determination to exploit the resources of the country up to the limit,
and to preserve the Puritan outlook on life that had led to such
important results, although the Puritan strain itself was steadily
declining in numbers and ability. Abroad, America was determined to
make her influence felt as at home; and the shadow of the dollar began
to extend itself not only over the American continent, but in the
remote regions of Europe and the Far East. The watchword for Russia
during the same period was suppression of everything that stood in the
way of the continuance of the Romanov dynasty, and suppression of the
underground struggle for power by all other sections. The combined
forces of Church and State would struggle on for a time longer, though
deprived of every vestige of intelligent support. There was nothing to
do but to wait on fate. When Crown and Church fell, they would fall
together. Abroad, Russia had little influence; all she asked for from
her new ally France was not a hand in policy, but capital to enable
her to meet the expenses of the immense military establishment she was
compelled to keep up in order to avert an explosion at home. Though
facing the East, she was drawn into the orbit of European nationalist
diplomacy by her economic needs. In America, on the other hand, no one
need ask Europe for financial aid. But there had to be an increasing
economic penetration of Europe to counterbalance industrial tension at
home.
3
Meantime, while these tremendous events were preparing, the nations
of the European continent pursued the path that had been left open to
them by Napoleon’s collapse, the path of a final intensification of
separate effort, backed by the combined forces of industrialism and
parliamentarism. It is possible that never to the average individual
had European life appeared on the surface so promising, so rich in
its complexity, as during the first decade of the twentieth century.
Despite the upheavals of 1848, despite the recrudescence of war that
had broken out in the years 1866-1870, the continent that was the
home of man’s ripest and maturest forms of civilisation had made
an astonishing recovery. The old and the new had been skilfully
combined. Except in France, the trappings of royalty persisted side by
side with keen-witted Parliaments, whose members, inflamed by fiery
patriotism and the carefully fostered sense of nationality, vied with
each other in demanding more and more factories and better armaments.
Thanks to the triumphs of science, the ever new discoveries that had
been made in the realm of invention, the spread of electric light,
telephones, railways, sanitation, medical skill, literacy, with the
rapidly approaching advent of the motor car and the aeroplane in
the offing--thanks to all these things, and the possession of the
franchise, the future was held to be a rosy one. England in particular
fêted the culmination of the Victorian age, and her last triumph over
the Boers. France threw wide the doors of a great exhibition in Paris
to celebrate a century of progress. Italy had reawakened as by magic
from her decay, and was becoming a modern nation, without losing her
ancient picturesqueness. In Austria, despite internal difficulties, the
veteran Franz Joseph still firmly held together the various parts of
his ramshackle Empire. Even backward Spain, newly defeated by America,
might aspire to a new Empire in Morocco. As for the Far East, that too
was giving way before the dominating force of the white man; in the
Philippines, where America was proving herself the heir to England’s
colonial ability; in China, where the Boxer rising had been quelled;
in India, which England held firmly; and on the continent of Africa,
parcelled out into colonies, and ruled by a dozen different nations.
Yes, the future was full of hope, a great hope for the white man.
Such was the picture that Europe presented to the superficial observer
at the close of the century. But underneath, things were very, very
different, as a few lonely Europeans--men like Ibsen and Nietzsche--had
learned to their cost. The aggressive nationalism that had gone on
unchecked throughout the nineteenth century had proven the real enemy
of progress. Every European nation had its own army, its own fleet;
and these immense military establishments were not only expensive,
but dangerous. Peace was outwardly maintained by means of a complex
web of diplomacy and treaties. The Triple Alliance balanced the
Triple Entente; but day by day this web became stretched to finer
tension, nearer to the breaking point. What was still worse was that
a generation of unchecked industrial competition, taking as its tacit
watchword its own interpretation of Darwin’s law of “the struggle
for life and the survival of the fittest,” had created immense city
slums, huge industrial areas of unrelieved hideousness, festering
plague-spots where drink, crime, misery, disease--varied only by
strikes and discontent--stalked open and unabashed. The protests of a
few idealists, a few æstheticians, such as Ruskin and William Morris,
had passed unheeded. Religion itself could do nothing to mend matters,
inasmuch as it was mostly State-religion, paying lip-service to the
established powers. When it condemned, it did so mostly for wrong
reasons, as in the case of Zola, whose only too honest and accurate
social novels proved meat far too strong for ecclesiastical stomachs.
To the radical minority of impartial and intelligent observers,
whether these called themselves socialists, anarchists, communists,
or simply honest men, something in the cardboard edifice of European
nationalistic prosperity was certain to give way; whether it was
the perpetual military establishments, or the intensive industrial
competition, or the futile and stupid madness of “patriotic”
Parliaments, or the mob-spirit already manifesting itself as latent
in democracy. But though the radicals saw the abyss yawning beneath
their feet, they could not arrest the earth-tremor that was shortly
to precipitate them and their respective nations into it. The régime
of mechanical competition and of intensified nationalist effort had
taken too firm a hold ever to be checked by words, however eloquent
and far-seeing. As many intelligent men realised this fact, a sort
of _fin de siècle_ weariness sprang up through the nineties, spread
itself throughout Europe, and after taking the various forms of
decadentism, symbolism, exoticism, finally immobilised itself in the
cynical lightness of an Anatole France. Meanwhile, the web of diplomacy
was re-spun, re-stretched, half ruptured at a touch and again tied
together. Every year brought new threats of war, balanced by new
projects of peace, until most people dreamed that war might never
come. The sound of a revolver-shot in the sleepy town of Serajevo at
last proved sufficient to shatter the fabric of a century of European
diplomacy. A sort of convulsion passed over the face of the world, and
the next moment, the nations that had maintained the fiction of armed
peace ever since 1870 suddenly found themselves involved in the vast
cataclysm of another European war.
Chapter XVI
Fifteen years since the outbreak, and eleven years since the cessation
of European hostilities have passed away; but the question is not yet
fully settled of responsibility for the war. Fortunately the question
need not here be asked; for it would lead us too far into the maze of
treaties and of safeguarding diplomacy by which the European nations
strove to make innocuous that national sentiment they themselves had so
outwardly fostered. Our concern here is not with moral responsibility,
but with tendency and result. The tendency in Europe, for a century of
European history, had been to prepare for war and to strive to maintain
outwardly the peace by diplomacy. There came a time when the machine
of war, carefully prepared and oiled, went forward simply of itself.
The brakes of diplomacy refused to work any longer. That moment came in
August, 1914.
