abolish all relics of barbarism in man, you would have no man at all. Heads, and arms, and bodies, are relics of barbaric man. Had not barbaric man heads, and arms, and bodies? Are you going to abolish heads, and arms, and bodies? ”