the great improvement, which seems to me to justify the Lincoln-like
patience of Lloyd George.]
Nor were they altogether unsuccessful; for, when the armies of Lenin and
Trotsky were at the gates of Warsaw, in the summer of 1920, the attempts
of the Governments of England and Belgium to afford assistance to the
embattled Poles were paralysed by the labour groups of both countries,
who threatened a general strike if those two nations joined with France
in aiding Poland to resist a possibly greater menace to Western
civilization than has occurred since Attila and his Huns stood on the
banks of the Marne.
Of greater significance to the welfare of civilization is the complete
subversion during the world war of nearly all the international laws
which had been slowly built up in a thousand years. These principles, as
codified by the two Hague Conventions, were immediately swept aside in
the fierce struggle for existence, and civilized man, with his liquid
fire and poison gas and his deliberate; attacks upon undefended cities
and their women and children, waged war with the unrelenting ferocity of
primitive times.
Surely, this fierce war of extermination, which caused the loss of three
hundred billion dollars in property and thirty millions of human lives,
did mark for the time being the "twilight of civilization." The hands on
the dial of time had been put back--temporarily, let us hope and pray--a
thousand years.
Nor will many question the accuracy of the second count in Pope
Benedict's indictment. The war to end war only ended in unprecedented
hatred between nation and nation, class and class, and man and man.
Victors and vanquished are involved in a common ruin. And if in this
deluge of blood, which has submerged the world, there is a Mount Ararat,
upon which the ark of a truer and better peace can find refuge, it has
not yet appeared above the troubled surface of the waters.
Still less can one question the closely related third and fourth counts
in Pope Benedict's indictment, namely the unprecedented aversion to
work, when work is most needed to reconstruct the foundations of
prosperity, or the excessive thirst for pleasure which preceded,
accompanied, and now has followed the most terrible tragedy in the
annals of mankind. The true spirit of work seems to have vanished from
millions of men; that spirit of which Shakespeare made his Orlando
speak when he said of his true servant, Adam:
"O good old man! how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world.
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!"
The _moral_ of our industrial civilization has been shattered. Work for
work's sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has
gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit. The conception of work as
a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging
inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes
and in all countries.
The spirit of work is of more than sentimental importance. It may be
said of it, as Hamlet says of death: "The readiness is all." All of us
are conscious of the fact that, given a love of work, and the capacity
for it seems almost illimitable--as witness Napoleon, with his
thousand-man power, or Shakespeare, who in twenty years could write
more than twenty masterpieces.
On the other hand, given an aversion to work, and the less a man does
the less he wants to do, or is seemingly capable of doing.
The great evil of the world to-day is this aversion to work. As the
mechanical era diminished the element of physical exertion in work, we
would have supposed that man would have sought expression for his
physical faculties in other ways. On the contrary, the whole history of
the mechanical era is a persistent struggle for more pay and less work,
and to-day it has culminated in world-wide ruin; for there is not a
nation in civilization which is not now in the throes of economic
distress, and many of them are on the verge of ruin. In my judgment, the
economic catastrophe of 1921 is far greater than the politico-military
catastrophe of 1914.
The results of these two tendencies, measured in the statistics of
productive industry, are literally appalling.
Thus, in 1920, Italy, according to statistics of her Minister of
Labour, lost 55,000,000 days of work because of strikes alone. From July
to September, many great factories were in the hands of revolutionary
communists. A full third of these strikes had for their end political
and not economic purposes.
In Germany, the progressive revolt of labour against work is thus
measured by competent authority: There were lost in strikes in 1917,
900,000 working days; in 1918, 4,900,000, and, in 1919, 46,600,000.
Even in our own favoured land, the same phenomena are observable. In the
State of New York alone for 1920, there was a loss due to strikes of
over 10,000,000 working days.
In all countries the losses by such cessations from labour are little as
compared with those due to the spirit which in England is called
"ca'-canny" or the shirking of performance of work, and of sabotage,
which means the deliberate destruction of machinery in operation.
Everywhere the phenomenon has been observed that, with the highest wages
known in the history of modern times, there has been an unmistakable
lessening of efficiency, and that with an increase in the number of
workers, there has been a decrease in output. Thus, the transportation
companies in the United States have seriously made a claim against the
United States Government for damages to their roads, amounting to
$750,000,000, claimed to be due to the inefficiency of labour during the
period of governmental operation.
