Art. 4.-SOME IDEALS OF RECONSTRUCTION.

An Inquiry into the Causes of the Growth and Decay of Civilisation. By Thomas Lloyd. The 'Statist' Office, 1926.

To rearrange the world, to set the times right, has been the desire, and sometimes the endeavour, of all manners of men, angry, pitiful, quixotic or ambitious, since long before the Flood; and as the above work, a portentous volume, suggests, the provision of would-be reformers, as of pessimists and prophets, is far more certain than the future supply of coal. In this book the late Mr Thomas Lloyd has set himself an impossible task. His intentions were excellent-intentions generally are excellent-but it needs more than the equipment of an economist, even although it is fortified with hard reading in ancient history and a sincere desire to improve and to secure the conditions of human brotherhood, to fulfil the brave intention of this work, which is at once unwieldy and scrappy. After an interesting and suggestive account of prehistoric times and possibilities, beginning with the Piltdown man, Mr Lloyd inquires into the truth and certainties of the Ice Age, with its effect on such civilisations as had been established and lost during some hundred thousand years; and then, with a surprising flight and transformation, he comes to a close study of modern Banking systems, and incidentally pours scornful and not well-justified criticism on the Victorian teachers of Political Economy.

It is a pity that his work was not better co-ordinated, more carefully revised, and to some extent abridged before publication, by a considerate hand; for there are frequent repetitions. References are made to Ireland as if an Irish Free State had not been established, and to the last census' of 1911; while the hope is expressed that in the post-War settlement the Turks will be swept away.' These remarks show that the book was written some few years ago; since when, there have been many upheavals in a world of electrical and changeful political conditions, with very rapid progress, or retrogression, here and there. Bulky as Mr. Lloyd's work is, it is merely one brick in the edifice to be reared if his

excellent purpose of examining and afterwards improving our ordered existence is to be realised. His statements, as his palliatives, are far too limited and partial. While we appreciate his sincerity and good intentions we cannot help feeling that his purpose would have been served in a more general and compact book.

The volume is useful less in what it says than in what it suggests. It reminds us that Civilisation is ever in a fluid condition, changing with the times, geographical circumstances, and racial ideals. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, mediæval Florence, the Spain of Philip, the recent Prussian Empire, and the British Commonwealth of Nations, as it is and is to be, are complete expressions of elaborate civilisations as different from each other as well could happen. The ancient civilisations, whose remains adorn the drift of the wilderness in Asia, Africa, and America north and south, though the best known of them, Assyria and Egypt, flourished only some ten thousand years ago, were the cradles of practical science and learning. They were the pioneers of the discoveries of to-morrow. And with all our organised wealth and mechanical skill, the successful conquest of earth and sea and air, submarines and wireless, can we achieve greater intellectual triumphs than were the rewards of those earliest known masters with their primitive instruments? Can we improve on the works of Praxiteles and Socrates? Is the mind of the average European of to-day more cultured than was that of the average citizen of Greece who knew Leonidas? Are we able to build better than the Romans, who established roads still in service throughout Europe and built the Colosseum? Can we excel the works of those mediæval masters, Leonardo and Michel Angelo?

Modern civilisation has its victories, colossal victories; yet in some, and in many, respects it is inferior to the civilisation of thousands of years ago; in other words, as with the growth of a plant or nation, civilisations rise, flourish, are stationary; and then decay and die. There is nothing more simply pathetic sometimes than to discover on a buried wall the scrawled writing of a forgotten Roman soldier, or some fragment of pottery or pavement which speaks of humanity happy or usefully employed in an hour long lost. The hoarded

treasures of a Tutankhamen are rich with the pathos of fallen dreams. It is needless to sentimentalise over this evidence of the victory of Time and his dust; but it is well to realise that civilisation is a living circumstance; and that it is the natural process of living things, when they have served their purpose, to fade and die; unless they and their usefulness may be renewed meanwhile.

The modern world has its peculiar form of civilisation, slowly wrought through centuries of religious tribulation, the fight for individual liberty, gradual and extraordinary scientific advancement, and what is rather loosely known as the Industrial Revolution. It is based upon reason and organised wealth-common-sense and capital-and finds general approval through the instrumentality of free parliaments, acting upon the accepted principle that every man has the right to do his best for himself, so long as he does not thereby injure, or even infringe upon, the rights and happiness of others. Obviously, these principles are ideal, and in every country where they have been accepted, they are modified according to local precedents and traditions, intelligence and good-will. But even in Russia, under Tsar Lenin or the unhappy Tsar Nicholas, lip-service, at any rate, was paid to the rights of subjects to express themselves through popular institutions, the Duma or the Soviet; although, in both cases, when it came to a possibility of putting the promised ideal into effective practice the potentate did not permit.

