Principles of western civilisation

VIE THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 225

kind of atavism, or a return to a former stage of evolution undoubtedly once represented amongst softer and more effeminate peoples long extinguished in the process of military selection which the race has undergone. It was, beyond doubt, largely owing to what may be described as a long process of discrimination against those softer feelings, that the stock from which the foremost peoples of the present day are descended won its way to the destiny which has devolved upon it. It was undoubtedly in virtue of this cause that the races which produced the military civilisations of Greece and Rome came to occupy the leading place which they filled in the world in the past. This is the fact, in short, in which we have the principal explanation of that phenomenon already noticed, namely, that the development of the gentler feelings in the ancient civilisations was, in itself, not only productive of no new principle of life, but that it began with the period of decline, and progressed part passu with other symptoms of decay.

One of the first duties of the scientific observer is, therefore, to recognise in all its bearings the pregnant fact that the deep sense of responsibility towards human life, of which we have here the first outward symptom and which is destined afterwards to play so great a part in the development of Western civilisation, is, at the point at which it is first encountered, presented to us as related to a principle entirely different, not only in degree, but in kind, to that which found expression in the humanitarianism of the ancient philosophy. The fact which stands out at the beginning in relation to the cause which suppressed the custom of infanti-

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