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Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram · English · Gutenberg #10642 · 431,112 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Towards the Great Peace

Author: Ralph Adams Cram


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10642]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE ***

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.

I repeat what I have said before. The material thing and the spiritual
force work by inter-action and coördinately. The abandonment or reform
of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution
of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the
individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent
possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this
direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more
possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an
equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the
present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible
changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary
society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the
spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level
through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even
greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the
character-development of the individual. In following out this line of
thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:
A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic
Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of
Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal
Responsibility.

I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject
under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument,
if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular
stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue
emphasis. If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression
would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a
suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only
when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another,
that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.




II


A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]

    [*This lecture has been very considerably re-written
    since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained
    has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These
    excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain
    bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures,
    might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it
    has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and
    give them a supplementary place by themselves.]

The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the
technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did
these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the
clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem
is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no
right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human
indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to
expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we
had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even
in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the
reason and the meaning of it all.

It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are
searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some
working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid
like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on
which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of
the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application
of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but
was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.
In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that
had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps
as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void
religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with
life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force
interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite
directions and after certain definite methods.

The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious
institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far
less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their
technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive
abandonment of religion. The wrong theories were there, and the
mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle
that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make
small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right
philosophy. I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his
reply was significant as coming from a philosopher. "Yes," he said, "you
are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important."

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it,
through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy
would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not
matter. On the other hand, without it, no institution can be counted
safe, or will prove efficacious, while no philosophy, however lofty and
magisterial, can take its place, or even play its own part in the life
of man or society. I must in these lectures say much about institutions
themselves, but first I shall try to indicate what seem to me the more
serious errors in current philosophy, leaving until after a study of the
material forms which are so largely conditioned by the philosophical
attitude, the consideration of that religion, both organic and personal,
which I believe can alone verify the philosophy, give the institutions
life and render them reliable agencies for good.

For a working definition of philosophy, in the sense in which I use it
here, I will take two sayings, one out of the thirteenth century, one
from the twentieth. "They are called wise who put things in their right
order and control them well," says St. Thomas Aquinas. "Philosophy is
the science of the totality of things," says Cardinal Mercier, his
greatest contemporary commentator, and he continues, "Philosophy is the
sum-total of reality." Philosophy is the body of _human_ wisdom,
verified and irradiated by divine wisdom. "The science of the totality
of things": not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups
of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting
of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that
narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive
specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities,
"Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality" and it achieves this
consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between
phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by
falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through
those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind,
informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as
media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by
philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to
control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to be "called wise."

Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself
surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena. Beaten upon by
forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to
solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation
between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as
Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to
achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite
lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the
vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most
dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost
mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the
intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out
through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests
itself in the form of emotion. With the revelation of Christianity came
also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at
some given moment, but progressive and cumulative. At once, speaking
philosophically, the intellectual method of the West and the intuitive
method of the East came together and fused in a new thing, each element
limiting, and at the same time fortifying the other, while the opposed
obscurities of the past were irradiated by the revealing and creative
spirit of Christ. So came the beginnings of that definitive Christian
philosophy which was to proceed from Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople,
through Alexandria to St. Augustine, and was to find its fullest
expression during the Middle Ages and by means of Duns Scotus, Albertus
Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is an interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration,
that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at
the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the
first great and consistent art of Christianity. This question is
admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps' "Form and Colour."

This great Christian philosophy which lay behind all the civilization of
the Middle Ages, was positive, comprehensive and new. It demonstrated
divine purpose working consciously through all things with a result in
perfect coherency; it gave history a new meaning as revealing reality
and as a thing forever present and never past, and above all it
elucidated the nature of both matter and spirit and made clear their
operation through the doctrine of sacramentalism.

In the century that saw the consummation of this great philosophical
system--as well as that of the civilization which was its expositor in
material form--there came a separation and a divergence. The balanced
unity was broken, and on the one hand the tendency was increasingly
towards the exaggerated mysticism that had characterized the Eastern
moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated
intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas
himself. The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common
life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the
Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the
minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it
became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as
in every other field of human activity.

