TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT.D., LL.D.
1922
INTRODUCTION
For the course of lectures I am privileged to deliver at this time, I
desire to take, in some sense as a text, a prayer that came to my
attention at the outset of my preparatory work. It is adapted from a
prayer by Bishop Hacket who flourished about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and is as follows:
_Lord, lift us out of Private-mindedness and give us Public
souls to work for Thy Kingdom by daily creating that Atmosphere
of a happy temper and generous heart which alone can bring the
Great Peace._
Each thought in this noble aspiration is curiously applicable to each
one of us in the times in which we fall: the supersession of narrow and
selfish and egotistical "private-mindedness" by a vital passion for the
winning of a Kingdom of righteousness consonant with the revealed will
of God; the lifting of souls from nervous introspection to a height
where they become indeed "public souls"; the accomplishing of the
Kingdom not by great engines of mechanical power but by the daily
offices of every individual; the substitution in place of current
hatred, fear and jealous covetousness, of the unhappy temper and
"generous heart" which are the only fruitful agencies of accomplishment.
Finally, the "Great Peace" as the supreme object of thought and act and
aspiration for us, and for all the world, at this time of crisis which
has culminated through the antithesis of great peace, which is great
war.
I have tried to keep this prayer of Bishop Hacket's before me during the
preparation of these lectures. I cannot claim that I have succeeded in
achieving a "happy temper" in all things, but I honestly claim that I
have striven earnestly for the "generous heart," even when forced, by
what seem to me the necessities of the case, to indulge in condemnation
or to bring forward subjects which can only be controversial. If the
"Great War," and the greater war which preceded, comprehended, and
followed it, were the result of many and varied errors, it matters
little whether these were the result of perversity, bad judgment or the
most generous impulses. As they resulted in the Great War, so they are a
detriment to the Great Peace that must follow, and therefore they must
be cast away. Consciousness of sin, repentance, and a will to do better,
must precede the act of amendment, and we must see where we have erred
if we are to forsake our ill ways and make an honest effort to strive
for something better.
For every failure I have made to achieve either a happy temper or a
generous heart, I hereby express my regret, and tender my apologies in
advance.
CONTENTS
LECTURE
INTRODUCTION
I. A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS
II. A WORKING PHILOSOPHY
III. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
IV. THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM
V. THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
VI. THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART
VII. THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION
VIII. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE
I
A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS
For two thousand years Christianity has been an operative force in the
world; for more than a century democracy has been the controlling
influence in the public affairs of Europe and the Americas; for two
generations education, free, general and comprehensive, has been the
rule in the West. Wealth incomparable, scientific achievements
unexampled in their number and magnitude, facile means of swift
intercommunication between peoples, have all worked together towards an
earthly realization of the early nineteenth-century dream of proximate
and unescapable millennium. With the opening of the second decade of the
twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in
an unquestioned evolutionary drama. Man was master of all things, and
the failures of the past were obliterated by the glory of the imminent
event.
The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein,
everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was
tried as by fire, and each failed--save the indestructible qualities of
personal honour, courage and fortitude. Nothing corporate, whether
secular or ecclesiastical, endured the test, nothing of government or
administration, of science or industry, of philosophy or religion. The
victories were those of individual character, the things that stood the
test were not things but _men._
The "War to end war," the war "to make the world safe for democracy"
came to a formal ending, and for a few hours the world gazed spellbound
on golden hopes. Greater than the disillusionment of war was that of the
making of the peace. There had never been a war, not even the "Thirty
Years' War" in Germany, the "Hundred Years' War" in France or the wars
of Napoleon, that was fraught with more horror, devastation and
dishonour; there had never been a Peace, not even those of Berlin,
Vienna and Westphalia, more cynical or more deeply infected with the
poison of ultimate disaster. And here it was not things that failed, but
_men._
What of the world since the Peace of Versailles? Hatred, suspicion,
selfishness are the dominant notes. The nations of Europe are bankrupt
financially, and the governments of the world are bankrupt politically.
