inherited tendencies, so it is not heritable, and a great soul showing
suddenly in the dusk of a dull race contributes nothing of its essential
quality to the issue of the body it has made its house. The stews of a
mill town may suddenly be illuminated by the radiance of a divine soul,
to the amazement of profligate parents and the confusion of eugenists;
but unless the unsolvable mystery of life has determined on a new
species, and so by a sudden influx of the _élan vital_ cuts off the line
of physical succession and establishes one that is wholly new, then the
brightness dies away with the passing of the splendid soul, and the
established tendencies resume their sway.
The bearing of this theory on the actions of society is immediate.
Through the complete disregard of race-values that has obtained during
the last two or three centuries, and the emergence and complete
supremacy in all categories of life of human groups of low potential,
civilization has been brought down to a level where it is threatened
with disaster. If recovery is to be effected and a second era of "dark
ages" avoided, there must be an entirely new evaluation of things, a new
estimate of the principles and methods that obtained under Modernism,
and a fearless adventure into fields that may prove not to be so
unfamiliar as might at first appear.
Specifically, we must revise our attitude as to immigration, excluding
whole classes, and even races, that we have hitherto welcomed with open
hands from the disinterested offices of steamship companies: we must
control and in some cases prohibit, the mating of various racial stocks;
finally we must altogether disallow the practice of changing, by law,
one race-name for another. This process is one for which no excuse
exists and unless it can be brought to an end then, apart from certain
physical differentiations on which nature wisely insists, we have no
guaranty against the adulteration that has gone so far towards
substituting the mongrel for the pure racial type, while society is
bound to suffer still further deception and continued danger along the
lines that have recently been indicated by the transformation of
Treibitsch into "Lincoln," Braunstein into "Trotsky" and Samuels into
"Montague."
For its fulfillment, then, and its regeneration, the real democracy
demands and must achieve the creation and cooperation of a real
aristocracy, not an aristocracy of material force either military or
civil, nor one of land owners or money-getters, nor one of artificial
caste. All these substitutes have been tried from time to time, in Rome,
China, Great Britain, the United States, and all have failed in the end,
for all have ignored the one essential point of _character_, without
which we shall continue to reproduce what we have at present; a thing as
insolent, offensive and tyrannical as the old aristocracies at their
worst, with none of the constructive and beneficent qualities of the old
aristocracies at their best.
That race-values have much to do with this development of character I
believe to be true, but of far greater efficiency, indeed the actual
motive force, is the Christian religion, working directly on and through
the individual and using race as only one of its material means of
operation. Democracy has accomplished its present failure, not only
because it could not function without the cooperation of aristocracy,
but chiefly because, in its modernist form, it has become in fact
isolated from Christianity. All in it of good it derives from that
Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages which first put it into
practice, all in it of evil it owes to a falling back on paganism and a
denial of its own parentage and rejection of its control. I shall deal
with this later in more detail; I speak of it now just for the purpose
of entering a caveat against any deduction from what I have said that
any natural force, of race or evolution or anything else, or any formal
institution devised by man, ever has, or ever can, serve in itself as a
way of social redemption. I am anxious not to overemphasize these things
on which the development of my argument forces me to lay particular
stress.
For those who can go with me so far, the question will arise: How then
are we so to reorganize society that we may gain the end in view? It is
a question not easy of solution. Granted the fact of social
differentiation and the necessity of its recognition, how are we to
break down the wholly wrong system that now obtains and substitute
another in its place? It would be simple enough if within the period
allowed us by safety (apparently not any too extended at the present
moment) a working majority of men could achieve, in the old and exact
phraseology, that change of heart, that spiritual conversion, that would
bring back into permanent authority the supernatural virtues of faith,
hope, and charity, and that sense of right values in life, which
together make almost indifferent the nature of the formal devices man
creates for the organization of society. Certainly this is possible;
greater miracles have happened in history but, failing this, what?
