"My illustrious Friend and Joy of my Liver: Al The thing which you ask of me is both difficult and useless. though I have passed all my days in this place I have neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and another stores away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it. .. Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal to the belief in God! He created the world and shall we liken ourselves to him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of his creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years? Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. . . . Thou art learned in the things I care not for, and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek paradise with thine eyes . . .? "Thy meek in spirit, "IMAUM ALi Zadi." CHAP. XLII Freedom of Inquiry The restless intellect is the natural enemy of the effete as sun- Preserve light is the natural enemy of certain fungi. Therefore preserve inviolate the right of free inquiry. No institution may rightfully claim immunity from scrutiny and test. Nothing should be held so "sacred" that it may not be criticized by a competent person at the proper time and in a seemly manner. The right of state officials to probe and criticize endowed agencies for religion, charity, education, or research should not, however, carry with it the right to control. This would lessen in such agencies their salutary power of initiative and ability to stand for unpopular truth. Let the search light play freely over them and the public will see that their faults are corrected. Altho many keen minds enter the professions we do not find the older professions imbued with the progressive spirit. It is not lawyers who call attention to the dead wood that cumbers the law but outsiders. The protests against the traditionalism of creeds and church methods come not so much from clergymen as from intelligent laymen. The trouble lies with the training which students of law and theology undergo. They study books instead of life. Against the dictum of an eminent teacher of law, "The Let the Learner As Well As Books СНАР. Apply to Society the Meth ods of Exact Measurement law library is the student's laboratory," it should be asserted that his laboratory is the world of human relations. Professional education would foster the liberal spirit if more of it were field work and less of it bookish. Just as cost accounting brings to light the weak spots in a business, the exact measurement of results may bring to light the weak spots in social organization. Alternative methods of probation, of reformation of juvenile delinquents, of apprenticeship, of instruction, of sanitation, of poor relief, of social insurance, of industral training, of factory discipline, may be compared by testing their results. The "social survey" is only ten years old, yet constantly its technique is perfected and it is introduced into new fields. Atho the method of measurements needs to be applied with caution, for it is liable to overlook or misread certain of the finer values, there should be incessant endeavor to substitute exact comparison for guessing and impression in conflicts between old and new. CHAPTER XLIII DECADENCE SOCIA СНАР. What De OCIAL decadence carries the idea of the raveling of a web, the crumbling of a wall that once was strong, the falling to pieces of a structure that has rotted at the joints. The decadent so- cadence Is ciety will be one that sinks below a former level of unity, vigor, and efficiency. Perhaps loyalty shifts from society to its subordinate groups, so that the spirit of caste or sect or faction or clan overrides feeling for the whole. Perhaps the sub-groups themselves are weakened by the spread of the spirit of each-for-himself. Egoism may go so far that the only social unit able to thrive is the band — i.e., the group formed about a strong man and promising immediate material advantages. Society decays when the laws, customs, and beliefs tending to keep within bounds the selfishness of individuals are not respected as of yore. The spiritual web which enmeshes men gives way. There are more contradictions among them than formerly and fewer agreements, more discords and fewer harmonies, more clashings and fewer cooperations. Not only has the I-feeling gained on the we-feeling, but the bonds uniting successive generations may fail, so that there is less veneration for forefathers and less concern for posterity. Adverse Climatic There are a number of external causes which may contribute to the decay of a society. One of these is a change of climate change for the worse. In Central America, Chinese Turkestan, Mesopotamia, Cambodia, and Rhodesia are found imposing ruins which testify to the handiwork of peoples far above the present inhabitants in culture and organization. In Bolivia, a few miles south of Lake Titicaca, have been brought to light the remains of a forgotten city which could hardly have counted fewer than a million inhabitants. The impossibility of such multitudes growing their food on a bleak plateau at an elevation of 12,500 feet above sea level has