Accompanying this indisposition to work efficiently has been a mad
desire for pleasure, such as, if it existed in like measure in preceding
ages, has not been seen within the memory of living man. Man has danced
upon the verge of a social abyss, and, as previously suggested, the
dancing has, both in form and in accompanying music, lost its former
grace and reverted to the primitive forms of crude vulgarity.
which gives the spectators the maximum of emotional expression with the
minimum of mental effort, had not been eclipsed by the splendour of a
Dempsey or a Carpentier.
Of the last count in Pope Benedict's indictment, I shall say but little.
It is more appropriate for the members of that great and noble
profession which is more intimately concerned with the spiritual advance
of mankind. It is enough to say that, while the Church as an institution
continues to exist, the belief in the supernatural and even in the
spiritual has been supplanted in the souls of millions of men by a gross
and debasing materialism.
If my reader agrees with me in my premises then we are not likely to
disagree in the conclusion that the causes of these grave symptoms are
not ephemeral or superficial; but must have their origin in some
deep-seated and world-wide change in human society. If there is to be a
remedy, we must first diagnose this malady of the human soul.
For example, let us not "lay the flattering unction to our souls" that
this spirit is solely the reaction of the great war.
The present weariness and lassitude of human spirit and the
disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of
blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of
which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were
in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the
war. Indeed, it is possible that the world war, far from causing the
_malaise_ of the age, was, in itself, but one of its many symptoms.
Undoubtedly, there are many contributing causes which have swollen the
turbid tide of this world-wide revolution against the spirit of
authority.
Thus, the multiplicity of laws does not tend to develop a law-abiding
spirit. This fact has often been noted. Thus Napoleon, on the eve of the
18th Brumaire, complained that France, with a thousand folios of law,
was a lawless nation. Unquestionably, the political state suffers in
authority by the abuse of legislation, and especially by the appeal to
law to curb evils that are best left to individual conscience.
In this age of democracy, the average individual is too apt to recognize
two constitutions--one, the constitution of the State, and the second,
an unwritten constitution, to him of higher authority, under which he
believes that no law is obligatory which he regards as in excess of the
true powers of government. Of this latter spirit, the widespread
violation of the prohibition law is a familiar illustration.
A race of individualists obey reluctantly, when they obey at all, any
laws which they regard as unreasonable or vexatious. Indeed, they are
increasingly opposed to any law, which affects their selfish interests.
Thus many good women are involuntary smugglers. They deny the authority
of the state to impose a tax upon a Paquin gown. The law's delays and
laxity in administration breed a spirit of contempt, and too often
invite men to take the law into their own hands. These causes are so
familiar that their statement is a commonplace.
Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute
this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in
the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with
the advance of democratic institutions. Undoubtedly, the excessive
emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of
the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
has contributed to this malady of the age. Men talked, and still talk,
loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties. And yet if we
were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would
again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause.
To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is
coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative
throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social
conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the
change must, therefore, be of environment.
I know of but one such change that is sufficiently widespread and
deep-seated to account adequately for this malady of our time.
Beginning with the close of the eighteenth century, and continuing
throughout the nineteenth, a prodigious transformation has taken place
in the environment of man, which has done more to revolutionize the
conditions of human life than all the changes that had taken place in
the 500,000 preceding years which science has attributed to man's life
on the planet. Up to the period of Watt's discovery of steam vapour as a
motive power, these conditions, so far as the principal facilities of
life, were substantially those of the civilization which developed
eighty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile and later on the
Euphrates. Man had indeed increased his conquest over Nature in later
centuries by a few mechanical inventions, such as gunpowder, telescope,
magnetic needle, printing-press, spinning jenny, and hand-loom, but the
characteristic of all those inventions, with the exception of gunpowder,
was that they still remained a subordinate auxiliary to the physical
strength and mental skill of man. In other words, man still dominated
the machine, and there was still full play for his physical and mental
faculties. Moreover, all the inventions of preceding ages, from the
first fashioning of the flint to the spinning-wheel and the hand-lever
press, were all conquests of the tangible and visible forces of Nature.
With Watt's utilization of steam vapour as a motive power, man suddenly
passed into a new and portentous chapter of his varied history.
Thenceforth, he was to multiply his powers a thousandfold by the
utilization of the invisible powers of Nature--such as vapour and
electricity. This prodigious change in his powers, and therefore his
environment, has proceeded with ever-accelerating speed.