One turns of course by instinct to old models, but in this is the danger
of an attempt at an archaeological restoration, a futile effort at
reviving dead forms that have had their day. In principle, and in the
working as well, the old orders of chivalry or knighthood strongly
commend themselves, for here there was, in principle, both the
maintenance of high ideals of honour courtesy and _noblesse oblige,_ and
the rendering of chivalrous service. Chesterton has put it well in the
phrase "the giving things which cannot be demanded, the avoiding things
which cannot be punished." Moreover, admission to the orders of
knighthood was free to all provided there were that cause which came
from personal character alone. Knighthood was the crown of knightly
service and it was forfeited for recreancy. Is there not in this some
suggestion of what may again be established as an incentive and a
reward, and as well, as a vital agency for the reorganization of
society?
Knighthood is personal, and is for the lifetime of the recipient. Is
there any value in an estate where status is heritable? If there is any
validity in the theory of varying and persistent race-values, it would
seem so, yet the idea of recognizing this excellence of certain families
and the reasonable probability of their maintaining the established
standard unimpaired, and so giving them a formal status, would no doubt
be repugnant to the vast majority of men in the United States. I think
this aversion is based on prejudice, natural but ill-founded. We resent
the idea of privilege without responsibility, as we should, but this,
while it was the condition of those aristocracies which were operative
at the time of the founding of the Republic, was opposed to the
Mediaeval, or true idea, which linked responsibility with privilege. The
old privilege is gone and cannot be restored, but already we have a new
privilege which is being claimed and enforced by proletarian groups, and
the legislative representatives of the whole people stand in such terror
of massed votes that they not only fail to check this astonishing and
topsy-turvy movement, but actually further its pretensions. The
"dictatorship of the proletariat" actually means the restoration of
privilege in a form far more tyrannical and monstrous than any ever
exercised by the old aristocracies of Italy, France, Germany and
England. Much recent legislation in Washington exempting certain
industrial and agricultural classes from the operation of laws which
bear heavily on other classes, and some of the claims and pretensions of
unionized labor, tend in precisely the same direction.
It is not restoration of privilege I have in mind but rather in a sense
the prevention of this through the existence of a class or estate that
has a fixed status dependent first on character and service and then on
an assured position that is not contingent on political favour, the bulk
of votes, or the acquisition of an inordinate amount of money. Surety of
position works towards independence of thought and action and towards
strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of
honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the
things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of
Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken
from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history
of European culture and civilization.
After all, is it merely sentimentalism and a sense of the picturesque
that leads us to look backward with some wistfulness to the days of
which the record is still left us in legends and fairy-tales and old
romance, when ignorance and vulgarity did not sit in high places even if
arrogance and pride and tyranny sometimes did, and when the profiteer
and the oriental financier and the successful politician did not
represent the distinction and the chivalry and the courtesy and the
honour of the social organism man builds for his own habitation? The
idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the
courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table,
Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and
adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our
blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. Princes
and fair chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and
delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal
ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by
significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes.
Courts of Love and troubadours and trouvères, kings who were kings
indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their
courts--Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King
Charles--above all the simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman,"
the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and
purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud
because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and
loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion. All these old things
of long ago still rouse in us answering humours, and there are a few of
us who can hardly see just why they are inconsistent with liberty and
opportunity, justice, righteousness and mercy.
Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years,
have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as
it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing
new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the
question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more
normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but
always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new
model came in, now hardly a century ago.
