Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances
of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as
wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the
barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at
least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of
life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered
circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature
that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much
grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth
century, for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the
nineteenth their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable
men. There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not
been guilty of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank,
kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country
before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought
and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and
uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant
personal violence, the squalor and naïve passions of the lowest
stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and inherent
quality between these worlds; their differences were all in
circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more
individual instances the constantly observed difference between one
portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion,
were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and
businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old
established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and
prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from
the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released
from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.
The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had
reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried
them back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council’s. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had
been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human
animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital
necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered
together, scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before
they sought mean advantages in the face of the unusual eagerness to
realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived again and
‘claims’ began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of
law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of the
past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new
literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into
existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in
the young. The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research
city for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of
estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made his
demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the discredited
Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of history as
the insolvent proprietor of a paper called _The Cry for Justice_, in
which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That was the
ingenuous Dass’s idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five
million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one of
Holsten’s discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital
at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended their days
enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the England of the
opening twentieth century, and it is just this novelty of their fates
that marks the quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal education
to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal rule. It made no
wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and sectarian forms of
religious profession that at that time divided the earth into a
patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left these organisations to make
their peace with God in their own time; but it proclaimed as if it were
a mere secular truth that sacrifice was expected from all, that respect
had to be shown to all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all
around the world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of
war and the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was
taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the salvation of
the world from waste and contention was the common duty and occupation
of all men and women. These things which are now the elementary
commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to the councillors of
Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them, marvellously daring
discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed the cheek and fired
the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the hands of
a committee of men and women, which did its work during the next few
decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This educational
committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and spiritual
side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it, and indeed
for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin, who was
singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he
walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at
last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle
ages so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature
of the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It
had a curious effect upon Karenin’s colleagues; their feeling towards
him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed
usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little
bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped
mouth. His skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray.
He was at all times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this
was forgiven him because of the hot wire of suffering that was
manifestly thrust through his being. At the end of his life his
personal prestige was very great. To him far more than to any
contemporary is it due that self-abnegation, self-identification with
the world spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That
general memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,’ he wrote. ‘That is the
device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all we
have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain
statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is
contributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the release of
man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children,
encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses,
and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for.
Under your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them,
they have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities,
and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out
until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this
that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves.
Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service,
love: these are the means of salvation from that narrow loneliness of
desire, that brooding preoccupation with self and egotistical
relationships, which is hell for the individual, treason to the race,
and exile from God....’