The ultimate decision for war no doubt came from the fact that Russia,
having mobilised her armies, in response to Austria’s insulting
ultimatum to Serbia, refused to withdraw the mobilisation order and to
allow Kaiser Wilhelm to make his eleventh-hour appearance in the rôle
of peacemaker. But to say that thereby Russia was solely responsible
for the war, is to utter the most pernicious nonsense. One might as
well say that America--who began and furthered the negotiations in the
person of President Wilson--was solely responsible for the peace, as
embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. From the moment when the Czar
and his advisers decided not to tolerate any further Austro-German
interference with the Slav nationalities of the Balkans--interference
which had already completely alienated Bulgaria and had transformed
Rumania from a friendly people to a sullenly hostile one--from that
moment the issue was already as good as settled. The Russian people
awoke as by magic from the stupor of their long nightmare, and walked
forth in the sunlight of a clear racial policy. Henceforward there
were to be no more mad attempts to penetrate into distant Asia, while
ignoring the plaint of the neighbour lying wounded at their own doors.
The dream of uniting the oppressed western Slavs of Europe into one
great free confederation under the headship of orthodox Moscow--a dream
which had been Russia’s up to Peter the Great’s day, and which had
revived under Nicholas I and Alexander II--needed but the touch of the
Russian ultimatum to Austria to start afresh from the soil. The “third
Rome” was to be no more a lost ideal but an accomplished fact. In the
fervour of a mystical re-conversion to an ideal which had somehow been
lost sight of, all party differences, all scars and injuries were
forgotten, and immense throngs again kneeled before the Czar. Only
the tram operatives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, indifferent to any
feeling but that of class, persisted for a time in a crippling strike,
at the same time the ultimatum went forward to Austria and her ally,
Germany. A small defection, but one pregnant with ominous possibilities
for the future.
Having mobilised his forces on the frontier, ready to move forward
in case Austria persisted in enforcing the terms of her outrageous
military and political demands upon helpless Serbia, the Czar refused
to countermand the order, despite Kaiser Wilhelm’s belated and hysteric
attempts to extricate himself from a position in which he had already
placed himself. Had Russia done so, what would have been the result?
The infuriated armies of Russia, withdrawn from the frontier, and
doubly tricked by their rulers, from accomplishment of an aim that
seemed to them perfectly just, might have perhaps marched upon Moscow
and deposed the Romanovs. No doubt this consideration was also present
in the minds of the Czar and of his chief advisers. It was necessary
at least to make an armed demonstration of goodwill to the Slav peoples
in general, in order to save their faces. Moreover, there was France
to be considered; France, which had solely stood by Russia during the
dark years since 1905, and which was burning with the hope of revenge
on Germany. So the time-limit of midnight August 1st expired, and the
world blundered into war.
The fact that Russia, despite her immense awakening of enthusiasm
for the cause of her fellow-Slavs, and despite her determination to
fight on to the bitter end--a determination which she proved over and
over again--was, after all, badly led and shamefully equipped, was no
handicap at the outset. Had the East Prussian campaign which was halted
at Tannenberg, not been fought, the allies could not have stood firm,
and stemmed the German onset at the Marne. This campaign, in the end
disastrous to the Russians, was nevertheless of equal moral effect on
the ultimate result as was America’s intervention three years later. In
the one case as in the other, it was not skill, but the mere weight of
numbers that finally decided the issue. The French troops, badly beaten
in their first attempt to seize upon Alsace-Lorraine, and supported
only by a meagre skeleton force of British, fell back steadily upon
Paris, until suddenly the pressure upon their crumbling front relaxed
and the desperate stand upon the Marne was transformed into an advance
to the Aisne. And this policy had been dictated to the German general
staff by the trail of smoking farmsteads and ravaged towns that the
Russians were making in the Hohenzollern province of East Prussia. The
well-directed thrust of the German armies to get between the desperate
French troops and Paris itself, and to cut off one from the other,
failed because two army corps had to be detached to aid Hindenburg to
trap the advancing Russians at Tannenberg. Thus the true agent of the
so-called “miracle of the Marne” was neither France nor England, but
Russia--that Russia whom her allies abandoned and repudiated three
years later in the time of her bitterest humiliation.
Despite the appalling loss of eighty thousand effectives at Tannenberg,
the great masses of the Russian people undoubtedly felt that they
could go on waging war indefinitely. Austria on the Carpathian-Polish
frontier proved as easy for them to invade as East Prussia was
impossible. All that they needed to accomplish the ultimate result was
a steady supply of munitions and supplies from the better-equipped
allies. But this feeling was not shared by the more intelligent heads
of affairs in the allied countries. One of the most far-seeing, the
English war secretary, Kitchener, had spoken of three years as being
the probable duration of the contest. It would take that time, he
thought, to stem the German advance through Belgium into France and
to train and equip armies sufficiently strong to coöperate with the
Russians elsewhere, and thus to force Germany to abandon the struggle.
By a miracle which was even greater in its total effect, though less
popularly acclaimed, than the “miracle of the Marne,” England barely
managed to save the Channel Ports through her stand at Ypres, and thus
effectively blockaded Germany--though this miracle was accomplished at
the price of all her fighting effectives. The war became, after the
first winter, a war of attrition with only one outstanding question:
how long would it take the Allies, backed as they were by the immense
wave of enthusiasm that was sweeping England and her colonies, to raise
the enormous forces required to throw back Germany in the West, and to
bring relief in the East to Russia, who was now equally blockaded--her
only effective port being Archangel. For by this time Germany had
persuaded Turkey to enter the war on her side.
The question was not long in being answered. In the spring of 1915
England committed herself to an attack upon the Gallipoli peninsula.
Had that attack been pressed home, and Constantinople fallen, the war
would certainly have ended then and there. For Germany could not then
have halted the immense supply of munitions and equipment that England,
confident of her financial resources and Still mistress of the seas,
was now cleverly procuring for herself and her allies through the
factories of outwardly neutral America. But as regards Russia, Germany
was already doing her work pretty thoroughly. Though the supplies were
pouring into Archangel, they were for the most part never allowed
to leave the wharves, or mysteriously disappeared _en route_ to the
Russian armies. For by now a small group of sycophantic courtiers and
corrupt administrators of the Czar’s own inner circle, taking their
tone from Berlin, and possibly also from the imperious and self-willed
Czarina, were asking themselves the question, “What should happen, if,
after all, we won? Would we not have put into the hands of the people
the very weapon whereby to destroy our power?”
Thus through outward delay and inner treachery, the Allies themselves
threw away their chief opportunity of forcing a decision upon Germany.
The Gallipoli advance, thanks to divided counsels in England and in
France, was never pressed home in time. The Russian armies, which
despite their terrible shortage in munitions, had fought their way
into Galicia in the spring of 1915 and delivered their last effective
threat to Vienna, crumbled away helplessly before the new policy
Germany had conceived of standing like a wall in the West, and sweeping
down all opposition in the East. From the foothills of the Carpathians
and the Hungarian plains to the Pripet marshes that lay two hundred
miles behind Warsaw, the Russian armies retreated, fighting with sticks
instead of rifles, and having back of them not sufficient reserves of
ammunition even to feed their batteries for a day. The outcome was that
the Grand Duke Nicholas, an able hard-bitten soldier, was deposed from
command of the Russian armies, and the Czar, now more than ever swayed
by the evil influences of his consort and Rasputin, took command.
Russia’s doom was sealed.