I do not think this wistful and bewildered looking backward is
particularly due to a new desire for beauty, that comeliness of
condition that existed then and has now given place to gross ugliness
and ill-conditioned manners and ways. Rather it seems to me it is due to
a sense of irrationality and fundamental injustice in the present order,
coupled with a new terror of the proximate issue as this already is
revealing itself amongst many peoples. We resent the high estate,
purchasable and purchased, of the cynical intriguer and the vulgar
profiteer, of the tradesman in "big business," the cheap prophet and the
pathetic progeny of "successful men" fast reverting to type. We know our
city councils and our state legislatures and our houses of congress, we
know our newspapers, their standards and the motive powers behind them,
and what they record of the character and the doings of what they call
"society men and women." Above all we know that under the ancient
regime, in spite of manifold failures, shortcomings and disloyalty,
there was such a thing as a standard of honour, a principle of chivalry,
an impulse to unselfish service, a criterion of courtesy and good
manners; we look for these things now in vain, except amongst those
little enclaves of oblivion where the old character and old breeding
still maintain a fading existence, and as we consider what we have
become we sometimes wonder if the price we have paid for "democracy" was
not too extortionate.
Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing
standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of
our diminishing stock of social character. We tore down in indignant
revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far
declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be
endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of
desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it.
Perhaps we did well, at least we hardly could have done anything else;
but now we are again in the position of our forefathers who saw things
as they were and acted with force and decision. There are as many counts
against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled
in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the
aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there are
more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less
sweeping.
Our plan, so generous, so liberal, so high-minded in many ways, has
failed to produce the results we desired, while it has worked itself out
to the point of menace. It is for us to see these facts clearly, and so
to act, and so promptly, that we may not have to await the destroying
force of cataclysm for the correction of our errors.
IV
THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM
The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts
the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is
contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy
of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the
earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its
performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work
man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of
once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or
the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes
something of the divine power of creation.
When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both
by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the
joy in labour is lost. Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after
another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from
the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century;
they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results
unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and
creation given back to those who have been defrauded.
Before Christianity prevailed slavery was universal in civilized
communities, labour, as conducted under that regime, was a curse, and
this at length came home to roost on the gaunt wreckage of imperialism.
Thereafter came slowly increasing liberty under the feudal system with
its small social units and its system of production for use not profits,
monasticism with its doctrine and practice of the sanctity of work, and
the Church with its progressive emancipation of the spiritual part of
man. Work was not easy, on the contrary it was very hard throughout the
Dark Ages and Mediaevalism, but there is no particular merit in easy
work. It was virtually free except for the labour and contributions in
kind exacted by the over-lord (less in proportion than taxes in money
have been at several times since) from the workers on the soil, and in
the crafts of every kind redeemed from undue arduousness by the joy that
comes from doing a thing well and producing something of beauty,
originality and technical perfection.
The period during which work possessed the most honourable status and
the joy in work was the greatest, extends from the beginnings of the
twelfth century well into the sixteenth. In some centuries, and along
certain lines of activity, it continued much longer, notably in England
and the United States, but social and industrial conditions were rapidly
changing, the old aristocracy was becoming perverted, Lutheranisms,
Calvinism and Puritanism were breaking down the old communal sense of
brotherhood so arduously built up during the Middle Ages, capitalism was
ousting the trade and craft guilds of free labour and political
absolutism was crushing ever lower and lower a proletariat that was fast
losing the last vestiges of old liberty. The fact of slavery without the
name was gradually imposed on the agricultural classes, and after the
suppression of the monasteries in England work as work lost its sacred
character and fell under contempt. With the outbreak of industrialism in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the institution and
introduction of "labour-saving" machinery and the consequent division of
labour, the factory system, the joint-stock company and capitalism, this
new slavery was extended to industrial workers, and with its
establishment disappeared the element of joy in labour.
For fifty years, about the blackest half-century civilization has had to
record, this condition of industrial slavery continued with little
amendment. Very slowly, however, the workers themselves, championed by
certain aristocrats like the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury against
professional Liberals like Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone in England,
began to loosen the shackles that bound them to infamous conditions, and
after the abrogation of laws that made any association of workingmen a
penal offense, the labour unions began to ameliorate certain of the
servile conditions under which for two generations the workman had
suffered. Since then the process of abolishing wage-slavery went slowly
forward until at last the war came not only to threaten its destruction
altogether but also to place the emancipated workers in a position where
they could dictate terms and conditions to capital, to employers, to
government and to the general public; while even now in many parts of
Europe and America, besides Russia, overt attempts are being made to
bring back the old slavery, only with the former bondsmen in supreme
dictatorship, the former employers and the "bourgeoisie" in the new
serfage.
