GOD'S TIME AS IT IS; AN INGERSOLL THAT REQUIRES MUCH WINDING
How many of us believe in Progress with the unquestioning faith we had
before that day in July, 1914, when Austria's declaration of war upon
Serbia started the ruin of all that centuries had built up in Europe?
Most of us have not stopped to analyze what has happened since to our
belief that the world ever moved by an irresistible primal impulse
forward to more and better things, that the song which the morning stars
sang together was "It shall be multiplied unto you," that increment is
inevitable and blessed. But how many of us really believe that in the
unqualified way we once did?
The world had many pleasant illusions about Progress before the great
catastrophe of 1914 came to shatter them. And nowhere were these
illusions more cheerfully accepted than in this country of ours, where a
wilderness had become a great civilization in the space of a century and
where the evidences of rapid, continuous advancement were naturally
strong.
The first pleasant illusion was that modern progress had made war
impossible, at least war between the great nations of the earth, which,
profiting by the examples we had set them, enjoyed more or less free
governments, where production mounted from year to year, where wealth
was ever increasing. Destiny plainly meant more and more iron dug from
the ground and turned into steel machinery, larger, more powerful
automobiles, taller and taller buildings, swifter and swifter elevators,
more and more capacious freight cars, and destiny would not tolerate
stopping all this for the insanity of destruction.
Moreover--how good were the ways of Progress--the ever increasing
mastery over the forces of nature which had been fate's latest and best
gift to humanity, approaching a sort of millennium of machinery, while
creating vaster engines of industry had brought into being more and
monstrous weapons of warfare.
Life with benignant irony was making man peaceful in spite of himself.
His bigger and bigger cannon, his more and more lethal explosives were
destroying his capacity for destruction. War was being hoist by its own
petard. The bigger the armies, the more annihilating the shells piled up
in the arsenals, the less the chance of their ever being used.
Progress, infinitely good toward man, had found a way out of war, the
plague that had blighted the earth since the beginning. What religion
could not do, the steel foundries and the chemical laboratories had
done. They had made war too deadly to be endured. In effect they had
abolished it. Peace was a by-product of the Bessemer oven and the dye
vat. Man's conquest of himself was an unconsidered incident of his
conquest of nature.
Then there were the costs of war. Progress had done something more than
make fighting intolerably destructive of men and cities; it had made it
intolerably destructive of money. Even if we would go to war, we could
not since no nation could face the vast expenditures.
Two little wars of brief duration, the Boer War and the Balkan War, had
left great debts to be paid and had brought in their train financial
disturbances affecting the entire world. A European war would destroy
immensely more capital and involve vastly greater burdens. No nation
with such a load on its shoulders could meet the competition of its
peace keeping rivals for the world's trade. No government in its senses
would provoke such consequences, and governments were, of course, always
in their senses.
You did not have to accept this as an act of faith; you could prove it.
Shells, thanks to Progress, cost so many hundreds of dollars each.
Cannon to fire them cost so many thousands of dollars each and could
only be used a very few times. Armies such as the nations of Europe
trained, cost so much a day to feed and to move. The demonstration was
perfect. Progress had rendered war virtually impossible.
If in spite of all a war between great modern nations did start, it
could last only a few weeks. No people could stand the strain.
Bankruptcy lay at the end of a short campaign. A month would disclose
the folly of it, and bring the contestants to their senses; if it did
not, exhaustion would. Credit would quickly disappear. Nations could not
borrow on the scale necessary to prolong the struggle.
The wisest said all these things as governments began to issue orders of
mobilization in 1914. Emperors were merely shaking their shining armor
at each other. There would be no war. It was impossible. The world had
progressed too far. Anachronistic monarchies might not know it, but it
had. Their armies belonged as much to the past as their little titles,
as all the middle-age humbug of royalty, their high-wheeled coaches,
their out-riders in their bright uniform, their debilitating habit of
marrying cousins, their absurdities about their own divine rights. They
had armies, as they wore upturned mustachios, to make themselves look
imposing. They were as unreal as the pictured kings in children's story
books or on a deck of cards. Forces mightier than they had settled
forever the question of war.