At the same time, England, misled by the French into thinking that the
German effectives were wasting away more rapidly than those of the
Allies in the West, withdrew from Gallipoli and launched a disastrous
attack at Loos, which was completely abortive, and served only to sweep
away a great portion of the new armies which Kitchener had summoned
into being. Henceforward, stalemate was practically certain, and by
this stalemate Germany in the end stood ready to profit. For she could
now move towards the East whenever and wherever she pleased. Bulgaria
was brought into the war on Germany’s side to counterbalance Italy’s
defection to the cause of the Allies, in 1915; and from Antwerp to the
Persian Gulf, Kaiser Wilhelm now ruled supreme. Russia had utterly
collapsed in the East, and the iron wall of troops still stood firmly
planted on French soil. That was the prospect that uplifted all German
hearts to face, in 1916, another year of war.
2
So the first act of the great drama ended with Germany everywhere
triumphant in the East and the Allies unable to force a decision
anywhere on their own chosen ground of the West. But this result had
only hardened the Western allies to persist. Their very lives were now
at stake, and they still held the German lines immobilised, and the
German coasts in the grip of the blockade. Economically, Germany could
persist no more than Napoleon had persisted, in bearing the strain. She
still had two military weapons whereby she might be able to bring her
last two opponents, France and England, to the ground. These were her
own power of making munitions, a power which had been tested and proven
successful in pulverising the Russians in the spring of 1915; and in
addition, the submarine which might eventually starve out England.
Both weapons were launched on the world in full strength in 1916.
The million of shells which the German armies showered on Verdun
in the first twelve hours’ bombardment of that fortress, and the
million tons of shipping which England began losing every month,
proved, however, equally ineffective to bring the war to its close.
The first led directly to open discontent behind the lines in Germany
itself; the latter led indirectly to America’s entry into the war. For
despite the wave of horror that had swept over her at the loss of the
_Lusitania_, America now learned with amazement that the Germans had
no intention whatever of abandoning the submarine, with its constant
threat to neutral traffic. The outcome was to bring America into the
struggle as a fresh factor of incalculable strength against an already
disillusioned Germany.
Yet this decision was not taken immediately. Apart from two strongly
vocal minorities, one of which insistently upheld the cause of the
Allies, while the other just as clearly pointed out the tremendous
triumphs of the German military machine, the great bulk of the American
people were still indifferent. They had, and they desired, no quarrel
with the people of Germany. On this basis, the sentimental basis of
“having kept America out of the war,” President Wilson was re-elected
in November 1916. He knew, and had given indications that he knew,
that the business of American neutrality was played out. But this
knowledge was not shared by the great majority of his people, who
fondly hoped to continue to profit at the expense of both sides in the
struggle, by maintaining a prosperous neutrality.
With incredible folly, the military leaders of Germany, blind to the
harvest of suffering they were creating in the homes and hearts of
their own people, played completely into the American President’s
hands. They issued a proclamation pointing out the devastation that
the German arms had already caused (a devastation real enough when
we consider that a million Russians had been slaughtered, another
million were prisoners in German hands, and that great tracts of land
had been left desert in Northern France, Poland, and the Balkans) and
demanding that this destruction should now cease. Let the Allies come
to the council table, and they would learn Germany’s demands. In the
swollen phrases of this threatening note, the American President found
his opportunity. He issued an appeal to the Allies to state their war
aims. The reply was unexpectedly moderate, but official Germany gave no
indication that she would accept it. Instead, while Wilson spoke openly
of a peace without victory, based on the cessation of interference
by one nation in another’s affairs, government by the consent of the
governed, freedom of the seas, and limitation of armaments, Germany
unsheathed her last weapon. On January 31st, 1917, she proclaimed a
blockade of England, France, and Italy, closed the ports of Europe
to neutral shipping, and declared that her submarines would sink
henceforward all ships that endeavoured to trade with the belligerents
at war with Germany. The answer was prompt and immediate. The American
government severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
Thus America came into the war in defence of the same principle of
freedom of the seas about which she had once before fought England in
1812. The leaders of Germany, had they possessed any intimate knowledge
of American history, or the American character, might have foreseen
this result. For the American nation as a whole lives and flourishes
by, and wages its greatest struggles over, the application of certain
very simple shibboleths and slogans. It was so in 1776, in 1812, in
1861, and it was again to prove so in 1917. Unlike the Russians, who
can always change their outward principles completely, without losing
any of their inner characteristics, the Americans have no special inner
characteristics (as they have no aristocracy) but make up for this lack
by their whole-hearted obedience to certain primary ideas and taboos
which are to them sacred. The threat which Germany delivered to the
cherished right of America to trade freely with all the nations of the
earth, and thereby to end the whole edifice of American prosperity,
proved sufficient to unite all sections of the American people; and
never did President Wilson speak more surely on behalf of the entire
nation than when, paraphrasing Luther, he declared that America “could
do no other” than fight.
Thus it happened that America, immense in untouched power and resource,
united to defeat Germany at the same moment when Russia, bleeding and
defeated, with an internal revolution on her hands, reeled out of the
struggle. For the first time--if we except the opening up of Japan in
which each had taken previously a hand--the two nations whose effort
was to dominate the future, met on a common ground. Like an electric
flash, or the torches that the Greek runners had carried in their
races long gone by, an impulse flashed from one to the other. That
impulse may have differed in origin, but not in aim. What Russia by her
concentration of power into a vacillating but central ruling class,
could not do, America, by her diffusion of power into a self-reliant
bourgeoisie, accomplished. Russia had crippled the European nationalist
military machine; America overwhelmed the economic. And not only the
liberated Slavs of Eastern Europe, but also the Mediterranean powers,
owe their existence to-day to the action of two nations, neither of
which stood to profit thereby: America and Russia.
3
The impulse that had pushed the two great frontier nations forward
to their momentary encounter on the blood-soaked and devastated soil
of Europe, was unquestionably the same in essence, though differing
profoundly in origin and in ultimate result. In the case of Russia, the
unconscious weight of public opinion, holding steadily to its ancient
dream of a great Pan-Slav Empire, had literally pushed from behind
the vacillating and enfeebled Czar. In the case of America, an aloof,
cautious, and essentially undemocratic President had found at last a
democratic formula to which popular opinion, holding firm to its old
dream of liberty for all peoples, could respond. The situation of 1688,
of 1776-89, of 1860-65 was thus repeated, on a larger scale, and with
the world itself for background; and the repercussion of both events in
their respective countries led to the same profound and far-reaching
changes.
In America, the principles which President Wilson had enunciated in
his celebrated Fourteen Points--principles which the Allies promptly
accepted as a basis for negotiation with a Germany, now ready to
acknowledge its defeat, and which they conveniently forgot immediately
afterwards--came into open and direct conflict with the outstanding
notion which had guided America in its foreign relations since the days
of Washington; that there was to be above all, aloofness from Europe,
no entanglement in European affairs. The result was that the American
President, who had been unquestionably empowered by his people to wage
war, found himself unable to make peace. The moment he stepped upon
European soil, President Wilson ceased to represent the American people
and became only representative of himself. Thus the declaration of
the Armistice led not to peace and sheathing of the sword, but to the
last act of the world struggle, an act in which America was obliged to
play the part of striving to rehabilitate Europe economically, while
standing aloof politically.
