INDICTMENT OF CIVILISATION

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13277, 8 September 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

INDICTMENT OF CIVILISATION

CivnjsATiON makes laws to bind men in gyves of steel. It builds enormous prisons.; ( it provides executioners with a rope or a guillotine; ,; it calls . into being a thousand. Acts of Parliament bristling with pains and penalties; ! it covers "the land with churches and chapels, and blatantly preaches Christ, but hypocrisy, cant, lying, cheating, thieving, knavery of every description, adultery, every form of moral uncleanliness, cruelty, and murder are as rampant to-day as they hare been at any period of the world's history. Modern Babylon is not one whit purer, cleaner, or more moral than Babylon of old, and, indeed, it, may almost safely be asserted that the chivalry of the Middle Ages was productive of a much purer state of morals than we can boast of in this the" twentieth century. Honour was something more than an expression rnder the reign of chivalry, while the virtue of woman was held in much higher regard than in this unromantic age, when the modern Divorce Court furnishes the world with stories of human wickedness and lust, which give the lie direct .the statement that civilisation has improved our morals.

Civilisation is responsible for a vast amount of luxury, which tends to effeminacy ; it gives us more physical comfort., and throws the segis of the law over human life and property. It does on a much larger scale what was done by the religious nouses of the Middle Ages, It sends out missionaries to tlie heathen to the heathen's ultimate destruction, for where the missionary goes the la ril -grabber, the prospector, the trader soon follow, and the poor heathen is wiped out of existence. It rears in the midst of great cities or on their outskirts huge workhouses, which are at once a disgrace and a, scandal. It allows boys and girls to toil and sweat in unwholesome factories and warehouses as slaves of old never toiled and sweated. It allows hundreds of thousands of men, .women, and children to live, rot, and starve in foetid dens, and as they die it shovels them with scant ceremony into pauper graves, and with but little of the solemnity of Christian burial, lb boasts of t.he equality of its laws, and yet there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. In,theory, of course, it is not so. But in the practical application of the law we have a. thousand and one glaring examples of its unfairness. It allows self-interests to deedd' all sense of justice. It destroys God's great spaces and Cod's pure air. It effaces- all picturesquenew and all romance. It rears hideous towns and cities, where the tee-miner inhabitants are suerrestive of conglomerate masses of human maggots, jostling and pushing each other., on one side, each trying to best the other: each indifferent to the other, in th-p, ruthless strusjele for bare existence. It allows the gaunt and famine-stricken wretch to die in the gutter, while the pampered one of fortune rolls by in a luxurious carriage. It builds huge navies creates stupendous armies, and invents such diabolical instruments to destroy men that the friends of the nether world must feel -that thev cannot comoeto with man. Civilisation outrages Nature,, and. as "Nature never forgets and never forgives, she has taken from us the hardv manhood of orinv'tive a.nd modern savage man.and Tfflieted us with a Jons? list of nervous diseases which certainly were not known in earlier times. Mr. Muddork. in Public Ooinon.