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr.
John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread,
distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process
cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of
philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an
equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who
accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the
Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the
protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was
un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the
year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined
through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism
played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of
mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the
nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we
have become through this dominance, coupled with the general
devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy
engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans,
with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is
visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn
with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that
"the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending
reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the
Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate
with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if
sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we
are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole
future of philosophy.

Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of
the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up
of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as
in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this
restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both
revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our
broken life were restored, philosophical development would be
continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they
proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of
continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous
effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a
sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.

Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions;
of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in
the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound,
however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute
in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the
intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion _is_ life and is
therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the
intellect, which is only a small portion of life, therefore limited,
partial, and (because of this) sometimes entirely wrong in its
conclusions independently arrived at along these necessarily
circumscribed lines.

The second possible error is that philosophy is the affair of a small
group of students and specialists, quite outside the purview of the
great mass of men, and that it owes its existence to this same class of
delving scholars, few in number, impractical in their aims, and sharply
differentiated from their fellows. On the contrary it is a vital
consideration for all those who desire to "see life and see it whole" in
order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a
right relationship between those things that come from the outside and,
meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of
interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth,
Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is
created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that
illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical
juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans in America, the Rev.
John Robinson, testifies to the same effect. "All truth," he says, "is
of God ... Wherefore it followeth that nothing true in right reason and
sound philosophy can be false in divinity.... I add, though the truth be
uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God." There are
not two sources of truth, that of Divine Revelation on the one hand,
that of science and philosophy and all the intellectual works of man on
the other. Truth is one, and the Source is one; the channels of
communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the
Absolute, the _noumenon_ that is the substance of phenomena, is in
itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies
within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The
trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says
Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests
Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the
soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible for the intellect to
understand anything actually except by turning to the phantasm."
Religion confesses this, philosophy constantly tends to forget it,
therefore true religion speaks always through the symbol, rejecting,
because it transcends, the intellectual criterion, while philosophy is
on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own
conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a
coadjutor.

It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a
witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the
philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of
man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in
religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility,
with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me
quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor,
who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of
Migne:

"There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the
true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking
itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and
boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder
of the face of creation.... Then those things which were seen were known
and there were other things which were not known; and through those
which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And
they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining.... So
God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ
crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the
world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set
for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine
in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain
curiosity to the study of alien things."

Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan
philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which
followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and
Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual
philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and
mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such
enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but
"the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor
speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and
are losing themselves in the desert they have made.

Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the
world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that
showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year
1800 and the present moment. Just what this influence was in determining
the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political
organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but
apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am
persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character. Neither
wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the
inherent tendencies of race--the most powerful of all--can avail against
the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse,
that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance
philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and
self-proclaimed substitutes for religion. As such they were offered and
accepted, and as such they must take their share of the responsibility
for what has happened.

I believe we must and can retrace our steps to that point in time when a
right philosophy was abandoned, and begin again. There is no
impossibility or even difficulty here. History is not a dead thing, a
thing of the past; it is eternally present to man, and this is one of
the sharp differentiations between man and beast. The material monuments
of man crumble and disappear, but the spirit that built the Parthenon or
Reims Cathedral, that inspired St. Paul on Mars' hill or forged Magna
Charta or the Constitution of the United States is, _because of our
quality as men,_ just as present and operative with us today, if we
will, as that which sent the youth of ten nations into a righteous war
five years ago, or spoke yesterday through some noble action that you or
I may have witnessed. It is as easy for us to accept and practice the
philosophy of St. Thomas or the divine humanism of St. Francis as it is
to accept the philosophy of Mr. Wells or the theories of Sir Oliver
Lodge. No spiritual thing dies, or even grows old, nor does it drift
backward in the dwindling perspective of ancient history, and the
foolishest saying of man is that "you cannot turn back the hands of the
clock."

It is simply a question of will, and will is simply a question of desire
and of faith.