At the other end of the scale, it is necessary to note that since the
spring of 1917, Russia had been in revolution, a revolution which took
an extreme form in the Bolshevik seizure of power in November of that
year. Lacking a Czar, abandoned by its Allies, utterly disillusioned
about the war, leaderless, and incapable of continuing the struggle,
the country now presented an opportunity to any clever opportunist who
could, under the guise of promising to the peasants bread, peace and
land, effectively usurp the central power of the Czar. Lenin alone
saw this opportunity and was ready to seize it and bend it to its
purposes. A new alliance equally deadly to avowed Czarists and liberal
intellectuals was forged between factory-worker and mujik; and from the
achievement of this alliance we date present-day Russia. The situation
had found the sole man, ruthless, undemocratic, efficient, who could
guide it. In America, Wilson had skilfully manœuvred his people into
a position where further retreat into neutrality was, as he thought,
impossible. He had created his own opportunity, instead of waiting
for it to come to him; and having created it, he immediately supposed
that he could personally master it, and that it would follow him
blindly. He did not count on the revulsion of horror that would follow
upon America’s awakening to the fact that the country was enmeshed
in European diplomacy, the determination on the part of his people
to remain an independent frontier. Thus the American and the Russian
crises followed very different courses.
There is much in the career of Woodrow Wilson that recalls the tragic
life-story of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenophis IV, known to later
ages as Akhnaton. Like the Egyptian king who strove to transform
the religion of his people from a tribal polytheism into a pure and
universal form of monotheism, Wilson strove to formulate finally the
American creed as it affected the world. But the American creed is too
loosely held, too vague a sentiment, to be formulated. A Californian,
though he may belong to the same racial stock, cannot have the same
outlook as a New Englander; a New Orleans Creole cannot share the
attitude to life of a Scandinavian settler in Northern Michigan.
America owes its continuance solely to the fact that all these diverse
racial and geographical stocks assume that their pooled effort will
make America sufficient to itself, and that “government of the people
by the people for the people” will still persist in bestowing the
fruits of middle-class prosperity. But it is obvious that this simple
creed--or superstition--cannot be maintained if once any attempt is
made to apply it to the more complex European situation. Once America
backs any side in the European struggle, then that side has to become
outwardly, if not inwardly, American; that is to say, it has to abandon
all the traditional differences that distinguish it from its European
neighbours. Wilson strove to reconcile the psychology of America with
the remoter psychology of Europe, in the same way as Amenophis strove
to identify all forms of Egyptian worship with his own personal and
individual creed. In striving thus to simplify the situation, he merely
complicated it. And the result was, as in the case of the Egyptian
Pharaoh whom he resembled, a personal tragedy of immense magnitude,
which left the American President an outlaw and heretic in his own
country, and pursued him to his death with rancour and misunderstanding.
Russia in repudiating the war and the Romanovs had to repudiate
Europe, and this despite the Bolsheviks themselves, whose dream was
probably a Marxian version of Peter the Great’s Empire. It became
again a peasant country facing the East. America, by its repudiation
of Wilson, was driven also to repudiate Europe, and this despite the
most intelligent classes of Americans who were aware that the one hope
of the maintenance of European peace lay in the establishment of an
European concert of nations. America became again a land of opportunist
industrialism, facing westward. Thus the two nations, having like two
planets revolved in opposing orbits up to the moment these orbits
coincided, resumed again their former course, but not without the hope
of some further encounter in the future. The optimistic idealism of
President Wilson, ready to accept the most outrageous provisions of
the Versailles Treaty for the sake of preserving his conception of
a League of Nations bound to respect the fundamental principles of
democracy, was finally rejected not by Europe, but by America. The
fatalistic materialism of Lenin, ready to swallow complete defeat at
Brest-Litovsk for the sake of creating a proletarian world-empire,
broke equally before the lack of European support and the obstinacy
of the Russian peasantry. With Wilson’s final retirement and Lenin’s
new economic policy the issue of the great drama was largely settled
as regards the two chief protagonists of Russia and America. But the
third, Europe, caught in the cleft of the dilemma, unable to decide
for either democratic capitalism or demagogic dictatorship, has as yet
found no clear issue out of the impasse.
This position, which is the world position of to-day, was enforced on
Europe by the successive abandonment of the European situation on the
part of both Russia and America. In the case of Russia, the abandonment
was perhaps more absolute, because it was more deeply psychological.
The Russian asked Europe for a new fetich, a new sacred talisman, to
replace the old fetich of the Orthodox Czar which was utterly worn out,
and impotent to protect him longer against misfortune. Such a belief
in the power of a fetich, a cult-object, is Oriental, and indeed the
Russian is fundamentally Oriental. The fetich of success had been
imported formerly from abroad, by Peter the Great, by Catherine, by
Alexander II, by Witte. Now it was no longer forthcoming. Even the guns
and the gold that the Allies had promised and provided, were turning
against the Russians themselves. A new talisman would have to be found
within. Lenin was the sole man who could provide it. A workman’s cap,
a few words from Marx, education and electric light for all, would be
sufficient. Russia could scramble out of her impasse, secure in the
conviction that she henceforth could control her destiny alone, while
undermining the nations of Europe with their own revolutionary ethic.
But America, too, abandoned Europe for causes that, however economic
they may appear on the surface, have a firmly-grounded psychological
foundation. Unlike Russia, all the talismans, wealth, power,
prosperity, were in her hands. But she was uneasy because she could
not discover a verbal formula that would cover equally her own
political union and the diversity of disunited European nations. This
belief in a formula--which expresses itself in Egyptian hieroglyph,
in Aristotelian syllogism, in algebraic equation--is Occidental, and
America is fundamentally Occidental. Even the arguments of the most
enlightened European statesmen, prepared to back up President Wilson
in his demand for a League of Nations, turned against America itself. A
League of Nations--what did that mean but a confederation of sovereign
and independent states such as had threatened to disrupt the economic
alliance between North and Middle West during the fateful years of
1854-65? What else did it mean, but that the Americans themselves, in
so far as they were still sentimentally attached to Europe, could still
feel themselves to be Europeans? The whole process of “Americanization”
was threatened by such a programme. Common standards of Puritan
conduct, of business dealing, of economic prosperity were threatened by
such a step. Wilson’s words, however close they seemed to Lincoln’s,
would effectively destroy all that the armies invoked by Lincoln had
fought for. They would destroy Americanism, and make Europeans equal
in every respect, to Americans. Let them be anathema! America hastened
to scramble out of her impasse, fearful that the European nations were
plotting against her, and determined henceforth to undermine them by
means of the “peaceful penetration” of mass-production.