Society is dissolving into classes and factions, either at open war or
manoeuvering for position, awaiting the favourable moment. Law and order
are mocked at, philosophy and religion disregarded, and of all the
varied objects of human veneration so loudly acclaimed and loftily
exalted by the generation that preceded the war, not one remains to
command a wide allegiance. One might put it in a sentence and say that
everyone is dissatisfied with everything, and is showing his feelings
after varied but disquieting fashion. It is a condition of unstable
equilibrium constantly tending by its very nature to a point where
dissolution is apparently inevitable.
It is no part of my task to elaborate this thesis, and still less to
magnify its perils. Enough has been said and written on this subject
during the last two years; more than enough, perhaps, and in any case no
thinking person is unaware of the conditions that exist, whatever may be
his estimate of their significance, his interpenetration of their
tendency. I have set myself the task of trying to suggest some
constructive measures that we may employ in laying the foundations for
the immediate future; they may be wrong in whole or in part, but at
least my object and motive are not recrimination or invective, but
regeneration. Nevertheless, as a foundation the case must be stated, and
as a necessary preparation to any work that looks forward we must have
at least a working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need
redemption were brought about. I state the case thus, therefore: That
human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at
any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came
with the fall of classical civilization and from which five centuries
were necessary for the process of recovery. Christianity, democracy,
science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand
years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history. How
has this been possible, what has been the sequence of events that has
brought us to this pass?
It is of course the result of the interaction of certain physical,
material facts and certain spiritual forces. Out of these spiritual
energies come events, phenomena that manifest themselves in political,
social, ecclesiastical transactions and institutions; in wars,
migrations and the reshaping of states; in codes of law, the
organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.
In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of
men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or
degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the
material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new
forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of
building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.
Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this
developed around the shores of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of
slavery: Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were
small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly
privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves. All
the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science,
letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and
civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society,
was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. But
freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when
the body is in bondage. The slaves of antiquity were free neither in
body nor in soul, but with the coming of Christianity all this was
changed, for it is one of the great glories of the Christian religion
that it gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give
freedom to the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire,
and with the infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery
gradually disappeared, and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real
liberty existed as the product of Christianity and under its protection.
Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the
guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so
to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the
lines of demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the
Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son
of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war
and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble
beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind,
and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were
recognized, accepted and enforced.
This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its
long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to
1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather
than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile class, now
reduced to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a
degree of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized
status, the like of which had never been seen before. It was not a
bourgeoisie, for it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan,
craft, art, mechanic; a great free society, the proudest product of
Christian civilization.
With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to
overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The
Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build up
their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been
completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the
quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the
rest of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased
in proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one
the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either
on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto
little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the
small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different
sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle
of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically
disappeared.
What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western
Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks
had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders,
managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down
and down in the mass of submerged proletariat, losing liberty,
degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and
wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient
mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself.
I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and
its present catastrophe: the great, predominant, central body of free
men during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie, and
the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat. They are
factors of great significance and potential force.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial
revolution began. Within the space of an hundred years came all the
revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and
electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the
world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and
economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny,
had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had
wrecked the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the
guiding and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear
for a new dispensation.
What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their
derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.
To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be
available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that
unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be
discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously
greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that
directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.
The conditions of the time made all these possible. The land-holding
peasantry of England--and it is here that the revolution was
accomplished--had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry
VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing
industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer
gave employment to the mass of field labourers. The first blast of
factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers,
smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, and
children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative
of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.
Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue. The
exploits of the "joint-stock companies" invented and perfected in the
eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained,
while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the
Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical
inhibition against usury. The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the
foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of
the triumphant achievements of the last century.