And when hostilities actually began an incredulous America knew they
would be over in three months. Anybody with a piece of paper and a
pencil could prove that they could not last. It took all of Kitchener's
prestige to persuade society that the fighting would keep on through the
winter, and his prediction that it would continue three years was
received as the error of a reporter or the opinion of a professional
soldier who overlooked the economic impossibility of a long war.
It is worth while recalling these cheerful illusions to estimate what
has happened to the idea of Progress in seven swiftly changing years. We
did not give up readily the illusion that the world had been vastly and
permanently changed for the better. As it was proved that there could be
a war and a long one and as the evidence multiplied that this war was
the most devastating in all history, we merely changed our idea of
Progress, which became in our minds a force that sometimes produced evil
in order that good might result.
The Great War itself was assimilated to our idea of a beneficent fate.
Whom Progress loveth it chasteneth. Instead of rendering war impossible
by making it destructive and costly, it visited the earth with the
greatest war of all time in order to make war impossible. This was the
war to end all war. The ways of progress were past finding out but they
were good.
Paper demonstrations had gone wrong. Governments did not go bankrupt
after a few months but could still borrow at the end of five years.
Humanity did not sicken and turn away from the destruction, but the
greater the carnage the more eager were the nations still at peace to
have a hand in it. Still it could never happen again. It was a lesson
sent of fate. Men must co-operate with progress and not leave to that
force the sole responsibility for a permanently peaceful future. They
had sinned against the light in allowing such unprogressive things, as
autocracies upon the earth. They must remove the abominations of the
Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. Once they had set up that brightest
flower of Progress, modern democracy, in place of the ancient empires,
there would be no more wars. Democracy had one great merit. It was
rather stupid and lacking in foresight. It did not prepare for war and
being forever unready would not fight.
The war had been sent by Progress to call man's attention to their
duties regarding certain anachronisms with which Progress was otherwise
unable to deal.
[Illustration: UNCLE SAM'S CONFERENCE]
You will observe that the idea of Progress took three forms in as many
years. First it was a pure force moving straight ahead toward a goal of
unimaginable splendor, even whose questionable products like bigger
cannon and higher explosives accomplished by one of its larger ironies
benefits that were the opposite of their purposes.
Then assuming the aspects of a more personal deity, it became capable of
intentions and could choose courses utterly inconsistent with itself in
order to achieve ends that would be splendidly consistent with itself.
It made larger demands upon faith.
Then it began to require a little aid from man himself, on the principle
that God helps them that help themselves, the cleaning up by men of the
human rubbish heap, the purging of autocracy by democracy. Human
responsibility began to emerge. The picture in our heads was changing.
Then, as the war came to a close it became apparent that President
Wilson's happy idea that democracies, being stupid and unready to fight,
would live together in eternal peace, was inadequate. The treaty would
leave the three great democracies armed as the autocracies never had
been armed. They might elect to remain so and use their weapons as
provocatively as any Hapsburg or Hohenzollern ever did. Men must
organize, must league themselves together, must govern themselves
internationally in order to have peace, which was no longer an
accidental by-product of the modern factory, but must be created by men
themselves, deliberately acting to that end. Men must work out their own
salvation, aided and admonished of course by such perfect works of
progress as a war to end war.
Men make the attempt. The peoples of the earth assemble and write a
treaty which keeps the chief democratic nations on the continent of
Europe armed against each other, which provides endless subjects of
dispute among the smaller countries; and they sign a covenant which the
unanimous opinion of mankind rejects as an effective safeguard against
future wars and which many regard as dividing the earth into two hostile
camps. "It was humanity's failure," declares General Smuts. "There will
always be war," asserts President Harding, calling a conference not to
end war but to lessen the cost of preparing for war.