Manifestly I cannot be expected to recreate in a few words this
philosophy to which I believe we must have recourse in our hour of need.
I have no ability to do this in any case. It begins with St. Paul, is
continued through St. Augustine, and finds its culmination in the great
Mediaeval group of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and
St. Thomas Aquinas. I do not know of any single book that epitomizes it
all in vital form, though Cardinal Mercier and Dr. De Wulf have written
much that is stimulating and helpful. I cannot help thinking that the
great demand today is for a compact volume that synthesizes the whole
magnificent system in terms not of history and scientific exegesis, but
in terms of life. Plato and Aristotle are so preserved to man, and the
philosophers of modernism also; it is only the magisterial and dynamic
philosophy of Christianity that is diffused through many works, some of
them still untranslated and all quite without coordination, save St.
Thomas Aquinas alone, the magnitude of whose product staggers the human
mind and in its profuseness defeats its own ends. We need no more
histories of philosophy, but we need an epitome of Christian philosophy,
not for students but for men.

Such an epitome I am not fitted to offer, but there are certain rather
fundamental conceptions and postulates that run counter both to pagan
and to modern philosophy, the loss of which out of life has, I maintain,
much to do with our present estate, and that must be regained before we
can go forward with any reasonable hope of betterment. These I will try
to indicate as well as I can.

Christian philosophy teaches, in so far as it deals with the
relationship between man and these divine forces that are forever
building, unbuilding and rebuilding the fabric of life, somewhat as
follows:

The world as we know it, man, life itself as it works through all
creation, is the union of matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit,
nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the other, but they are two
different creatures. Apart from this union of matter and spirit there is
no life, in the sense in which we know it, and severance is death. "The
body" says St. Thomas, "is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul,
by the nature of its essence, can be united to the body, so that,
properly speaking, the soul alone is not the species, but the
composite", and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and origin of this
common "essence" when he says there is "on the one hand God as Infinite
Actuality, on the other spiritual and corporeal substances possessing an
homogeneous common element." That is to say; matter and spirit are both
the result of the divine creative act, and though separate, and in a
sense opposed, find their point of origin in the Divine Actuality.

The created world is the concrete manifestation of matter, through
which, for its transformation and redemption, spirit is active in a
constant process of interpenetration whereby matter itself is being
eternally redeemed. What then is matter and what is spirit? The question
is of sufficient magnitude to absorb all the time assigned to these
lectures, with the strong possibility that even then we should be
scarcely wiser than before. For my own purposes, however, I am content
to accept the definition of matter formulated by Duns Scotus, which
takes over the earlier definition of Plotinus, purges it of its elements
of pagan error, and redeems it by Christian insight.

"Materia Primo Prima" says the great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate
element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has
reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity.
By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the
attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. Subject to the
substantial changes of Nature, it becomes matter as we see it."

It is this "Materia Primo Prima," the term of God's creative activity,
that is eternally subjected to the regenerative process of spiritual
interpenetration, and the result is organic life.

What is spirit? The creative power of the Logos, in the sense in which
St. John interprets and corrects the early, partial, and therefore
erroneous theories of the Stoics and of Philo. God the Son, the Eternal
Word of the Father, "the brightness of His glory and the figure of His
Substance." "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten,
not made, being of one substance with the Father: by Whom all things
were made." Pure wisdom, pure will, pure energy, unconditioned by
matter, but creating life out of the operation of the Holy Spirit on and
through matter, and in the fullness of time becoming Incarnate for the
purpose of the final redemption of man.

Now since man is so compact of matter and spirit, it must follow that he
cannot lay hold of pure spirit, the Absolute that lies beyond and above
all material conditioning, except through the medium of matter, through
its figures, its symbols, its "phantasms." Says St. Thomas: "From
material things we can rise to some kind of knowledge of immaterial
things, but not to the perfect knowledge thereof." The way of life
therefore, is the incessant endeavour of man sacramentally to approach
the Absolute through the leading of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel
to the slow perfecting of matter which is being effected by the same
operation. So matter itself takes on a certain sanctity, not only as
something susceptible, and in process, of perfection, but as the vehicle
of spirit and its tabernacle, since in matter spirit is actually
incarnate.

From this process follows of necessity the whole sacramental system, in
theology, philosophy and operation, of Christianity. It is of its
_esse;_ its great original, revolutionary and final contribution to the
wisdom that man may have for his own, and it follows inevitably from the
basic facts of the Incarnation and Redemption, which are also its
perfect showing forth.