Nations have their phobias and complexes no less than individuals. In
the case of America and Russia, a complex and a phobia were to take the
place of the natural growth of tradition, and to strive to overcome the
world.
Chapter XVII
For the past ten years the situation of Europe has been both grotesque
and tragic. Had she made her exit from the stage of world-politics with
the gesture of tragic dignity that marked the downfall of the ancient
Roman Empire, had she been overwhelmed by a new wave of barbarians,
the historian of to-day might have a more pleasant and profitable task
to fulfill. But unfortunately nothing of this came to pass, nor did
Europe really recover from the death-blow of the war. Since 1921, when
the French armies marched into the Ruhr, she has become like a patient
suffering from shell-shock who acts irresponsibly and has no coherent
purpose in life. Apart from the tenuous hope of a League of Nations
which has not been able to prevent fresh combinations of power, such
as have been clearly revealed by the various naval pacts, nor fresh
outbursts of rabid nationalism, such as France, Italy and various
Balkan nationalities have displayed, Europe has done little, either
morally or politically. Of the two new world-philosophies offered her,
she has chosen neither.
The American world-philosophy, in the ultimate form that it has taken
since the close of the war, is a rough-and-ready simplification of
the far more complex but equally individualistic social philosophy
of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. It exalts the physical liberty
of the individual at the expense of his general social and moral
responsibility. Immediately after the close of war, the labour
situation in America became again acute. The great industrial trade
unions, realising the immense part they had played in carrying the
Allied effort to a successful conclusion, had long begun to agitate
for an overthrow of the existing form of government and for such a
seizure of power as had been effected in Russia. The American system
of democratic capitalism, reverting into the hands of the great
industrialists and their allies and servants, set itself to the
task of destroying this opposition. Its two outstanding means were
mass-production and coöperative capitalism. It set itself to the task
of manufacturing more quickly and of giving the worker a share in
the product. Thereby it created a new prosperity and a standardised
happiness. Any protest became in the eyes of its leaders a crime
against true Americanism. To enforce this unalterable Americanism upon
the immense masses of citizens of foreign descent, it was necessary to
stop the flow of immigration; and this was promptly done. To prevent
the country lapsing into a state of sheer moral anarchy, such as was
foreshadowed by the post-war revivals of the Ku Klux Klan, the fierce
recrudescence of race-hatreds cutting athwart all sections of American
life, it was necessary to concentrate solely on a more intensive
development of that industrial prosperity that had characterised the
war years. The South was industrially invaded as well as the North,
the East and the West became more firmly linked together by the
great money and manufacturing interests. Finally, to ensure that the
reëstablishment of the country was to be permanent, on the old basis of
complete aloofness from both European radicalism and European idealism,
it was necessary to stifle or suppress freedom of spirit, freedom of
thought, freedom of public utterance, and to concentrate altogether
on the immense material achievements that America had already
accomplished--the improvement in living conditions, the provisions of
schools, hospitals, roads, and scientific inventions for all sections
of the population. Accordingly, the study of American patriotic views
became an important part of school curriculums. Anyone who thought
otherwise than these views taught, must either hold his peace or accept
exile and poverty. During the years that immediately succeeded the war,
a new body of American intellectuals again took the road to Europe,
not to mention those who were forcibly cast out upon Soviet Russia.
The Russian world-philosophy, as formulated by the leaders of the new
Bolshevik régime, was also a comprehensive simplification of what was
formerly a much more complex social position. It skilfully provided
an outlet for public enterprise, while maintaining the power in the
hands of a specially chosen and selected class. Unquestioningly the
Bolsheviks accepted the postulate, which America had been foremost in
proclaiming, that all power derives ultimately from the lowest ranks of
the people, from the peasants and factory workers. This happened also
to be the postulate of Karl Marx, and accordingly Marxism became a new
State religion to take the place of the old, which had delegated this
power of the people themselves into the hands of the Czar and of the
Orthodox Church. But in its application to the situation created by
the Russian débâcle, this dogma proved to be just as much of a check
upon free activity as had all the old restrictions of the Czar. It
exalted the moral and social responsibility of the individual at the
expense of his physical liberty. Everyone, whether Communist or not,
must henceforth behave in the way laid out for him by the heads of the
Communist party, who though representing an even smaller proportion
of the entire people than the American Wall Street magnates,
nevertheless had now all the power in their hands. The masses would be
fed, housed, educated, on condition only that they did not undertake
counter-revolutionary propaganda, and the Communist Secret Service
was there to enforce this law, on penalty of death or imprisonment,
against all who attempted to modify the existing political system. A
new revolutionary army, recruited among the peasants, and backed by
firm discipline, arose to take the place of the old; but the field
of its activity was to be limited to helping the foreign proletariat
to overthrow their own capitalist Imperialist governments, and to
maintaining Lenin’s system intact at home. All foreign influences,
whether in the shape of very limited concessions to foreign capital,
or works of art with a definitely anti-communist tendency, were to
be severely supervised and ruthlessly suppressed. Thus freedom of
activity outside the bounds of the Communist dogma became as impossible
in Russia during the years after the war, as freedom of thought
outside the bounds of the Capitalist assumption became in America.
The underlying aim of the Russians became to create an army of young
Lenins; that of the Americans to achieve a million Henry Fords.[8]
It is quite obvious that none of the European nations could
whole-heartedly accept either the American or the Russian solution.
To follow the Russian idea out in all its logical implications meant
the suppression of the Parliamentary régime to which Europe had been
accustomed, and the transformation of all the European countries from
constitutional monarchies to proletarian dictatorships, in which
the will of a single man, or a small committee of men reinforced
and balanced through the establishment of local advisory councils
controlled all industrial production. To carry out in detail the
American idea, it was necessary for Europe to abolish all gradations
of rank and responsibility, such as a constitutional monarchy implies,
and to concentrate entirely on demagogic parliamentarism, backed and
controlled by the industrial interests which have everything to gain
from an increase of individual production and prosperity. To follow
out this ideal proved quite as impossible for Europe as to Russianise
their existing populations. The traditional conservatism which dreads a
complete break with the past, the already established forms of social,
moral, and religious usage, and the lingering remnants of nationalist
pride and sentiment, stood everywhere in the way. Only in one country,
Italy, was the combination effected of proletarian demagogy and
autocratic dictatorship. Thanks to a chapter of accidents, Mussolini
and his henchmen took over the rule of that country from the hands
of the conservative Catholics and the anti-clerical Liberals alike.
For the rest, the European countries tended to fall into the same
alignment that had been theirs upon the first appearance of America
and Russia upon the stage of the world. Western Europe, led by England
and reconstructed Germany, tended to become more and more American and
parliamentary; Eastern Europe, under the leadership of Italy, Hungary,
Poland, tended to become more and more arbitrary and swayed by the
dictates of revolutionary militarism.