The old slavery is gone, but the joy in work has not been restored;
instead, those who have achieved triumphant emancipation turn from
labour itself with the same distaste, yes, with greater aversion than
that which obtained under the old régime. With every added liberty and
exemption, with every shortening of hours and increase of pay,
production per hour falls off and the quality of the output declines.
What is the reason for this? Is it due to the viciousness of the worker,
to his natural selfishness, greed and cruelty? I do not think so, but
rather that the explanation is to be found in the fact that the
industrial system of modernism has resulted in a condition where the joy
has been altogether cut out of labour, and that until this state of
things has been reversed and the sense of the holiness of work and the
joy of working have been restored, it is useless to look for workable
solutions of the labour problem. The _fact_ of industrial slavery has
been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches
to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and
holiness of labour has not come back any more than the old joy and
satisfaction. Failing this recovery, no reorganization of industrial
relations, neither profit-sharing nor shop committees, neither
nationalization nor state socialism, neither the abolition of capital,
nor Soviets nor syndicalism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat will
get us anywhere. It is all a waste of time, and, through its ultimate
failure and disappointments, an intensification of an industrial
disease.
Why is it that this is so? For an answer I must probe deep and, it may
seem, cut wildly. I believe it is because we have built up a system that
goes far outside the limits of human scale, transcends human capacity,
is forbidden by the laws and conditions of life, and must be abrogated
if it is not to destroy itself and civilization in the process.
What, precisely has taken place? Late in the eighteenth century two
things happened; the discovery of the potential inherent in coal and its
derivative, steam, with electricity yet unexploited but ready to hand,
and the application of this to industrial purposes, together with the
initiating of a long and astounding series of discoveries and inventions
all applicable to industrial purposes. With a sort of vertiginous
rapidity the whole industrial process was transformed from what it had
been during the period of recorded history; steam and machinery took the
place of brain and hand power directly applied, and a revolution greater
than any other was effected.
The new devices were hailed as "labour-saving" but they vastly increased
labour both in hours of work and in hands employed. Bulk production
through the factory system was inevitable, the result being an enormous
surplus over the normal and local demand. To organize and conduct these
processes of bulk-production required money greater in amount than
individuals could furnish; so grew up capitalism, the joint-stock
company, credit and cosmopolitan finance. To produce profits and
dividends markets must be found for the huge surplus product. This was
accomplished by stimulating the covetousness of people for things they
had not thought of, under normal conditions would not, in many cases,
need, and very likely would be happier without, and in "dumping" on
supposedly barbarous peoples in remote parts of the world, articles
alien to their traditions and their mode of life and generally
pestiferous in their influence and results. So came advertising in all
its branches, direct and indirect, from the newspaper and the bill-board
to the drummer, the diplomatic representative and the commercial
missionary.
Every year saw some new invention that increased the product per man,
the development of some new advertising device, the conquest of some new
territory or the delimitation of some new "sphere of influence," and the
revelation of some new possibility in the covetousness of man. Profits
rose to new heights and accumulating dividends clamoured for new
opportunities for investment. Competition tended to cut down returns,
therefore labour was more and more sustained through diminished wages
and laws that savagely prevented any concerted effort towards
self-defense. Improvements in agricultural processes and the application
of machinery and steam power, together with bulk-production and
scientific localization of crops, threw great quantities of
farm-labourers out of work and drove them into the industrial towns,
while advances in medical science and in sanitation raised the
proportion of births to deaths and soon provided a surplus of potential
labour so that the operation of the "law of supply and demand," extolled
by a new philosophy and enforced by the new "representative" or
democratic and parliamentary government, resulted in an unfailing supply
of cheap labour paid wages just beyond the limit of starvation.