THE BOOK
I found the book beneath my pillow. David had been afraid to hand it to
me, and I was not surprised. For assuredly the anonymous author would
have received the utmost penalty from the Council.
He was a Christian, and he took the ground that democracy, in itself
bad, had become impossible when the atheistic deism of the eighteenth
century pervaded the minds of the voting masses and took the form of
Hæckel’s materialism and that of his school of thinkers.
He claimed that, so far from indicating the spread of enlightenment, it
was due to national decay, and had always preceded periods of national
reconstruction, instancing Rome and Athens, and the America of a century
ago, where democracy had become incompatible with free speech and
assembly, an independent judiciary, and a broad and secure freedom.
Written for circulation among those opposed to the Sanson régime, it was
a fervent prayer for the deliverance of the world. In it I gathered more
of the meaning of the new civilization than I had learned from David.
I read that the War of the Nations was caused by one thing alone: the
breaking down of Christianity in Germany, and the revival of the old
pagan doctrines, with the ensuing challenge against all that humanity
had built up during two thousand years.
But in that period of ferments only a few had seen this meaning. The
challenge had been interpreted as one of aristocracy against democracy,
largely because democracy, then in the saddle, was the creed of the
loudest publicists. For this the writer Wells, known posthumously as
“The Prophet,” a man whose penetrating judgment and synthetic mind were
fogged by class consciousness, was largely responsible.
The hope of democracy was fair in those after-years, when nations,
purged by their ordeal of blood, revived the noble hopes of liberty. Men
would have sacrificed everything for their brethren during that first
decade of peace. There was a splendid spiritual awakening among the
nations. Democracy was the young, smiling god, the guardian of universal
peace.
If only, the writer said, that spiritual enlargement had been joined to
Christian faith. But the backwash of nineteenth century atheism swamped
it. The doctrines of materialism were rooted in the masses. The German
virus could not be rooted out without trained leadership and ideals. I
recalled Sir Spofforth’s words when I read that. “It must not happen
again!” all men had said, when at last peace triumphed. No, not if the
spirit of Christ, governing all men, had drawn them into brotherhood.
But what if insults had been heaped upon the German people? What hope of
peace was there when hate such as this ruled in the mind of the leader
of the new faith?
Instead of Christ, these blind philosophers set up their democratic god.
They labelled war “dynastic,” and believed democracy would destroy it.
Had they not used their eyes? Did they not know that war was the
embodiment of hate? Had they never looked on a mob, shouting for war, or
was human nature to be changed by education, and through prosperity, so
that no nation would ever again gather to itself false doctrines, with
hate, and scorn, and pride, and go forth to destroy?
As every century produced its dominant illusion, so now in the twentieth
this singular delusion of a democracy progressing through graded virtue
unto a perfect day possessed the race. And here the writer paused to
draw another instance from America, not, as he was painstaking to
explain, because her inhabitants were different from other men, but
because they were the same.
He showed how decadence had spread exactly as democracy had spread. He
told of the two counties of Ohio where investigation showed the
inhabitants to have sold their votes universally—merchants and
clergymen, professional men and laborers. Corruption radiated from the
English-speaking centers. Law, principle, and integrity had gone first
in New England and the South, in the withered branches of Anglo-Saxondom
that had broken from the bough. One by one all the traditions of civic
honesty had died; and if life was still tolerable in the early twentieth
century, when justice was a byword and faith in public men had almost
ceased, it was because the State was still largely an abstraction and
people could still keep aloof from politics.
All the while there existed the same pitiable belief that this democracy
would some day become honest, all-good, all-wise; but this was democracy
and the fruits of it, and nowhere had it had a fairer chance to
inaugurate the millennium. And the same mob that ran blindly after its
blind leaders, responsive to every prejudice, to the old Moloch of
race-hatred and the old Mammon of dishonesty, would, had it been
allowed, have followed an ideal with its fund of inexhaustible loyalty
and self-sacrifice.
Men had not changed. The Amazon and Congo valleys were drenched with the
blood of murdered natives, and democracy yawned, just as the blood of
Polish women and children, massacred by State troops, cried from the
Colorado mining camps. In former days Christian orders arose to uphold
justice and to keep down the devil in man. When Christendom was one,
labor guilds had arisen under Catholic auspices whereby all men could
live in freedom; now the Pope, impotent, could only issue an encyclical
against that oppression of labor which, in its turn, begot hatred and
war. The sword of Justice had been snapped in the scabbard.
Was this the hope of the world, he asked, this barren, Christless
democracy? How many hearts had it broken? How many idealists had
sacrificed themselves before this idol, dying with blind faith in a
deity that devoured its votaries? Was there no higher hope? Were
millions of colored men and women in America to be born forever, black
cattle without hope, and die without a part in life? Had not the race at
last turned on itself, when the eugenics madness thrust the sword into
the heart of every family and made life a more loathsome slavery than
any the world had known? What a sinister end to human hopes!
The persecutions of the mob always struck to degrade humanity. And when
England developed, in proportion to her democracy, the same corruption
as the United States, the same lack of loyalty and public sense, the
same violence and the same vindictiveness, that was suspected which
happened afterward—that the same types of men would rise to leadership,
and her faithful, loyal heroes vanish like smoke in a gale.
And all the time the remedy was at hand; no Moloch of hate, no
stock-farm theory of human bodies, but the principles of Christ, imposed
to save the world by leaders who had abdicated their responsibility. The
mob could never understand the need of abstract justice nor subordinate
greed to duty. But for some ideal, however dimly seen, it could obey and
sacrifice itself with matchless zeal, even to death.
Truly the Prophet Wells had prophesied of the years to come: “Not only
will moral standards be shifting and uncertain, admitting of
physiologically sound menages of very variable status, but also vice and
depravity, in every form that is not absolutely penal, will be practiced
in every grade of magnificence, and condoned.”
A shadow fell across the book. I looked up and saw David. He had been
glancing over my shoulder as I read, unconscious of him; and he had
reached these words with me.
His eyes flashed, he shook his fist in vehemence of passion. “No,
Arnold!” he cried. “We’ll fight as long as we live to remain something
better than the beasts; if life is a lie, or a dream, we’ll fight for
that!”