Philosophically this is the great contribution of Christianity and for
fifteen centuries it was held implicitly by Christendom, yet it was
rejected, either wholly or in part, by the Protestant organizations that
came out of the Reformation, and it fell into such oblivion that outside
the Catholic Church it was not so much ignored or rejected as totally
forgotten. Recently a series of lectures were delivered at King's
College, London, by various carefully chosen authorities, all
specialists in their own fields, under the general title "Mediaeval
Contributions to Modern Civilization," and neither the pious author of
the address on "The Religious Contribution of the Middle Ages," nor the
learned author of that on "Mediaeval Philosophy," gave evidence of ever
having heard of sacramental philosophy. It may be that I do them an
injustice, and that they would offer as excuse the incontestible fact
that Mediaevalism contributed nothing to "modern civilization," either
in religion or philosophy, that it was willing to accept.

The peril of all philosophies, outside that of Christianity as it was
developed under the Catholic dispensation, is dualism, and many have
fallen into this grave error. Now dualism is not only the reversal of
truth, it is also the destroyer of righteousness.


Sacramentalism is the anthithesis of dualism. The sanctity of matter as
the potential of spirit and its dwelling-place on earth; the humanizing
of spirit through its condescension to man through the making of his
body and all created things its earthly tabernacle, give, when carried
out into logical development, a meaning to life, a glory to the world,
an elucidation of otherwise unsolvable mysteries, and an impulse toward
noble living no other system can afford. It is a real philosophy of
life, a standard of values, a criterion of all possible postulates, and
as its loss meant the world's peril, so its recovery may mean its
salvation.

Now as the philosophy of Christianity is purely and essentially
sacramental, so must be the operation of God through the Church. This
"Body of Christ" on earth is indeed a fellowship, a veritable communion
of the faithful, whether living or dead, but it is also a divine
organism which lives, and in which each member lives, not by the
preaching of the Word, not even by and through the fellowship in living
and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the
Sacraments. In accordance with the sacramental system, every material
thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental
potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each
after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power
of the Divine Actuality. Each is a symbol, just as so many other created
things are, or may become, symbols, but they are also _realities,_
veritable media for the veritable communications of veritable divine
grace. Here is the best definition I know, that of Hugh of St. Victor.
"A sacrament is the corporeal or material element set out sensibly,
representing from its similitude, signifying from its institution, and
containing from its sanctification, some invisible and spiritual grace."
This is the unvarying and invariable doctrine of historic Christianity,
and the reason for the existence of the Church as a living and
functioning organism. The whole sacramental system is in a sense an
extension, in time, of the Redemption, just as one particular Sacrament,
the Holy Eucharist, is also in a sense an extension of the Incarnation,
as it is also an extension, in time, of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of
Calvary.

The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed
nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and
their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of
matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity
of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal
transfiguration.

God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of
men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary,
but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this
result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church,
working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or
was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the
Church He had brought into being at Pentecost. He did not come to
establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide
for its ultimate coming. He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His
Church, "in the world, not of it," which is a very different matter
indeed, as the centuries have proved. His Kingdom is not of this world,
nor will it be established here. There has been no _absolute_ advance in
human development since the Incarnation. Nations rise and fall, epochs
wax and wane, civilizations grow out of savagery, crest and sink back
into savagery and oblivion. Redemption is for the individual, not for
the race, nor yet for society as a whole. Then, and only then, and under
that form, it is sure, however long may be the period of its
accomplishment. "Time is the ratio of the resistance of matter to the
interpenetration of spirit," and by this resistance is the duration of
time determined. When it shall have been wholly overcome then "time
shall be no more."

See therefore how perfect is the correspondence between the Sacraments
and the method of life where they are the agents, and which they
symbolically set forth. There is in each case the material form and the
spiritual substance, or energy. Water, chrism, oil, the spoken word, the
touch of hands, the sign of the cross, and finally and supremely the
bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist. Each a material thing, but each
representing, signifying and containing some gift of the Holy Spirit,
real, absolute and potent. So matter and spirit are linked together in
every operation of the Church, from the cradle to the grave, and man has
ever before him the eternal revelation of this linked union of matter
and spirit in his life, the eternal teaching of the honour of the
material thing through its agency and through its existence as the
subject for redemption. So also, through the material association, and
the divine condescension to his earthly and fallible estate (limited by
association with matter only to inadequate presentation) he makes the
Spirit of God his own, to dwell therewith after the fashion of man.

