American life, especially urban life, is an intensive education in the two most ignoble vices of the human spirit, which are fear
and hatred.
There can be no doubt of this; to prove it, stand ten minutes in view of any urban thoroughfare and look at the faces around you, study them attentively, and see how many you can pick out that betoken dignity, self-respect, intelligence, force of character, calmness and gentleness of spirit. Try it at the corner of Broad and Market, in Times Square, or where you will. Then see how many express habitual fear, habitual hatred; fear for one's job, fear of traffic, fear of one's boss or one's banker, fear of opinion, fear of the consequence of some kind of "break," of some turn in the stock market or in trade, and above all, deadly fear of ideas; hatred of competitors in business or society, of forestallers, of people who jostle one on the street or tread on one's toes in the subway, of the driver who just misses running one down, of the pedestrian whom one just misses running down. It is a life that besets one by every known form of hatred and fear, by night and day; and the appropriate moral indurations must follow.
There is only one observation to be made concerning all this, which is that a society chiefly animated by fear and hatred, and exhibiting so pronouncedly the moral indurations which the constant exercise of fear and hatred induce, is simply not a civilized society. It throws back steadily to a troglodytic stage of human development. A people so deeply marked by these indurations is not a civilized people; that is the whole story. There is every evidence that the governing spirit of the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal types was that of fear and hatred, and that their exercise of these deforming vices left in them very little ground for the rootage of instincts and dispositions properly called humane. These types are called uncivilized, but it does not lie in the American mouth to call them so, for the spiritual development of American society, under the dominant influence of the same master-passions, is toward a precise reproduction of these types. A society that elects to live by its fears and hatreds may be ever so rich, powerful and pretentious, but it is not civilized. It is no trouble to imagine the Cro-Magnon somehow becoming all three, but it is impossible to imagine him as in consequence approaching any nearer the status of civilized man.