2
The modern world, which we are examining from the perilously close
range of participators in, rather than spectators of its effort, is
essentially the fruit of two streams of influence, emanating from
beyond the European frontier, and expressing themselves logically
in the solutions of the social problem which America and Russia
have found. These two streams of influence have been at work upon
Europe, and in a different way upon the Far East, for at least two
centuries past. At the present moment they are rapidly approaching
their culmination. In order to understand this culmination it is
necessary to turn aside from the field of outward political action and
to state, as far as such things can be finally stated, the fundamental
psychological characteristics that go to the making up of what may be
called the typical Russian and the typical American.
The Americans, taken as a class apart from Europeans or Asiatics,
tend to have no interest whatever in thought for its own sake. Their
special delight is not in thought, but in purely physical activity.
This refusal to think maturely, to speculate even remotely about the
ultimate problems of the world and of humanity, has frequently led
European observers to characterise the American people as a young
nation, a nation not grown up. But it was possibly quite as evident
in the days of Washington as it is now; the only difference being
that it has by now grown a dominating characteristic of all parts
of the country, whereas in the early stages it was confined mostly
to the frontier, and obscured from view by the influence of the
better-educated colonial seaboard settlements, still under the spell
of European ways of thinking. The whole course of American history may
be summed up as the history of the spread of the pioneer and of his
type of mind into every department of human effort. The pioneer type
is always a man too busy with cutting away virgin forests, building
roads, cultivating land, opening mines and factories, inventing
machines, making automobiles, gambling with stocks, devoting himself
to social “service,” to stop and ponder upon the æsthetic values of
art and religion, or the metaphysical problems of human destiny.
Such questions cannot enter into his pragmatic scheme of material
effort directed towards immediate ends. For him the sheer delight of
making suffices, not the value of the thing made. So habitual, so
universal has this cult of activity for its own sake grown to the
Americans, that it is constantly employed by all ranks of the people
as a substitute for thought. The American uses leisure itself, not as
a valuable opportunity for self-examination, but only as a stimulus
to some new kind of activity. Sports and games, travel, book- and
picture-collecting, education itself, become for him simply fresh
pretexts for employing some more of his surplus energy, for taking
part in some new form of mental distraction. For example, the European
lecturers who annually go to America in such great numbers may be under
the illusion that they are somehow guiding or directing the American
mind into more fruitful channels; their American audiences are under
no such illusion. Their aim is at the best merely to rapidly get
firsthand information about some new fact that puzzles them; at the
worst, to momentarily accept the lecturer’s own views as a substitute
for creative and independent thinking of their own, whereby they share
the illusion that they are actually participating in some form of human
thought-process.
Even when the American is in repose, he must somehow feel that his
body, if not his mind, is exerting itself. The fundamental symbol of
American life is not, as many observers have held, the skyscraper,
with its busy activity, nor the athletic field with its gladiatorial
baseball and football games, nor even that puritanic symbol of the
pitcher of melting ice-water which makes its inevitable appearance
equally upon the tables of the humblest lunch counters and the desks
of bank presidents and statesmen. The true, the classic American
symbol is the rocking-chair. It symbolises alike domestic comfort, and
nomadic restlessness. In the rocking-chair one need not speak and yet
one must continue to move to and fro. In the rocking-chair activity
becomes a soothing narcotic, and absence of mental purpose a stimulus
to further effort. The rocking-chair removes all the necessity for
the contemplation of the great cosmos of justice and injustice, truth
and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, to plant man firmly in the lesser
cosmos of his personal individuality, his simple animal “reaction” to
practical truth. In the rocking-chair one can “loaf and invite one’s
soul” for an endless journey. The goal does not matter. This is true
on every weekday, and on Sunday the activities of the rocking-chair
are supplemented by the Sunday newspaper supplement, providing another
substitute for thought.
On the other hand, the Russians, as opposed to the Americans, tend to
have very little interest in physical activity. A fund of Mongolian
inertia, concealed at the roots of the Russian character, probably
accounts for this; but it is impossible to understand the tragic
disorder of many Russian lives,[9] as well as the strange crisis of
feverish and misdirected fury that traverse Russian history, unless we
admit at the outset that the Russian is in some way prejudiced against
activity for its own sake. If he undertakes activity at all, it must
be for some object that lies beyond activity. Thus we find the Russian
peasant becoming a tramp in order to “save his soul”; the Russian
intellectual indulging in all forms of drunken debauchery in order to
acquire the “experience that is necessary to an artist”; the Russian
Czar making war on Oriental or European nations in order to prove that
he is “by the Grace of God, leader of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.”
Nor has the Russian Revolution brought about any change in this state
of affairs. Lenin himself, although he displayed while in power a
quite remarkably un-Russian ability to make rapid decisions, owed
his advent to power largely to his ability to hold his ground without
altering his position. His own pedantic and doctrinaire Marxism shows,
no less than his stoic fatalism, the fact that mere obstinate adherence
to a theory was to him more important than practice, for many years
before the moment that he suddenly found Russia at his feet. And Lenin
owed, though perhaps he himself would never have admitted it, a great
deal to the fiery Jew, Trotsky, who was profoundly un-Russian, indeed
American, in temperament. The Revolution owed its success entirely to
a few clean-cut practical actions thrown athwart a raging torrent of
unpractical ideas and theories; Lenin and Trotsky rather saved Russia
from herself, than created a new Russia. And since the Revolution the
stream of endless discussion of theoretical ideas, has merely flowed
on, like water under a bridge, leaving the structure of the state
intact. A wise and witty French observer, Luc Durtain, who has seen
Russia since the Revolution, has remarked that the Russian conversation
is, in times of food shortage, in itself equal to meat and drink.
What, then, is the specific symbol of Russian life? It is not the
immobile gleam of the ikon in the corner of the house, nor the
strangely drifting, tentative and slow-gathering mass-demonstrations
of the people, nor the oddly mechanical governmentally-ordered
demonstrations, nor the curiously vivid splashes of gay and exotic
colour that contrast with the sombreness of the landscape. The specific
symbol of Russia is probably the samovar. Ready at all times of the day
and night to provide hot water, it stimulates but does not nourish,
like the endless Russian conversations. It is the essential element
of every Russian social gathering, and yet at the same time is only a
pretext for meeting and wasting one’s energy in talk: as much a pretext
as Moscow, Russia itself, life, or the Universe in Russian eyes. It
does not provide tea in itself. For that a teapot is still necessary.
It only provides the hot water that may be used or not to produce tea,
as you will. In short, it is as perfect a symbol of inactive power as
anyone is ever likely to find. And, like Russia herself, it has fire
in its belly: fire hidden away from too prying eyes, under an outward
shell of servility and conformity.
3
The conflict that is being fought out to-day between America and
Russia is a psychological one. It is a subjective conflict between two
opposed conceptions of the destiny of mankind, rather than an objective
conflict between armies and directly political aims. And the two
fields of its activity are the European and the Asiatic world.
