One element only there is in our population which does deliberately
challenge our national unity. I mean the militant Bolsheviki in our
midst, the preachers and devotees of liberty run amuck, who would
place a visionary class interest above patriotism and who in ignorant
fanaticism would substitute for the tyranny of autocracy the still
more intolerable tyranny of mob-rule, as for the time being they have
done in Russia.
If it were not for the disablement of Russia, the battle against
autocracy would have been won by now. As so often before, liberty has
been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and
freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past,
proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin brother of
tyranny.
Out-czaring the czar, its votaries are filling the prisons with their
political opponents, are practising ruthless spoliation and savage
oppression, and are maintaining their self-constituted rule by the
force of bayonets. Riot, robbery, famine, fratricidal strife are
stalking through the land.
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.
Liberty is not fool-proof. For its beneficent working it demands
self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and
attainable and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are
beyond our power to change.
Liberty can, does and must limit the rights of the strong, it must
increasingly guard and promote the well-being of those endowed with
lesser gifts for the struggle for existence and success, it must
strive in every way consistent with sane recognition of the realities
to make life more worth living to those whose existence is cast in the
mould of the vast average of mankind; it must give political equality,
equality before the law; it must throw wide open to talent and worth
the door of opportunity.
But it must not attempt in fatuous recklessness to make over humanity
on the pattern of absolute equality. If and when it does so attempt,
it will fail as that attempt has always failed throughout history. For
an inscrutable Providence has made inequality of endowment a
fundamental law of nature, animate as well as inanimate, and from
inequality of physical strength, of brain power and of character,
springs inevitably the fact of inequality of results.
Envy, demagogism, utopianism, well-meaning uplift agitation may throw
themselves against that basic law of all being, but the clash will
create merely temporary confusion, destruction and anarchy, as in
Russia; and after a little while and much suffering, the supremacy of
sanely restrained individualism over frenzied collectivism will
reassert itself.