And how much this explains and justifies: Man approaches, and must
always approach, spiritual things not only through material forms but by
means of material agencies. The highest and most beautiful things, those
where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest reaches, are frequently
associated with the grossest and most unspiritual forms, yet the very
splendour of the spiritual verity redeems and glorifies the material
agency, while on the other hand the homeliness, and even animal quality,
of the material thing, brings to man, with a poignancy and an appeal
that are incalculable, the spiritual thing that, in its absolute
essence, would be so far beyond his ken and his experience and his
powers of assimilation that it would be inoperative.

This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was
the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had
no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages,
from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it
was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and
poised man himself in a sure equilibrium. Already it had of necessity
developed the whole scheme of religious ceremonial and given art a new
content and direction through its new service. By analogy and
association all material things that could be so used were employed as
figures and symbols, as well as agencies, through the Sacraments, and
after a fashion that struck home to the soul through the organs of
sense. Music, vestments, incense, flowers, poetry, dramatic action, were
linked with the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, and
all became not only ministers to the emotional faculties but direct
appeals to the intellect through their function as poignant symbols. So
art received its soul, and was almost a living creature until matter and
spirit were again divorced in the death that severed them during the
Reformation. Thereafter religion had entered upon a period of slow
desiccation and sterilization wherever the symbol was cast away with the
Sacraments and the faith and the philosophy that had made it live. The
bitter hostility to the art and the liturgies and the ceremonial of the
Catholic faith is due far less to ignorance of the meaning and function
of art and to an inherited jealousy of its quality and its power, than
it is to the conscious and determined rejection of the essential
philosophy of Christianity, which is sacramentalism.

The whole system was of an almost sublime perfection and simplicity, and
the formal Sacraments were both its goal and its type. If they had been
of the same value and identical in nature they would have failed of
perfect exposition, in the sense in which they were types and symbols.
They were not this, for while six of the explicit seven were
substantially of one mode, there was one where the conditions that held
elsewhere were transcended, and where, in addition to the two functions
it was instituted to perform it gave, through its similitude, the clear
revelation of the most significant and poignant fact in the vast mystery
of life. I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the
Mass.

If matter is _per se_ forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then
we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand,
Manichaean dualism on the other. Even under the most spiritual
interpretation we could offer--that, shall we say, of those today who
try to run with the hare of religion and hunt with the hounds of
rationalistic materialism--matter and spirit unite in man as body and
soul, and in the Sacraments as the vehicle and the essence, but
temporally and temporarily; doomed always to ultimate severance by death
in the one case, by the completion of the sacramental process in the
other. If, on the other hand, the object of the universe and of time is
the constant redemption and transformation of matter through its
interpenetration by spirit in the power of God the Holy Ghost, then we
escape the falsities of dualism, while in the miracle of the Mass we
find the type and the showing forth of the constant process of life
whereby every instant, matter itself is being changed and glorified and
transferred from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit.

If this is so: if the Incarnation and the Redemption are not only
fundamental facts but also types and symbols of the divine process
forever going on here on earth, then, while the other Sacraments are in
themselves not only instruments of grace but manifestations of that
process whereby in all things matter is used as the vehicle of spirit,
the Mass, transcending them all, is not only Communion, not only a
Sacrifice acceptable before God, it is also the unique symbol of the
redemption and transformation of matter; since, of all the Sacraments,
it is the only one where the very physical qualities of the material
vehicle are transformed, and while the accidents alone remain, the
substance, finite and perishable, becomes, in an instant of time and by
the operation of God, infinite and immortal.

It is to sacramentalism then that we must return, not only in religion
and its practice, but in philosophy, if we are to establish a firm
foundation for that newer society and civilization that are to help us
to achieve the "Great Peace." Antecedent systems failed, and subsequent
systems have failed; in this alone, the philosophy of Christianity, is
there safety, for it alone is consonant with the revealed will of God.