Both Russia and America have achieved within their borders what to them
is the perfect mode of existence. They have arrived at the Utopian
state of complete optimism and confidence for the future. Despite the
activities of one set of European prophets, the Soviet system has not
broken down. It is more secure, after ten years, than the system of
Czardom that it replaced. Despite the activities of another set of
prophets, American democratic capitalism has not broken down either. It
apparently possesses inexhaustible reserves of prosperity and energy.
But Europe, scarcely recovered from the horrors of its own internecine
struggle, cannot follow the course of either country. Europe is like
the ancient Hebrew monarchy divided between the imperialist tolerance
of the kings of Israel and the narrow particularism of the kings of
Judah. To the working classes the Russian solution, in its trenchant
logic, immediately appeals; but this drives the capitalist classes only
further towards embracing the ideas of America. To the intellectuals,
the American solution is a monstrous vulgarisation; but this only means
that they must either become reactionary, or accept the revolutionary
message of Russia. Europe, caught between the intellectual and
moral millstones of two great powers which were originally of its
own creation, but which have gone their own ways without accepting
the nineteenth century compromises, is awaiting a new political
Messiah with a clear message; hence the popularity of such a figure
as Mussolini. But whether Europe, in its decadent cosmopolitanism,
will ever achieve anything resembling the unity of which its poets
only dreamed, is doubtful. It is far more likely to pass, by gradual
infiltration of influence and direction, completely under the sway of
the United States.
But it is not only in Europe that the world-struggle is being waged.
The balance of power, ultimately, lies in the Far East, and its
enormous reserves of natural resources and of population. And during
the past ten years the Far East has shown clearly the direction it
proposes to follow. It is ready to accept the material achievements of
the West, without in the slightest degree altering its own racial and
social traditions. Thus it is ready to turn the weapons of the West
against the West itself, while remaining at heart far more akin to the
spirit of non-individualistic fatalism which has successfully guided
Russia. The most outstanding example of this recent development in the
East is Japan, which in the words of a modern Russian writer, “wishes
to take her machinery from America, her spiritual culture from Russia.”
China and India are likely sooner or later to take the same path,
thanks to the awakening of Asiatic racial pride, actively fomented
by Europe’s glaring administrative blunders and internal political
divisions.
4
The parallel lines that we have drawn between the two great frontier
nations are now complete, and the whole world finds itself in the
dilemma of having to make either a choice or a compromise between the
ideals of America and of Russia. At the present moment, the tendency is
probably towards a compromise of some sort, the war years and post-war
years having too profoundly shaken mankind. But this tendency is only
temporary, and is due to the slow disappearance of the generation that
lived through the crisis of the war, a generation that emerged from the
conflict profoundly sceptical of itself and of others, and incapable of
the supreme unreason of an absolute creed.
If Russia succeeds in consolidating its moral gains in the Far East,
while America no less succeeds in its clever policy of economic
penetration into Europe--a policy to which European newspapers,
theatres, hotels, shops and social usages are gradually but
unmistakably responding--if these two achievements come about, another
world-conflict is almost certain to take place before the close of
the twentieth century. For between an industrialised and proletarian
East and an industrialised and plutocratic West, the population
problem will rapidly become as acute as it already is in Japan. Nor
will the sporadic and necessarily individualistic propaganda of birth
control mend matters here. Under the present conditions controlling
this propaganda, the better, finer and more harmonious sections
of the population simply tend to die out, while the lower, baser,
and least intelligent, go on increasing--thus destroying the aim
of eugenics and inverting the true course of human evolution. This
inversion of evolution is now powerfully aided by the mushroom-like
growth of industrial capitalism, ready to exploit the lower levels for
its own purposes, and also by all so-called “religious” propaganda,
which has unfortunately always an equally “practical” end in view,
whether directed by the ideals of Communist Bolshevism, Catholic
Ecclesiasticism, or American Rotarianism. Thus the only hope for
avoidance of a conflict between the two forces loosed on the world
by Russia and America, becomes some shadowy proposal for complete
disarmament, or the limitation of competitive industrialism and the
breeding of a new aristocratic élite to control the economic and social
life of the various nations. Such a proposal lies apparently outside
the sphere of “practical” politics, and only the idealist philosopher
Plato has dealt fully with its implications.
The fact that most intelligent Europeans have come to despair of the
prospect, and have practically abandoned any further attempt to control
the two opposing forces let loose upon the world, is shown by the
extraordinary revival, within recent years, of intellectual interest
in the eighteenth century. Such people realise that the nineteenth
century, with its compromise between materialism and idealism, failed
to liberate humanity, so they yearn to go back to a happier, more
harmonious time, before instinct and reason conflicted, when neither
Russia nor America interfered with the course of human existence. This
movement towards the eighteenth century is however merely a final
gesture of world-weary romanticism, impotent to create any new values
for humanity. It cannot postpone by a single day the conflict that is
increasingly approaching between the unloosed forces of America and
Russia.
The only factors that may prevent that conflict from taking on an acute
phase in the not distant future, exist not in hyper-intellectual and
creatively sterile Europe, but in Russia and in America themselves.
Russia’s attempt to get the East completely on her side by stirring
up the Asiatics against the Caucasians may perhaps prove abortive,
for the reason that the heads of the Communist party take at the
same time no pains to conceal their immense contempt for all forms
of transcendent and organised religion save their own. This side of
Bolshevik propaganda may possibly fail to appeal very strongly to the
other-worldly millions of the Orient. At the same time, America’s
effort to control Europe through intensive financial and economic
penetration may possibly fail because of the inferior intellectual
character of the envoys she sends to Europe, or because Europe may
still place a higher value on leisure, culture, and beauty, than upon
any of the energy-wasting devices America has to offer her. But apart
from this, there seems very little doubt that America and Russia are
destined to bulk more and more largely in the world’s affairs, until
the inevitable clash between them takes place. Europe has no longer the
economic force nor the creative will to resist America. Asia has no
longer the spiritual fervour nor the unified faith to hold back Russia.
If such a conflict as we have envisaged should take place, what would
be the result? The crisis of the European war would simply be repeated
on a larger scale. Russia, together with her Eastern allies, would
possess incalculable reserves of man-power; and the fact that the
Soviet Republic has shown a determination to maintain in existence a
highly-efficient and disciplined army of considerable numbers, would
give her an initial advantage, in case the first attack in the opening
stages of the contest came from her side. But America and her European
allies would undoubtedly possess a preponderance of machinery, greater
financial resources, and a far superior naval and aerial force. After
the first year of battle, their effort would only increase, while
Russia’s effort would almost necessarily diminish. Russia’s only hope
would be in a short rather than in a long war.
