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.