Man has suddenly become the superman. Like the giants of the ancient
fable, he has stormed the very ramparts of Divine power, or, like
Prometheus, he has stolen fire of omnipotent forces from Heaven itself
for his use. His voice can now reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and, taking wing in his aeroplane, he can fly in one swift flight from
Nova Scotia to England, or he can leave Lausanne and, resting upon the
icy summit of Mont Blanc--thus, like "the herald, Mercury, new-lighted
on a heaven-kissing hill"--he can again plunge into the void, and thus
outfly the eagles themselves.
In thus acquiring from the forces of Nature almost illimitable power, he
has minimized the necessity for his own physical exertion or even
mental skill. The machine now not only acts for him, but too often
_thinks_ for him.
Is it surprising that so portentous a change should have fevered his
brain and disturbed his mental equilibrium? A new ideal, which he
proudly called "progress," obsessed him, the ideal of quantity and not
quality. His practical religion became that of acceleration and
facilitation--to do things more quickly and easily--and thus to minimize
exertion became his great objective. Less and less he relied upon the
initiative of his own brain and muscle, and more and more he put his
faith in the power of machinery to relieve him of labour. The evil of
our age is that its values are all false. It overrates speed, it
underrates sureness; it overrates the new, it underrates the old; it
overrates automatic efficiency, it underrates individual craftsmanship;
it overrates rights, it underrates duties; it overrates political
institutions, it underrates individual responsibility. We glory in the
fact that we can talk a thousand miles, but we ignore the greater
question, whether when we thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth
saying. We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our
media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music
and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought,
Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library
shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!
This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man. The lust
has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or
destructive. Quantity, not quality, becomes the great objective. Man
consumes the treasures of the earth faster than he produces them,
deforesting its surface and disembowelling its hidden wealth. As he
feverishly multiplied the things he desired, even more feverishly he
multiplied his wants.
To gain these, man sought the congested centres of human life. While
the world, as a whole, is not over-populated, the leading countries of
civilization were subjected to this tremendous pressure. Europe, which,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, barely numbered 100,000,000
people, suddenly grew nearly five-fold. Millions left the farms to
gather into the cities to exploit their new and seemingly easy conquest
over Nature.
In the United States, as recently as 1880, only 15 per cent. of the
people were crowded in the cities, 85 per cent. remained upon the farms
and still followed that occupation, which, of all occupations, still
preserves, in its integrity, the dominance of human labour over the
machine. To-day, 52 per cent. of the population is in the cities, and
with many of them existence is both feverish and artificial. While they
have employment, many of them do not themselves work, but spend their
lives in watching machines work.
The result has been a minute subdivision of labour that has denied to
many workers the true significance and physical benefit of labour.
The direct results of this excessive tendency to specialization, whereby
not only the work but the worker becomes divided into mere fragments,
are threefold. Hobson, in his work on John Ruskin, thus classifies them.
In the first place, _narrowness_, due to the confinement to a single
action in which the elements of human skill or strength are largely
eliminated; secondly, _monotony_, in the assimilation of man to a
machine, whereby seemingly the machine dominates man and not man the
machine, and, thirdly, _irrationality_, in that work became dissociated
in the mind of the worker with any complete or satisfying achievement.
The worker does not see the fruit of his travail, and cannot therefore
be truly satisfied. To spend one's life in opening a valve to make a
part of a pin is, as Ruskin pointed out, demoralizing in its
tendencies. The clerk who only operates an adding machine has little
opportunity for self-expression.
Thus, millions of men have lost both the opportunity for real physical
exertion, the incentive to work in the joyous competition of skill, and
finally the reward of work in the sense of achievement.
More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of
quantity, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of
quality.
Take, for example, the printing-press: No one can question the immense
advantages which have flowed from the increased facility for
transmitting ideas. But may it not be true that the thousandfold
increase in such transmission by the rotary press has also tended to
muddy the current thought of the time? True it is that the
printing-press has piled up great treasures of human knowledge which
make this age the richest in accessible information. I am not speaking
of knowledge, but rather of the current thought of the living
generation.
I gravely question whether it has the same clarity as the brain of the
generation which fashioned the Constitution of the United States. Our
fathers could not talk over the telephone for three thousand miles, but
have we surpassed them in thoughts of enduring value? Washington and
Franklin could not travel sixty miles an hour in a railroad train, or
twice that speed in an aeroplane, but does it follow that they did not
travel to as good purpose as we, who scurry to and fro like the ants in
a disordered ant-heap?
