We may come to wonder the less at this adverse judgment when we have
considered two instances of the effects which the highest types of
civilization have had upon the masses of mankind who were brought under
its sway. Take ancient Egypt and ancient Athens. Go back to the
building of the pyramids. Although they are among the earliest
monuments of civilization, they are yet among the most marvellous
illustrations of the mastery of the human mind over matter. Scarcely
three had passed of the ten thousand years which have constituted the
epoch that superseded barbarism, before these vast tombs, or whatever
they are, began to be erected. Lost in admiration as he stands before
the Great Pyramid, how can any one but resent the suggestion that the
social order, which made it at last possible, was a disease, preying
upon the body and spirit of men?
And yet, if one turns from it to examine that organization of human
labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made
it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures
that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak
thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists
and archaeologists tell us, that to the building of any one of the
great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for
many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is
no ground for supposing that the feel of the whip, when the back of an
Egyptian slave began to bleed, was different from what we should suffer
if the stroke fell now on us: nor that cries of pain were any the less
natural then. And we must remember that, according to the unanimous
opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one
of the essentials of civilization. Picturesque and vivid, but not
exaggerated, is the saying of the author of that able book, _The
Nemesis of Nations_: "Civilization begins with the crack of the whip."
Lord Cromer quotes this dictum in his work on Egypt as giving an
epitome of the kind of power behind the civilizing process as it has
always manifested itself in the land of the Nile; and then, lest those
of his readers who live in the glass house of English history should
commit the ridiculous sin of unconscious hypocrisy, he gently but
firmly reminds us that many inhumanities of a similar spirit,
especially towards offenders against the laws of property, were not
suppressed in England till the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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