Not only has material progress failed to produce peace as its
by-product, but moral progress has failed to produce peace as its
deliberate product.
And Progress is in reality moving forward to wars more deadly and more
ruinous than the last. Weapons were developed toward the end of the
Great War capable of vastly worse havoc than any used during its course.
And only a beginning has been made. If we may come to use the power that
holds atoms together in the driving of engines, we may also use it in
war to blast whole cities from the face of the earth. Conquest of the
air means larger bombs from the air. Greater knowledge of chemistry
means industrial advancement and also deadlier poison gases. Material
gains bring compensating material ills or the possibility of them.
Even the material gains, great as they have been, seem somewhat smaller
today than they once were thought to be. In our most optimistic moments
before the war we had the pleasant illusion of steadily decreasing hours
of labor and steadily lowering costs. Men had worked twelve, ten, and
finally eight hours a day, and it was predicted that this process would
go on until six, perhaps four hours a day would be sufficient to supply
the needs of the race.
We paid five cent fares on the street cars and were hopeful that they
would become three cent fares; three cents was established by law in
many cities as the maximum charge. The railroads collected a little over
two cents a mile for carrying passengers and in many states statutes
were enacted establishing two cents a mile as the legal rate. We were
impressed by striking examples of lowering prices, in the automobile
industry for example, and were confident that this was the rule of
modern life.
Prices, except of food products, were steadily decreasing; there might
be an end to this movement but we were nowhere near the end. The wonders
of modern inventions, and if not these, the economics of concentrated
organization, and if not these, the use of by-products, were steadily
lowering costs. The standard of living was rising. What was the rich
man's luxury in one generation was the poor man's necessity in the next.
It would always be so. That was Progress.
We now pay seven or eight cents to ride on street cars and more than
three cents a mile to travel on trains. All prices have advanced. The
standard of living has declined and we ask ourselves if it will not have
to decline still further. No one now talks of a six-hour day. We
recognize a check in the process toward increasing well-being at less
effort. Life has become more difficult. Progress is no longer a simple
and steady movement onward in a single direction. Like evolution
sometimes it seems to stand still or perhaps go back. Like evolution it
requires a _vital elan_; it is a thing of leaps and rests. We are less
enthusiastic about it when it rests.
We blame our discomfiture, the higher prices and the lower standard of
living on the war, but much of it was inevitable, war or no war. The
idea that the struggle for existence would grow steadily easier was
largely a conclusion from appearances. We were raising our standard of
living by skimming the cream of our natural resources. When our original
forests were cut, when the most easily mined veins of iron and coal were
exhausted, when oil wells ceased to gush and had to be pumped, unless
substitutes were found, all the basic costs of production would advance.
Ultimately they would advance to the point where economies of
organization, of quantity production, of by-product development, so far
as they have been realized, would no longer serve to keep down final
prices. We were rapidly reaching that point when the war came.
We lived under an illusion. What we called the results of progress was
the rapid exhaustion of easily available resources. We used our capital
and thought ourselves rich. And we lie under a burden of debt made much
heavier by the weapons which progress put into our hands. Progress had
not made war too expensive to fight but it had made peace too expensive
to be borne. We forgot the law of diminishing returns. We ignored the
lessons of history that all ages come to an end, when the struggle for
existence once more grows severe until new instruments are found equal
to the further conquest over nature. Useful inventions have not kept
pace with increasing consumption and rapidly disappearing virgin
resources. The process of steadily lowering costs of production has
stopped and reverse process has set in. Spectacular inventions like the
airplane have deluded us into the belief that Progress, always blessing
us, we had the world by the tail. But coal and iron became harder and
costlier to mine. Oil neared exhaustion. Timber grew scarcer.
Agricultural lands smaller in proportion to population.
