CIVILISATION'S PERIL.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17645, 23 December 1922, Page 4

CIVILISATION'S PERIL.

NATIONS "GOING BACK TO GRASS." r)- L T Hobhouse recently fiddress- , +l,o Warrington ed the members of the , (Lancashire) Literary Th.losopl.ic Society on "Internationalism, P-ist an . his lecture With some reference to Mr H. G. Wells's speech Manchester. He did not think, that M* Wells had overdrawn the gr.'Vity threat to civilisation in Europe. In np inconsiderable part of the Continent decadence had set in; there marked features which one w° u nise from historical readmg. Our own unemployment and the fail 0 e r ", in France were ripples of jj® * ld £ present state of things mu ®L like what was kappenrng in the Rormu Empire a century after Ohust. An other symptom was the r " , '\ G nuany . die classes in Austria and Genu | That also was spreading to this eou trv There was- no sign -lift "icso things were being arrested; they »e , 111 or© aggravated than they weie ™ur yenis ago; and therefore thought tint Mr Wells's" serious warning was not exaggerated. These things were tho governing issue of the _bm I Referring casually to Mr Keynes's economic fearsi for the i'ltjue. Professor Hobhouse said it w'.'.s not.in the economic factor thatf he (saw the trouble. The trouble he saw was tremendous human problem. If that," he said, "we shall have energy to give to science to extract fiom Nature nil we require. Given sexual tranquility, the march of in the next hundred years v.ill be fnr more rapid than in the last hundred years." The trouble was m the acquisition of moral wisdom, which mean the combination of prudence intellect, knowledge, judgment, and insight, with the will to do the best, not for self, party, group, caste, or nation, but for humanity. This ideal of moral wisdom working for humanity ivae no longer an adornment of the lecture-room* of the treatise on moral philosophy. It was a necessity, because in practice the world had become one in a sense in which it had never been ond before. There was scarcely a part of the world to-day whose happenings were indifferent to the other parts. England was feeling that now (and here he differed from Mr Wells, who thought the present economic position was due to curcency collapse). It was due to a great part of the Continent, with which we had been organically united in trade, having collapsed, a great body of our old customers having gone out of action. This had all happened because people, and particularly leaders and thinkers, had not the moral wisdom to recognise humanity as the governing society, as the community which, must organic means of dealing with relations which were going on wnether they were dealt with by organisations or not. The very extension of communications had put peojjle all oyer the world in face with a oreat social problem of human rela-tions,-and the moral, wisdom to solve that problem had not yet "been found. Professor Hobhouse then went on to show, with great wealth of interesting illustration, how this problem had existed from the earliest tunes, and how from time to time endeavours Bad been made to ameJiorate the severity of the clash between one group, tribe, or nation and another. It was from the information and the destruction of tne Pope's position as a supreme head above all kings that there emerge'd the conception that the national sovereign -was absolute. With this became mixed up the conception of "patriotic pride," in which be traced the basis of the view that there was one morality for the individual and another for men as organised into States, in a word, that the moral writ stopped' at the frontier. That perverted morality has played a dark part in the last 300 or 400 years. Decay of Civilisation. To-day we had a state of things which, if no remedy was found, would mean that one nation after another would have to "go hack to grass." He did not think modern civilisation would suffer decay of ancient civilisations J because modern civilisation existed in other continents beside Europe. If it were not for that fact he would say on the balance of probabilities that our civilisation even now was doomed to pass like those of old. In any case, this country must suffer a great catastrophe or a gradual decline' unless we pulled ourselves There was no such thing as fatality in the course of human events. On the degree of insight and clearness with which large numbers of petjple appreciated. . the problem depended whether . Europe would 0} forward or sink back into something like the social state of the Middle Ages. In the actual problem he saw nothing difficult; it was nothing but a case of goodwill wisely instructed. The mechanism of the problem presented nothing more, difficult than there was ] in constituting the United .States of America or the South African Union. Just so could be constituted a complete League of Nations if people would sink the elements of pride, self-interest, hatred, and suspicion which made up the thing glorified in the past as "nationalism." Edith Cavell had put the matter rightly: "Pair:otism is not enough." It would be untrue to say that patriotism ,was wrong or unworthy, but it was not' enough. "It is only enough,'' said Professor Hobhouse, "when it is deep enough and pure enough and sincere enough to realise that one's nation,. however good and glorious, is only one part of and that its highest greatness resides in the service of humanity."