The question of markets was more difficult. It was clear that, through
machinery, the exploitation of labour, and the manipulations of finance,
the product would be enormously greater than the local or national
demand. Until they themselves developed their own industrial system, the
other nations of Europe were available, but as this process proceeded
other markets had to be found; the result was achieved through
advertising, i.e., the stimulating in the minds of the general public of
a covetousness for something they had not known of and did not need, and
the exploiting of barbarous or undeveloped races in Asia, Africa,
Oceanica. This last task was easily achieved through "peaceful
penetration" and the preëmpting of "spheres of influence." In the end
(i.e., A.D. 1914), the whole world had so been divided, the stimulated
markets showed signs of repletion, and since exaggerated profits meant
increasing capital demanding investment, and the improvement in
"labour-saving" devices continued unchecked, the contest for others'
markets became acute, and world-politic was concentrated on the vital
problem of markets, lines of communication, and tariffs.
As for the finding or development of competent organizers and directors,
the history of the world since the end of medievalism had curiously
provided for this after a fashion that seemed almost miraculous. The
type required was different from anything that had been developed
before. Whenever the qualitative standard had been operative, it was
necessary that the leaders in any form of creative action should be men
of highly developed intellect, fine sensibility, wide and penetrating
vision, nobility of instinct, passion for righteousness, and a
consciousness of the eternal force of charity, honour, and service.
During the imperial or decadent stages, courage, dynamic force, the
passion for adventure, unscrupulousness in the matter of method, took
the place of the qualities that marked the earlier periods. In the first
instance the result was the great law-givers, philosophers, prophets,
religious leaders, and artists of every sort; in the second, the great
conquerors. Something quite different was now demanded--men who
possessed some of the qualities needed for the development of
imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of
those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new
industrial-financial-commercial régime, the leaders must be shrewd,
ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and
avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and
vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the
Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle
Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection
always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort
as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. This
aristocracy was an accepted and indispensable part of society, and it
was always more or less the same in principle, and always the centre and
source of leadership, without which society cannot endure. It is true
that at the hands of Christianity it acquired a new quality, that of
service as contingent on privilege--one might almost say of privilege as
contingent on service--and the ideals of honour, chivalry, compassion
were established as its object and method of operation even though these
were not always achieved, but the result was not a new creation; it was
an institution as old as society, regenerated and transformed and
playing a greater and a nobler part than ever before.
Between the years 1455 and 1795 this old aristocracy was largely
exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the massacres of the Reformation,
and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the
Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France
had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of
culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the natural and
actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as
the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and
Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France
suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty
Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the
class of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. In France, until the
fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present
moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily,
but on a different basis and from a different class from anything known
before. Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership;
distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage,
honour, fealty--these, in general, had been the ground for admission to
the ranks of the aristocracy. In general, also, advancement to the ranks
of the higher nobility was from the class of "gentlemen," though the
Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages,
wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.
Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that
from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force
in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the
upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil
slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men
(peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes")
was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy,
further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell
burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of
servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the
gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an
age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the
instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.
As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman
Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was
during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under
mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant
was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved definite
status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin
and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure,
the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and
monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however;
absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the
guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the
Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held
under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him. By
1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive
oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle
Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down
its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and
building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood
visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling class.
Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving
aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons
certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were
imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the
finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce
that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force
of modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold
of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities,
and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the
world.
Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in
government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay
the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could
give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a
thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the
absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was
fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of
the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the
misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a
splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed
in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of
the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.
The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with
it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of
operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the
creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of
the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same _milieu_ that was
responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain
of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and
finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at
the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the
same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in
new schemes, of government, which would take all power away from the
class that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the hands of
the emancipated proletariat. This new model was called then, and is
called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish between
democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I should have used
a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply distinguished between
republicanism and democracy, for this is what it amounts to. The former
is as old as man, and is part of the "passion for perfection" that
characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the chief difference
between brute and human nature; it means the guaranteeing of justice,
and may be described as consisting of abolition of privilege, equality
of opportunity, and utilization of ability. Democracy of method consists
in a variable and uncertain sequence of devices which are supposed to
achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a matter of fact have thus far
usually worked in the opposite direction. The activity of this movement
synchronizes with the pressing upward of the "the masses" through the
dissolving crust of "the classes," and represents their contribution to
the science of political philosophy, as the contribution of the latter
is current "political economy."