Immense possibilities lie before us. So they did before the man with the
stone hatchet in his hand, but he waited long for the steam, saw and
drill and crusher. An invention which would mean as much in the conquest
of nature as did the steam engine would make the war debt as easily
borne as the week's account at the grocery store. But when will progress
vouchsafe it? Converting coal into power we waste 85 per cent of its
energy in coal and call that efficient. But does Progress always respond
instantly to our needs with new methods and devices, like a nurse
responding to a hungry child? A few years ago we were sure it did, but
now we look anxiously at the skies for a sign.
We had another characteristic pleasant illusion during the war.
Progress, like the Lord, in all previous conflicts was on our side. Here
was a great need of humanity. Surely, according to rule, it should be
met by some great invention that would blast the Germans out of their
places in the earth and give the sons of light an easy and certain
victory. All the familiars of the deity sat about in boards watching for
the indication that the engine to meet the needs of civilization had
been granted. But it never was.
I do not write this to suggest that men, especially American men, have
ceased to believe in Progress. They would be fools if they had. I write
to suggest that they have ceased to believe in Progress. They would be
fools if they had not. A great illusion is gone, one of the chief
dislocations wrought by the war.
What the war has done to our way of thinking has been to lay a new
stress upon man as a free and responsible agent. After all the battles
were won not by guns, or tanks or gas or airplanes, but as always by the
common man offering his breast to the shots of the enemy. The hope of
the future is all in human organizations, in societies of nations, in
councils and conferences. Men's minds turn once more to governments with
renewed expectation. Not only do we think for the first time seriously
of a government of the world but we focus more attention on the
government at Washington. Groups with special interests to serve reach
out openly to control it.
The war laid a new emphasis on government. Not only did the government
have our persons and our lives at its command but it assumed authority
over our food, it directed our factories and our railroads, it told us
what we could manufacture and ship, it decided who could borrow of the
general credit and for what purposes, it fixed the prices at which we
could buy and sell. It came to occupy a new place in the national
consciousness and one which it will never wholly lose. One rival to
it,--the belief, having its roots in early religious ideas, and
strengthened by scientific theory and the outward results of the great
inventions, that moved by some irresistible impulse, life went steadily
forward to higher and higher planes, and that man had but little to do
but pluck the fruits of progress--has been badly shattered by events.
But men do not change beliefs suddenly. Perhaps after all the war was
only the way of progress--to usher in a new and brilliant day. Perhaps
the unfolding future has something near in store far greater and better
than went before. We shall not trust men too far, men with their
obstinate blindness, men with their originally sinful habit of thinking
they know better than the forces which rule the world. We want not
leaders but weather cocks, who will veer to the kindlier wind that may
blow when it is yet only a zephyr.
We turn to men yet, we cling a little to the hope that fate will yet
save us. This division in us accounts for Lloyd George and Harding, our
own commonplace "best we have on hand" substitute for the infinitely
variable Englishman, adjusted to every breath that blows, who having no
set purpose of his own offers no serious obstacle to any generous design
of fate.
Senator Borah once said to me, "The Administration has no definite
policies." And it is not Mr. Harding's fault. If he wanted to form any
the people wouldn't let him. They elected him not to have any. They
desired in the White House some one who would not look further ahead
than the next day until the future became clearer. If he had purposes
events might prove them to be wrong.
The same fundamental idea underlay the remark of a member of the
Cabinet, at the outset of the recent disarmament and Far Eastern
Conference, that "Lloyd George was the hope of the gathering because he
had no principles."
The war destroyed many men but it half restored Man. You see how
inevitable optimism is. The ways of Progress are indeed past finding
out. Governments during it performed the impossible. They even took in
hand the vast industrial mechanism which we ordinarily leave to the
control of the "forces." We half suspect they might do the impossible in
peace but we half hope that some kindlier fate is in store for us than
to trust ourselves to human intelligence. We don't know whether to put
our money on Man or on Progress; so we put it on Mr. Harding.