Unquestionably, man of to-day has a thousand ideas suggested to him by
the newspaper and the library where our ancestors had one; but have we
the same spirit of calm inquiry and do we co-ordinate the facts we know
as wisely as our ancestors did?
Athens in the days of Pericles had but thirty thousand people and few
mechanical inventions; but she produced philosophers, poets and artists,
whose work after more than twenty centuries still remain the despair of
the would-be imitators.
Shakespeare had a theatre with the ground as its floor and the sky as
its ceiling; but New York, which has fifty theatres and annually spends
$100,000,000 in the box offices of its varied amusement resorts, has
rarely in two centuries produced a play that has lived.
To-day, man has a cinematographic brain. A thousand images are impressed
daily upon the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as
moving pictures in a cinema theatre. The American Press prints every
year over 29,000,000,000 issues. No one can question its educational
possibilities, for the best of all colleges is potentially the
University of Gutenberg. If it printed only the truth, its value would
be infinite; but who can say in what proportions of this vast volume of
printed matter is the true and the false? The framers of the
Constitution had few books and fewer newspapers. Their thoughts were few
and simple, but what they lacked in quantity they made up in unsurpassed
quality.
Before the beginning of the present mechanical age, the current of
living thought could be likened to a mountain stream, which though
confined within narrow banks yet had waters of transparent clearness.
May not the current thought of our time be compared with the mighty
Mississippi in the period of a spring freshet? Its banks are wide and
its current is swift, but the turbid stream that flows onward is one of
muddy swirls and eddies and overflows its banks to their destruction.
The great indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is
that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work. The great enigma which
it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will
solve or be destroyed, is this:
_Has the increase in the potential of human power, through
thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the
potential of human character?_
To this life and death question, a great French philosopher, Le Bon,
writing in 1910, replied that the one unmistakable symptom of human life
was "the increasing deterioration in human character," and a great
physicist has described the symptom as "the progressive enfeeblement of
the human will."
In a famous book, _Degeneration_, written at the close of the nineteenth
century, Max Nordau, as a pathologist, explains this tendency by arguing
that our complex civilization has placed too great a strain upon the
limited nervous organization of man.
A great financier, the elder J.P. Morgan, once said of an existing
financial condition that it was suffering from "undigested securities,"
and, paraphrasing him, is it not possible that man is suffering from
undigested achievements and that his salvation must lie in adaptation to
a new environment, which, measured by any standard known to science, is
a thousandfold greater in this year of grace than it was at the
beginning of the nineteenth century?
No one would be mad enough to urge such a retrogression as the
abandonment of labour-saving machinery would involve. Indeed, it would
be impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that
not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that
every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and
in large part attributable to, a new mechanical invention.
But suppose the development of labour-saving machinery should reach a
stage where all human labour was eliminated, what would be the effect on
man? The answer is contained in an experiment which Sir John Lubbock
made with a tribe of ants. Originally the most voracious and militant of
their species, yet when denied the opportunity for exercise and freed
from the necessity of foraging for their food, in three generations they
became anaemic and perished.
Take from man the opportunity of work and the sense of pride in
achievement and you have taken from him the very life of his existence.
Robert Burns could sing as he drove his ploughshare through the fields
of Ayr. To-day millions who simply watch an automatic infallible
machine, which requires neither strength nor skill, do not sing at their
work but too many curse the fate, which has chained them, like Ixion, to
a soulless machine.
The evil is even greater.
The specialization of our modern mechanical civilization has caused a
submergence of the individual into the group or class. Man is fast
ceasing to be the unit of human society. Self-governing groups are
becoming the new units. This is true of all classes of men, the employer
as well as the employee. The true justification for the American
anti-monopoly statutes, including the Sherman anti-trust law, lies not
so much in the realm of economics as in that of morals. With the
submergence of the individual, whether he be capitalist or wage-earner,
into a group, there has followed the dissipation of moral
responsibility. A mass morality has been substituted for individual
morality, and unfortunately, group morality generally intensifies the
vices more than the virtues of man.
Possibly, the greatest result of the mechanical age is this spirit of
organization.
Its merits are manifold and do not require statement; but they have
blinded us to the demerits of excessive organization.
We are now beginning to see--slowly, but surely--that a faculty of
organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is
not an unmixed good.