It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the
case of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which
occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an
autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the
fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws
by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue
of which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that
dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result
of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working
out of these two great devices of the new force released by the
destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why,
when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so
exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and
finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was
at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism
worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further
continuance.
A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate.
Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of western
Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity. Sooner
here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial,
commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of
society, becoming partners with them and following their aims, conniving
at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits. By the
end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly "free"
governments had become as identified with "special privilege," and as
widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic governments
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they failed
consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and efficiency of
operation.
For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For
fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican
system until at last, during the same first decade of the present
century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it,
whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or republic,
essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist,
incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain
point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not
alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very
government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and
administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of
society itself.
Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force
were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical
justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a
certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to
regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were
joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last
century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something
else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by
evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it
appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the
final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law;
through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life,
the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the
anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had
devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things
were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very
highly developed animals to experience and environment, it had given
weighty support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy
both in theory and in act.
Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the
invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the
acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and
were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by education;
hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as between man
and man because of past discrepancies in environment, opportunities, and
education) could be equalized by a system of teaching that aimed to
furnish that mental and physical training hitherto absent.
Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very
shortly this became the firm conviction of the great mass of men, and
the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are
equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized,
state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that
made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between one
man and another.
In another respect, however, the superstition of mechanical evolution
played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets
nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while
undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from
degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the
rocket rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures,
even so must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to
greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human
history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and
then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood,
or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the
annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable,
unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes
a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to
incipient or crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain
dream of manifest destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of
the primary gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last
years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking
in its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers
that threatened it then and now menace it with destruction.
When, therefore, modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July, 1914,
we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry, commerce,
and finance, expressing itself through highly developed specialists, and
dictating the policies and practices of government, society, and
education; on the other, a democracy of form which denied, combated, and
destroyed distinction in personality and authority in thought, and
discouraged constructive leadership in the intellectual, spiritual, and
artistic spheres of activity. The opposition was absolute, the results
catastrophic. The lack of competent leadership in every category of life
finds a sufficient explanation in the two opposed forces, in their
origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.
In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be
difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that
were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present
century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical system
of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human progress,
and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world. The
plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events though
both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise. The
impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the unfortunate
effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of
evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either
consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.
Not only did it deter men from realizing the ominous tendency of events
but, more unhappily, it minimized their power to discriminate between
what was good and bad in current society, and even reversed their sense
of comparative values. If man was indeed progressing steadily from bad
to good, and so to better and best, then the vivid and even splendid
life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its headlong
conquest of the powers of nature, its enormous industrial development,
its vast and ever-increasing wealth in material things, must be not only
an amazing advance beyond any former civilization but positively good in
itself, while the future could only be a progressive magnifying of what
then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr.
Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other
pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will
some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently
acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any
period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches
the sky."
Nothing but a grave inability to estimate values, based on a
pseudo-scientific dogma, can explain the lack of any just standard of
comparative values that was the essential quality in pre-war society.
Extraordinary as were the material achievements of the time, beneficent
in certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the
advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in
value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image
which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were
voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into
idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life
were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real
that they were unreal became the object and the measure of achievement.
It was an unhappy and almost fatal attitude of mind, and it was
engendered not so much by the trend of civilization since the
Renaissance and Reformation, nor by the compulsion and cumulative
influence of the things themselves, as by the natural temper and
inclinations and the native standards of this emancipated mass of
humanity that, oppressed, outraged and degraded for four hundred years
had at last burst out of its prison-house and had assumed control of
society through industrialism, politics and social life. The saving
grace of the old aristocracies had disappeared with the institution
itself: between 1875 and 1900 the great single leaders, so fine in
character, so brilliant in capacity, so surprising in their numbers,
that had given a deceptive glory to the so-called Victorian Age, had
almost wholly died out, and the new conditions neither fostered the
development of adequate successors, nor gave audience to the few that,
anomalously, appeared. It is not surprising therefore that the new
social element that had played so masterly a part in bringing to its
perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should
have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its
materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness
and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own
followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring a predominant
position.
