Faith & Spirit Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Civilisation, in Wallace's formulation, is not a gentle export but a byproduct of rupture. The line reads like a cool-headed observation, yet it smuggles in a bleak thesis: what gets labeled "civilisation" tends to arrive on the back of movement and force, and it is inseparable from the frictions that movement creates. By pairing "emigration" (a word that can suggest hope, necessity, or adventure) with "conquest" (unambiguously coercive), Wallace collapses the moral distance Victorians often tried to keep between settlers and soldiers. The syntax does the work: "has ever accompanied" makes the pattern feel historical, almost lawlike, as if to deny the reader the comfort of exceptions.

The second clause sharpens the blade. He doesn’t describe progress through inventions or institutions; he defines its engine as "conflict" - specifically in the domains that most reliably justify domination: opinion, religion, race. That list maps neatly onto 19th-century imperial reality, where missionaries, bureaucrats, and racial theorists supplied a moral and scientific alibi for expansion. Wallace, a scientist who traveled through colonized spaces and watched cultures collide, is registering that "civilisation" functions as a narrative that explains violence after the fact, then calls the resulting order improvement.

Subtextually, the quote refuses the Victorian fairy tale that civilisation is a gift bestowed by the advanced upon the backward. It’s closer to an ecological view of society: disturbance creates new arrangements. The sting is that the disturbance is human, intentional, and often sanctified.