MR BALFOUR ON DECADENCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2818, 18 March 1908, Page 95

MR BALFOUR ON DECADENCE.

"NO PAUSE IN THE UPWARD MOVEMENT." Mr Arthur Balfour discussed the problem of decadence at Newnham College on January 25. His sister, Mrs Sidgwick, i» I the principal of Newnham College, and the lecture was the Heniy Sidgwick Memorial Lecture. The Times says that Mr Balfour suggests by his choice of a subject King Richaad's doleful utterance, "Le£ s talk of groves, of worms, and epitaphs." Mr Balfour has no pessimistic view of decadence. He declares that there ha« been "no pause in the upward movement."' Here are the conclusions he has reached: ■ —Norraalness of Decadence. — "The conclusions at which I provision-, ally arrive axe that we cannot regard decadence and arrested development as lea* normal in human communities than progress, though, the point at which the energy of advance i* exhausted (if and when it is reached) varies in different races; that the internal causes by which progress is encouraged, hindered, or reversed lie to a great extent beyond the field of ordinary political discussion, and are not easily expressed in current political terminology: that the influence whictf a superior civilisation, whether acting by example or imposed by force, may have in advancing an inferior one, though often beneficent, .is not' likely to be self-sup-porting; its withdrawal will be followed by decadence, unless the character of the civilisation be in harmony both with the acquired temperament and the innate capacities of those who have been induced to accept it; that, as regards those. nations which still advance in virtue of their own inherent energies, though time has brought perhaps new causes of disquiet, it has brought also new grounds of hope; and that, whatever be the perils in front of us, there are so far no symptoms either of pause or of regression in the upward movement which for more than a. thousand years has been characteristic of Western civilisation." —Relation of Progress and Def«<knre. — The decadence respecting "which Mr Balfour wished to put questions v,sf. Vie said', that which attacked, or was alleged to attack, gieat communities and Historic

civilisations ; which was to Foci"tics of rr*en what .--c-ni!ity was to man, and was ', often, like teniiit}, the precursor dud the i cause of final dissolution. I'he al'eqation | »--- :>iidlipxl: >iidlipxl in our '-ui-wiit pln<>'"~'\ B"*

why, lie aeked, should civilisations thus wear out and great communities decay, and what evidence was there that in fact tli«y did? These questions, thoueh he could not give v* them a.n.v conclusive

answers, were of much more than a merely theoretic interest. For if current modes of speech took decadence more or less foi granted, with still greater confidence did they speak of progress as assured. Yet if both wtere real they could hardly be studied apart ; they nnrst evidently limit and qualify each other in actual experience, and they could not be isolated in speculation. 1 hough antiquity, Pagan and Christian, took a diffelent view, it seemed easier, a priori, to understand progress than decadence. Even if the former were limited, as presumably it was, by the limitation of human faculty, we should expect the ultimate boundary to be capable of indefinite approach, and we should not expect that any part of the road towards it, once traversed, would have to be retraced. Even in the organic world, decay and death, familiar though th*y were, were phenomena that called for scientific explanation. The struggle for existence between different ra-ces and different societies had admittedly played a great part in social development, but we must not consider a diminution of national power, whether relative or absolute, as constituting by itself a proof of national decadence. Mr Balfour cited cases in support of the latter contention, and said that decadence, even if it were a reality, never acted in isolation. It was always complicated with, and often acted through, other more obvious causes. It was always, therefore, possible to argue that to those causes, and not to the more subtle and elusive influences collectively described as "decadence," the decline' and fall of great communities was really due. — Unsatisfactory Reasons for Decay. — Yet there were historic tragedies, as in the case of the Roman Empire, which, did most obstinately refuse to be thus simply explained. It was in vain that historians enumerated the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth — the gloomy catalogue was unrolled before their eyes, yet somehow it did not in all cases wholly satisfy us ; we felt that some of those diseases were of a kind which a rigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others were secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in i neither case did they supply us with the full explanations of which we were in search. —Why Should We Escape?— "What grounds were there for supposing that we could escape the fate to which other races had had to submit? If for periods which, measured on the historic scale, were of great duration communities which had advainoed to a certain point appeared able to advance no further ; if civilisations wore out and races became effete, why should we expect to progress indefinitely? — why, for us alone, was the doom of man to be reversed? To those questions- he had no very satisfactory answers to give, nor did he believe that our knowledge of national or social psychology was sufficient to make a satisfactory answer possible. Some purely tentative observations on the point might, however, furnish a fitting conclusion to an address which had been tentative throughout, and aimed rather at suggesting trains of thought than at completing them. — An Heroic Suggestion. — He assumed that the factors which combined to make each generation what it wee at the moment of its entrance into life were, in the main, twofold. The one produced the raw material of society ; the process of manufacture was effected by the other. The first was physiological inhei-i-tance, the second was the inheritance partly of external conditions of life, partly of beliefs, traditions, sentiments, customs, laws, and organisation — all that constituted the social surroundings in which men grew up to maturity. He hazarded no conjecture as to the share borne re1 spectively by these two kinds of cause in producing their joint result. Nor were we likely to obtain satisfactory evidence on the subject till, in the interests of science, two communities of different blood and different traditions consented to exchange their children by a universal process of reciprocal adoption. But even in the absence of so heroic an experiment it seemed safe to say that the mobility which made possible either m-ogress or decadence resided rather in the causes grouped under the second head than in the physiological material on which education in the widest sense of that ambiguous term had got to work. — Acquired Qualities. — If, as he supposed, acquired qualities were not inherited, the only causes which could fundamentally modify the physiological character of any particular community were its intermixture with other races through slavery, conquest, or immigration, or else new conditions which varied the relative proportion in which different sections of the population contributed to its total numbers. If, for example, the more successful members of the community had smaller families than the less successful, or if medical administration succeeded in extinguishing maladies to which persons of a particular constitution were specially liable, or if one strain in a mixed race had a larger birth rate than another — in those cases, and in others like them, there would, doubtless, be a change in the physiological factor of national character. But such changes, he supposed, were not likely to be considerable, except perhaps those due to the mixture of races, and that only in new countries, whose economic opportunities tempted immigrants widely different in culture and in capacity for culture from those whose citizenship they proposed to share. In the cases where a forward movement had died away, the pause must in part be due to arrested development in the variable, not to a fixed resistance in the unchanging, factor of national fihaLracter.

| — A New Social Force. — 1 A new social force had come into being, new in magnitude if not in kind. This force was the modern alliance between pure science and industry, and on that we must madnly rely for the improvement of the material conditions under which societies lived. If iv the last hundred years the whole material setting of civilised life had altered, we owed it neither ( to politicians nor to political institutions. j We owed it to the combined efforts of \ those who had advanced science and those i wiho had applied it. If our outlook upon | the universe had suffered modifications in I detail, so great and so numerous that they j amounted to a revolution, it was to men of science we owed it, not to theologians •or philosophers. Science was the great ; instrument of ' social change — all the i greater because its object was not change, but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function amid the din of political and religious strife was the most vital of all the revolutions which had marked the development of modern civilisation.