I am not unconscious that these are hard sayings and that few indeed
will accept them. They seem too much like attempting that which Burke
said was impossible, viz., to bring an indictment against a people. I
intend nothing of the sort. Out of this same body of humanity which _as
a whole_ has exerted this very unfavourable influence on modern society,
have come and will come personalities of sudden and startling nobility,
men who have done as great service as any of their contemporaries
whatever their class or status. Out of the depths have come those who
have ascended to the supreme heights, for since Christianity came into
the world to free the souls of men, this new liberty has worked without
limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very creations of the emergent
force, industrialism and democracy, while they were the betrayal of the
many were the opportunity of the few, taking the place, as they did, of
the older creeds of specifically Christian society, and inviting those
who would to work their full emancipation and so become the servants of
God and mankind. By the very bitterness of their antecedents, the
cruelty of their inheritance, they gained a deeper sense of the reality
of life, a more just sense of right and wrong, a clearer vision of
things as they were, than happened in the case of those who had no such
experience of the deep brutality of the regime of post-Renaissance
society.
True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were
many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers
of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern
life as pervasive and controlling as it is.
What has happened is a certain degradation of character, a weakening of
the moral stamina of men, and against this no mechanical device in
government, no philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of
successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and
scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the
process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound
to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it
has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material
respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to
say that in so far as it was acting consciously it was with good
motives, which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation
already sufficiently depressing.
If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation
we have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The
emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who owed
their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the
Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in some
ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its victims
was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely due to
the condition of religion which existed during the period of
emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any
revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in
contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its
potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the
Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body
politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at
a time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western
Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its
place taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism,
Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a guiding
and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last come up
into the light of day.
In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the
responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as
well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and
profligate ordering of society, which followed on the end of
Mediaevalism.
So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and
obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the
last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and
because we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in
character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior
standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned by a
world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had
betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency,
that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.
There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the
disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast
heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought
nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural,
but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is persisted
in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but
only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination,
we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making,
for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will. What we will that
shall we be, or rather, what we _are_ that shall we will, and if we make
of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests
with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period,
on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch. Never in
history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years,
and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century,
cannot outlast the present. But these declining years are preceding
those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will
see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is
our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us
to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it,
it may be a reign of disaster, a parallel to the well-recognized "Dark
Ages" of history, but also, if we will, it may be a new and a true
"renaissance," a rebirth of old ideals, of old honour, of old faith,
only incarnate in new and noble forms.
The vision of an old heaven and a new earth was vouchsafed us during the
war, when horror and dishonour and degradation were shot through and
through with an epic heroism and chivalry and self-sacrifice. What if
this all did fade in the miasma of Versailles and the cynicism of trade
fighting to get back to "normalcy," and the red anarchy out of the East?
There is no fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal. Even they
also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation. Paris
and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of
the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the
old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the
failure of "modern civilization," but another generation is taking the
field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them. They
may have achieved this great perfection in the field, they may have
experienced it through those susceptible years of life just preceding
military age. It does not matter. Somehow they have it, and those who
come much in contact in school or college with boys and men between the
ages of seventeen and twenty-five, know, and thankfully confess, that if
they can control the event the future is secure.
In the harlequinade of fabulous material success the nations of "modern
civilization" suffered a moral deterioration, in themselves and in their
individual members; by a moral regeneration they may be saved. How is
this to be accomplished? How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of
society to be achieved? Not alone by change of heart in each individual,
though if this could be it would be enough. Humanly speaking there is
not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the
twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole
reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and
educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that
can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up
of individuals whose moral sense is defective. Either of these two
methods, put into operation by itself, will fail. Acting together they
may succeed.