Short Essay on Civilization Order and Safety:
First and foremost among the blessings of civilization are order and safety. If today I have a quarrel with another man, I do not get beaten merely because I am physically weaker and he can knock me down.
I go to law, and the law will decide as fairly as it can between the two of us.
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Thus in disputes between man and man right have taken the place of might. Moreover, the law protects me from robbery and violence.
Nobody may come and break into my house, steal my goods or run off with my children. Of course there are burglars but they are very rare, and the law punishes them whenever it catches them.
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It is difficult for us to realize how much this safety means. Without safety those higher activities of mankind which make up civilization could not go on. The inventor could not invent, the scientist find out or the artist make beautiful things.
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Hence order and safety, although they are not themselves civilization, are things without which civilization would be impossible. They are as necessary to our civilization as the air we breathe is to us, and we have grown so used to them that we do not notice them any more than we notice the air.
For all that, they are both new things and rare things. Except for a short period under the Roman Empire, there have been order and safety in Europe only during the last two hundred years and even during that time there had been two revolutions and a great many wars.
Thus it is a great achievement of our civilization that today civilized men should in their ordinary daily lives be practically free from the fear of violence.