led to the startling hypothesis that this civilization flourished at a time so remote that the Andean upland had not CHAP. Soil Exhaustion in the Classic World Social Results of Soil Exhaustion yet risen more than eight or nine thousand feet above the ocean! In Central Asia the discovery of cities long buried under desert sand affords the principal ground for the pulsatory theory of climatic changes formulated by Dr. Ellsworth Huntington. If the alleged changes are substantiated, we have the key to a downfall which heretofore has been attributed to some mysterious internal cause. EXHAUSTION OF NATURAL RESOURCES Society rests on land and people, so that, if either deteriorates, society sags, twists, or falls, like a house when its foundation is breaking down. We know now that, quite in its day's work, a people can so dissipate or use up its natural resources as to leave the land scarcely habitable. Behind some of the great tragedies of history we are just beginning to glimpse soil exhaustion. In the early Roman Republic, as in China and Japan today, a four-acre plot was deemed enough to support a family. But the allotments of the Gracchi were twenty acres in extent, those of the triumvirs, thirty acres, those of Caesar, forty acres. Before the imperial period the scantness of the grain crops stood in such harsh contrast to the tales of older fertility that agricultural writers generally held the theory that mother-earth was approaching old age; that, like a woman, she had reached that point in her life when one ceases to bring forth. Columella recommends the vine, because in the greater part of Italy no one can recall when grain produced fourfold-i.e., four to six bushels to the acre! It was in just the longest-tilled parts that the soil had become leanest. In old Latium, Varro cites Pupinia "where the foliage is meager, the vines look starved, where the scant straw never stools, nor the fig tree blooms, and trees and parched meadows are largely covered with moss." Two centuries later Columella refers to entire Latium as a country where only imported food kept the people alive. Soil exhaustion doubtless brought on such profound social changes as the turning of tilled land into pasture, the indebtedness and ruin of the Latin yeomen, the growth of great estates (latifundia), the formation of the urban populace, the exaction of a grain tribute from the provinces, the deliberate conquest of grain-producing countries, and the development of Rome into a huge parasite, living, as Seneca puts it, "on the spoils of all nations." But since Rome sucked food from the provinces, the shadow of soil exhaustion presently fell upon them also. Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, Spain, went the way of Italy, which in Sophocles' time had geen a granary for Greece. Only Egypt, annually refertilized by the Nile slime, escaped exhaustion.1 It is only within a generation that we have perceived how a people prepares its ruin by a reckless destruction of the natural forest. In China deeply gullied plateaus, guttered hillsides, choked watercourses, silted-up bridges, sterilized bottom lands, bankless wandering rivers, dyked torrents that have built up their beds till they meander at the level of the tree tops, and mountain brooks as thick as pea soup testify to the changes wrought once the reckless ax has let loose the force of running water to resculpture the landscape. What I observed in Shansi along the Fên River is typical: Once the tree cover is removed, the rains wash the soil from the hillsides and with it fill the watercourses and choke the valleys. Wherever a brook or creek debouches into the valley of the Fên, it has built with this wash a great alluvial cone, curving down-river, and along the crest of this cone runs the shallow gravelly bed of the stream that once loitered under high banks three or four fathoms beneath its present level. This cone has covered under silt and sand and gravel from a few score acres to several miles of the former rich bottom lands and they can never be recovered. Buildings are imbedded to the waist in the débris. Gateways that once one could ride a camel through, one can now only creep through on hands and knees. Twice we came upon majestic stone bridges which once spanned broad affluents of the Fên, but which now, their noble arches half silted up, stand unused amid fields of beans and rape, sad monuments of a bygone prosperity. Since the bridge was built, twenty feet of wash from deforested hills has been dropped in that watercourse and the stream, no longer fed from spongy wooded slopes, is a trickle or an underground moisture in summer and a raging flood in the rainy season.2 From the once-wooded hills opposite Hong Kong the soil has been washed away till the country is nothing but granite boulders. North of the Gulf of Tonkin, it is said, not a tree is to be seen and the surviving balks between the fields show that areas once 1 See Simkhovitch, "Rome's Fall Reconsidered," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXXI. 2 Ross, "The Changing Chinese," p. 271. CHAP. Disastrous tion in China |