Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As
civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was
not triumphant until the invention of written language, so the new
order--call it what you will: Christianity, the Meaning of America, the
Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy,
Humanity--this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet
had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on
apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon
as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed
to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of
reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory
which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was
being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in
Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth
and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.
But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old
order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions,
ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first
decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been
precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and
the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of
civilization.
It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of
the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new
inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we
saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the
upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of
attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their
ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of
reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We
are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is
such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic
and political equality.
Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of
industrial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of
social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the
freedom of the seas during times of peace. The aeroplane and the
airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in
the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of
the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the
meek of the earth to rush together to one another's rescue; and
wireless telegraphy, as soon as it is established universally, will
sound to them the alarum in the twinkling of an eye. All the new
inventions are, as it were, God's detectives for the exposing of the
subtle and disguised crimes of the great; or they are God's captains
for the mobilization of the scattered forces of the meek when the plot
of an oppressor has been unearthed. The people need only to realize
that the new inventions are by their very nature breakers of
power-monopolies, in order to find in them an irresistible incentive to
rise and act in the cause of world-wide democratic initiative. High
explosives, the gas-engine, the giant gun, sheets of flame, deadly
gases, all these are within the reach of Christ's little ones to
encircle their kingdom-that-is-coming against the attacks of inhuman
humans. The new inventions are humanity's destructors to annihilate
civilization's destroyers.
I have specified some of the twentieth century's inventions to show
that, like the compass and the printing-press, they will be scatterers
of privileges to the masses. I might go on indefinitely adding to the
list, but I will cite only one more. It was only in the last decade of
the nineteenth century that a new way of making cheap paper was
discovered--so cheap that it became possible to sell great dailies for
one cent. But this practice was not established until the twentieth
century. And it was only a few years ago that the greatest newspaper of
the world--and a very stronghold of upper-class monopoly--was able, or
driven, to reduce its price from threepence (six cents) to a penny. But
I specify the case of the London _Times_ because, like a miracle of
divine healing, but entirely due to the cheapness of paper, is the
change of its policy from that of brutal imperialism to the democratic
one of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal
states. Now that the _Times_ has been converted, we may be sure that
the universe itself has come round to the side of the right, and has
taken up the cause of the poor. By the pricking of my thumbs I know
that something better than civilization this way comes. Dull indeed
must be that man whose blood does not tingle with anticipation. Yet the
physical inventions of the twentieth century are not to be compared in
pregnancy of good with its less palpable, its spiritual, novelties.