On the other hand, even should the Western Allies hold the coasts
of Russia, together with the Far East, in a complete blockade, a
Russo-Mongolian combination could continue the struggle almost
indefinitely. The immense reserves of food, land, and man-power at the
disposal of the Soviet war lords would insure this. Russia cannot be
completely beaten by a blockade (even when that is aided by internal
famine) as the Allies found out in 1919. Nor can she be beaten by
land-invasion, as Napoleon found out in 1812. The only hope for the
West of obtaining a decision in their favour would be to invade and
terrorise Russia through the air. Such a campaign, if the West had
sufficient preponderance in the air to carry it to a successful
conclusion, might eventually lead to an admission of physical defeat
on Russia’s part. But hers would nevertheless remain a moral victory of
enormous importance to the future of the human race.
The dangers of a war of this nature, especially if the forces engaged
are anywhere near equal, can scarcely be overstated. The recent
European war gave those who took part in it a faint foretaste of them.
There would be continuous bombing of enemy capitals, communications,
granaries, food and munition depots. Armies would operate at enormous
distances from their base of supplies, with resultant tension and
spirit of mutiny ready to flame up every moment. Ocean-going submarines
would defy the blockade, and spread death and destruction on the high
seas. Governments might have to meet and be conducted from secret
places underground in order to escape destruction from poison-gas and
other lethal weapons. Spying and counter-spying would be universal.
Such a state of affairs might well lead the world rapidly back to a
state of sheer anarchy, and undo in a few years the finest effort of
five thousand years of civilisation. The break-up of the Roman Empire,
or the recent chaos in China, offers but a feeble picture of what such
a world would be like. The end of such a conflict might well be such a
state of famine, disorder and exhaustion as to leave no hope to mankind
for the future.
Under these circumstances, the duty of every intelligent Russian and
every intelligent American of to-day becomes clear. Since salvation is
not to be looked for either from the old civilisations of the East nor
from the more recent European civilisations; since both are now rapidly
and inevitably in decay after their last great creative period (which
was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than the eighteenth
or nineteenth); since, above all, no revival of unified religious faith
is to be looked for either among the Western Christian sects, or the
great Oriental religions, we must either find some hope of salvation
in ourselves, or admit our defeat, and with it the ultimate defeat
of mankind. Step by step, inch by inch, we must oppose the tides of
Bolshevism and of Americanism that are now sweeping over the world. We
must save America and Russia from themselves. That is our mission and
our purpose. But how can we fulfil this mission that our time--perhaps
the most tragic time in all human history--imposes upon us? We can
not fulfil it separately, for that is a task beyond the powers of any
single man, or body of men. We must strive to inform both America and
Russia with a purpose alien to their whole historical development.
Against these two attempts to impose on mankind a purely mechanical and
material conformity, we must uphold, perhaps for the last time, the
values of an ideal and supra-physical unity of spirit, not of function,
of a humanism that is at once scientific and æsthetic, and of a world
outlook that reconciles both man’s desire to achieve “the good life”
for himself on this planet, and his overwhelming sense of awe and
wonder at the superhuman processes of the universe. Perhaps this task
is altogether beyond our feeble and intermittent powers. Yet it is the
one remaining task left to humanity to accomplish in our age. And after
all, it is a problem that only education can solve, and we must leave
it to the teachers to accomplish. It is Russia, not America, that needs
an Emerson to lead it towards individual self-reliance. It is America,
not Russia that needs a Dostoevsky to show it the value of common
submission to the mysterious powers that govern the development of all
spirituality.
_April 1927-August 1929._
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The list that follows is not intended to be exhaustive. To cite, for
example, all the literary works of the authors discussed in Book III
would be a wearisome and a fruitless task. The list here given will be
found valuable to the student who seeks to expand his mental horizon by
reading further on the topics discussed in these pages.
_GENERAL WORKS_
A History of Russia, by Sir Bernard Pares. 1927.
The Oxford History of the United States, by S. E. Morison. 2 vols. 1927.
Main Currents in American Thought, by Vernon Louis Parrington. 1927.
Vol. I. The Colonial Mind (1620-1800).
Vol. II. The Romantic Revolution (1800-1860).
A History of Russian Literature to 1881, by Prince D. S. Mirsky. 1927.
Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, by Prince D. S. Mirsky.
1926.
(These two books contain valuable bibliographies of works
translated into English.)
Panorama de la Littérature Russe Contemporaire, by Vladimir Pozner.
Paris. 1929.
The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. 2 vols. 1926-9.
Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humains, by Count Arthur Gobineau. 2
vols. Paris. 1884.
The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams. 1919.
The Law of Civilization and Decay, by Brooks Adams. 1921.
The Revolutions of Civilization, by Flinders Petrie.
History of Religions, by G. F. Moore. Vol. I (Egypt, Babylonia,
Assyria, etc.). International Theological Library, 1914.
The Amarna Age. A Study of the Crisis of the Ancient World, by Rev.
James Baikie. 1926.
The Emancipation of Massachusetts, by Brooks Adams. Revised and
enlarged edition with new Preface. 1919.
Middletown, by Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd. 1929.
The Golden Day, by Lewis Mumford. 1926.
_WORKS ON SPECIAL TOPICS_
George Washington, the Image and the Man, by W. E. Woodward. 1928.
Catherine the Great, by Katherine Anthony. 1925.
Hawthorne, by Henry James. (English Men of Letters Series) 1879.
Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, by Raymond M. Weaver. 1921.
Whitman, An Interpretation in Narrative, by Emory Holloway. 1926.
Walt Whitman, by Basil de Sélincourt. London. 1914.
Dostoevsky, by André Gide. Paris. 1923.
Tolstoy as Man and Artist, by Dmitri Merejkowski. 1902.
The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks. 1922.
Stephen Crane, by Thomas Beer (with a preface by Joseph Conrad). 1923.
Anton Chekhov, by Leon Shestov, 1916.
Woodrow Wilson, by William Allen White. 1926.
Woodrow Wilson: A Character Study, by R. E. Annin. 1924.
Lenin, by Valeriu Marcu. 1928.
Geist und Geschichte der Bolschewismus, by Réne Fülop-Miller. 1927.
L’Autre Europe. Moscou et Sa Foi, by Luc Durtain. 1928.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The threat of pogroms has by no means disappeared under the
Bolsheviks. See Luc Durtain’s “L’Autre Europe” for details.
[2] His mother’s name was Rachel Levine. His father is unknown. Mrs.
Levine might have been a Christian married in a Jewish family but the
name of Rachel is not common among Christians.
[3] This statement may perhaps be questioned by some Catholics.
Apparently, Catholics are not allowed to undertake missionary activity
in Russia. But the church cult has not been suppressed.
[4] This same image was recently removed by the Bolsheviks, apparently
without any opposition whatever. Such are the paradoxes of Russian
history.
[5] A notable exception is the sermon in Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
[6] Isabel F. Hapgood. Introduction to “Taras Bulba.” New York, 1915.
[7] It has been estimated that during the fifty years between 1870
and 1910, America added to her previous population of forty million,
twenty-five million foreign settlers.
[8] See on this point, “The Diary of a Communist Schoolboy,” by S.
Ignatyev. Also “American Prosperity” by Paul M. Mazur.
[9] For example, the life of Pushkin or of Dostoevsky.