The Great War was a supreme test of modern civilisation and almost broke it down. The trial was crucial, as it was bound to be when almost the whole world was involved in it, and the protagonists were Germany, elaborately organised, rich, powerful, prepared, and Great Britain, infinitely resourceful, dutiful, conscious of responsibilities expressed upon parchment-to her no scrap of paper-and in the long tradition which, with all her faults, mistakes, and committed wrongs, had made her the recognised champion of the enslaved and downtrodden. The vast consequent destruction of life and wealth, the mad exhaustion of capital, much of it spent in further efforts and instruments to destroy, and in large measure irreplaceable, were more than sufficient Vol. 248.-No. 492.

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to alter the values of social life; but the material loss was less than the spiritual.

For the first time it was brought home to the thoughtful in the great family of Mankind that the maxims they had tried, or pretended, to live by, too often were little more than mere words in their effect, and that the strongest and proudest conditions of earthly circumstance under that crisis proved a brittle vanity. Kaisers and Kings, whose power was based upon force and national pride alone-shining armour and the mailed fist (the wicked old phrases!)-were tumbled down wholesale, in collapse as absolute as that of ninepins in a skittle-alley. It is true that the shocks and their reverberations of the earthquakes of 1914, also proved that thrones based upon a people's will and faith, and the courtesy and simplicity of just and considerate government, were even strengthened by the common suffering, sacrifice, and courage involved. They stood, in the poet's phrase, four-square to all the winds that blew, and they endured. But see the contrast. Look first upon that picture and on this! The royal mission to Australia, where a gracious Duke and his simple-hearted Duchess are received rapturously, because of loyalty and home-ties, by the most democratic community in the world; with the unlovely solitude of the exile of Doorn, whose selfconceit and insufficiencies of heart, mind, and character in large measure brought crushing defeat to a confident people. Material might, after incalculable stress, catastrophe, and the illusions and parade of tinsel 'glory,' was brought to nothing; while constitutional monarchy was justified, and autocracies were swept away, to be restored only in ignorant and unhappy Russia. So, in ruin and doubt, the end came to a definite chapter of organised energy and material progress; and although much has been done in the nine years spent, and not too well-spent, since the Armistice of 1918, to clear away the débris and renew the world, the conditions need a vigorous and a bold rebuilding. The civilisation of tomorrow must be essentially different from that of yesterday. Our feet are standing on the threshold of the mighty future. What shall we do?

At the outset it is necessary to recognise what will be the first distinguishing note of the new conditions. Pre

diction is futile, especially in the realm of politics; and is even more futile with international politics over a range world-wide. There is no limit to the future possibilities of racial development or endeavour, as is illustrated by Mr Thomas Lloyd's casual hope that the Turks were to be swept away. He was not alone in that expectation when his thought was written. Pretty well everybody in those hours of rapid optimism was confident that even although the Ottoman people would still exist, it would be as a fourth-rate state in Asia Minor; and that Constantinople at last would be wrested from them and occupied by a Christian Power. We now can wonder pleasantly which of the Christian Powers could have occupied Stamboul with the acquiescence of the others. Yet, we see, that not merely have the Turks refused to be swept away; but, reformed and apparently rejuvenated, under the leadership of Kemal Pasha, and through their own irrepressible vitality, they promise to become a new power in the Near East, possibly even, on the whole, a beneficent power: although, remembering, as we do, the hopes aroused by the successful revolt of the Young Turks, twenty years ago, against the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and utterly disappointing as the sequel proved, we cannot speak with confidence on that particular. In any case, the surprising refusal of the Turkish Government and people to vanish in compliance with the convenience of the West illustrates the truth that in international politics there is no sure prediction.

In spite of such uncertainties it is probable that the first note of the next stage in the renewal of Civilisation will be Order, Organisation. This is, indeed, not exactly prophecy; it is, rather, a simple deduction from realised experience. The League of Nations was a genuine inspiration and attempt of President Woodrow Wilson to put overturned, unhappy Europe into new order and to safeguard peace in the future; and although its author seems to have been little esteemed for it anywhere, mainly because his own countrymen, through their party politics, repudiated it and have remained aloof from the resettlement of the stricken Old World in a way which sometimes has looked selfish, it still should be regarded as an ideal realised, a splended ideal, a risen star, pale as