III


THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

Society, that is to say, the association in life of men, women and
children, is the fundamental fact of life, and this is so whether the
association is of the family, the school, the community, industry or
government. Everything else is simply a series of forms, arrangements
and devices by which society works, either for good or ill. Man makes or
mars himself in and through society. He is responsible for his own soul,
but if he sees only this and works directly for his soul's salvation,
disregarding the society of which he is a part, he may lose it, whereas,
if he is faithful to society and honourably plays his part as a social
animal with a soul, he will very probably save it, even though he may
for the time have quite ignored its existence. Man is a member of a
family, a pupil under education, a worker and a citizen. In all these
relationships he is a part of a social group; he is also a component
part of the human race and linked in some measure to every other member
thereof whether living or dead. Into every organization or institution
in which he is involved during his lifetime--family, school, art or
craft, trade union, state, church--enters the social equation. If
society is ill organized either in theory or in practice, in any or all
of its manifestations, then the engines or devices by which it operates
will be impotent for good. Defective society cannot produce either a
good fundamental law, a good philosophy, a good art, or any other thing.
Conversely, these, when brought forth under an wholesome society, will
decay and perish when society degenerates.

In its large estate, that is, comprehending all the minor groups, as a
nation, a people or an era, society is always in a state of unstable
equilibrium, tending either toward better or worse. It may indeed be of
the very essence of human life, but it is a plant of tender growth and
needs delicate nurture and jealous care; a small thing may work it
irreparable injury. It may reach very great heights of perfection and
spread over a continent, as during the European Middle Ages; it may sink
to low depths with an equal dominion, as in the second dark ages of the
nineteenth century. Sometimes little enclaves of high value hide
themselves in the midst of degradation, as Venice and Ireland in the
Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the
family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and
beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy.

I have taken the problem of the organization of society as the first to
be considered, for it is fundamental. If society is of the wrong shape
it does not matter in the least how intelligent and admirable may be the
devices we construct for the operation of government or industry or
education; they may be masterly products of human intelligence but they
will not work, whereas on the other hand a sane, wholesome and decent
society can so interpret and administer clumsy and defective instruments
that they will function to admiration. A perfect society would need no
such engines at all, but a perfect society implies perfect individuals,
and I think we are now persuaded that a society of this nature is a
purely academic proposition both now and in the calculable future. What
we have to do is to take mankind as it is; made up of infinitely varied
personalities ranging from the idiot to the "super-man"; cruel and
compassionate, covetous and self-sacrificing, silly and erudite, cynical
and emotional, vulgar and cultured, brutal and fastidious, shameful in
their degradation and splendid in their honour and chivalry, and by the
franchise of liberty and the binding of law, facilitate in every way the
process whereby they themselves work out their own salvation. You cannot
impose morality by statute or guarantee either character or intelligence
by the perfection of the machine. Every institution, good or bad, is the
result of growth from many human impulses, not the creation of
autocratic fiat. But growth may be impeded, hastened, or suspended, and
the most that can be done is to offer incentives to action, remove the
obstacles to development, and establish conditions and influences that
make more easy the finding of the right way.

Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of
a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything
of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy
which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and
potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses
them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In
questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism
and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose,
attacking precisely the two institutions which are today--or at all
events have been until very recently--held in most conspicuous honour by
the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for
my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature,
and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore
absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the
matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with
politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate
problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human
scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of
immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the
quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative
standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited
catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have
in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution
which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others
of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very
energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly
mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these
energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate
past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the
Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.
There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of
death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man,
perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable
that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale,
though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community
made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the
human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With
society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and
geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with
all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is
simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the
delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the
thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush
of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the
eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot
out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the
jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli
and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits
of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link
imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more
ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the
quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but
even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come
many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and
exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they
exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed
1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which
degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of
industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance,
capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized
education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches
"run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity
agents."

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society
with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social
group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding
stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local
trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome
association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he
knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their
first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals
whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of
personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to
the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which
covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential
matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He
votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he
knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another
group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the
United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds
himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if
he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps,
except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or
in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he
find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind
and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of
potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human
animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and
quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.

Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural
associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are
unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the
club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate
interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and
regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not
vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the
neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into
classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of
"class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this
imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human
scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money,
manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a
human unit or an essential factor in a workable society.

It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society
in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is
universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the
greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one
today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills
and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their
millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock
exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and
the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional
associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do
not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of
false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent
weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it
has generally escaped notice.

There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored;
either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more
unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos,
and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before
after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as
we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can
from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right
shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so
becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the
monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the
Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the
Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and
failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already
begun.

The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is
that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has
produced the conditions they would redeem. Socialism is now as
completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in
its scope and methods. Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in
its operations. Secular reformers must organize vast committees with
intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by "drives" for
money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and
efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and
then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation
enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has
now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and
nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is
conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by
efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of
propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A
good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no
reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since
reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it
will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for
it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with
society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome
society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations
of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and
the segregation and unification of industries and the division of
labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family,
through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and
self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying
force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be
a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of
a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent,
and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common
lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been
recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became
operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two
centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral
practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and
towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction
of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually
materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature.
Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of
human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the
elimination of private property and the negation of sacred
individuality. Its institution implies an almost immediate descent into
anarchy with a sequent dictatorship and autocracy, for it is the
reversal of the foundation laws of life. Such reversals cannot last,
nothing can last that is inimical to flourishing life; it may triumph
for a day but life itself sloughs it off as a sound body rids itself of
some foreign substance through the sore that festers, bursts and, the
septic conditions done away with, heals itself and returns to normal.

Now the inhuman scale has produced one set of septic conditions in
society while what is commonly called "democratization" has produced
another. We have a bloated society, but also we have one in which a
false theory has grown up and been put in practice, in accordance with
which an uniformity of human kind has been assumed which never has
existed and does not now, and in the effort to enforce this false theory
the achievement of distinction has been impeded, leadership discouraged
and leaders largely eliminated, the process of leveling downward carried
to a very dangerous point, the sane and vital organization of society
brought near to an end and a peculiarly vicious scale and standard of
social values established. I have urged the return to human scale in
human associations, but this does not imply any admixture of communism,
which is its very antithesis, still less does it permit the retention of
the theoretical uniformity and the unescapable leveling process of
so-called democracy.

Before the law all men are equal, that is, they are entitled to
even-handed justice. Before God all men are equal, that is, they are
granted charity and mercy which transcends the law, also they possess
immortal souls of equal value. Here their equality stops. In every other
respect they vary in character, capacity, intelligence and potentiality
for development along any or all these lines, almost beyond the limits
of computation. A sane society will recognize this, it will organize
itself accordingly, it will deny to one what it will concede to another,
it will foster emulation and reward accomplishment, and it will add
another category to those in which all men are equal, that is, the
freest scope for advancement, and the greatest facility for passing from
one social group into another, the sole test being demonstrated merit.

I am prepared at this point to use the word "aristocracy" for we have
the thing even now, only in its worst possible form. The word itself
means two things: a government by the best and most able citizens and,
to quote a standard dictionary "Persons noted for superiority in any
character or quality, taken collectively." There is no harm here, but
the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic
government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without
responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or
quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the
touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis
of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and,
paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a
real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply service, its
relations with those in other estates are reciprocal, it is not a closed
caste but the prize of meritorious achievement, and it is therefore
equality of opportunity, utilization of ability and the abolition of
privilege without responsibility.

Men are forever and gloriously struggling onward towards better things,
but there is always the gravitational pull of original sin which
scientists denominate "reversion to type." The saving grace in the
individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in
every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way
of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men,
in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as
necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to
possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all
these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence.
Somewhere there must be something that achieves high ideals of honour,
chivalry, courtesy; that maintains right standards of comparative value,
and that guards the social organism as a whole from the danger of
surrender to false and debased standards, to plausible demagogues, and
to mob-psychology.


The greater the prevalence of democratic methods, the greater is the
danger of this surrender to propaganda of a thousand sorts and to the
dominance of the demagogue, and the existence of an estate fortified by
the inheritance of high tradition, measurably free from the necessity of
engaging too strenuously in the "struggle for life," guaranteed security
of status so long as it does not betray the ideals of its order, but
open to accessions from other estates on the basis of conspicuous merit
alone, such a force operating in society has proved, and will prove, the
best guardian of civilization as a whole and of the interests and
liberties of those who may rank in what are known as lower social
scales.

But, it may be objected, such an institution as this has never existed.
Every political or social aristocracy in history has been mixed and
adulterated with bad characters and recreant representatives. There
never has been and never will be a perfect aristocracy. Quite true;
neither has there ever been a perfect democracy, or a perfect monarchy
for that matter. As men we work with imperfections, but we live by
faith, and our sole duty is to establish the highest ideals, and to
compass them, in so far as we may, with unfailing courage, patience and
steadfastness. The _ideal_ of democracy is a great ideal, but the
_working_ of democracy has been a failure because, amongst other things,
it has tried to carry on without the aid of true aristocracy. If the two
can be united, first in ideal and in theory, then in operation, our
present failure may be changed into victory.

What, after all, does this imply, so far as the social organism is
concerned? It seems to me, something like this. First of all,
recognition of the fact that there are differences in individuals, in
strains of blood, in races, that cannot be overcome by any power of
education and environment, and can only be changed through very long
periods of time, and that these differences must work corresponding
differences in position, function and status in the social organism.
Second, that since society automatically develops an aristocracy of some
sort or other, and apparently cannot be stopped from doing this, it must
be protected from the sort of thing it has produced of late, which is
based on money, political expediency and the unscrupulous cleverness of
the demagogue, and given a more rational substitute in the shape of a
permanent group representing high character and the traditions of
honour, chivalry and courtesy. Third, that character and service should
be fostered and rewarded by that formal and august recognition, that
secure and unquestioned status, and those added opportunities for
service that will form a real and significant distinction. Finally, that
this order or estate must be able to purge itself of unworthy material,
and also must be freely open to constant accessions from without,
whatever the source, and for proved character and service.

I fear I must argue this case of the inequality in individual potential,
that inequality that does not yield to complex education or favourable
environment, for it is fundamental. If it does not exist, then my
argument for the organization of society along lines that recognize and
regularize diversity of social status and functions, falls to the
ground. I affirm that, the doctrine of evolution and modern democratic
theory to the contrary, it does exist and that the mitigating influence
of education, environment and inherited acquired characters, is small at
best.

Let us take the most obvious concrete examples. There are certain ethnic
units or races which for periods ranging from five hundred to two
thousand years have produced _character_, and through character the
great contributions that have been made to human culture and have been
expressed through men of distinction, dynamic force, and vivid
personality. Such, amongst many, are the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans,
the Normans, the Franks, the "Anglo-Saxons," and the Celts. There are
others that in all history have produced nothing. There are certain
family names which are a guarantee of distinction, dynamic force, and
vivid personality. There are thousands of these names, and they are to
be found amongst all the races that have contributed towards the
development of culture and civilization. On the other hand, there are
far more that have produced nothing distinctive, and possibly never
will.

What is the reason for this? Is it the result of blind chance, of
accidents that have left certain races and families isolated in stagnant
eddies from which some sudden current of a whimsical tide might sweep
them out into the full flood of progress, until they then overtook and
passed their hitherto successful rivals, who, in their turn, would drift
off into progressive incompetence and degeneracy? Biology does not look
with enthusiasm on the methods of chance and accident. The choice and
transmission of the forty-eight chromosomes that give to each individual
his character-potential are probably in accordance with some obscure
biological law through which the unfathomable divine will operates. Now
these chromosomes may be selected and combined after a fashion, and with
a persistence of continuity, that would guarantee character-potential,
for good or for ill, through many generations, or they might be so
varied in their combinations that no distinct traits would be carried
over from one generation to another. As a matter of experience all these
three processes take place and are recorded in families of distinct
quality, good, bad and indifferent. If the character-potential is
predetermined, then manifestly education and environment can play only
the subordinate part of fostering its development or retarding it.

In the same way the character and career of the various races of men are
determined by the potential inherent in the individuals and families
that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long
periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of
distinction. There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay,
the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and
Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as
recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There
are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton,
East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in
Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the
cultural and character-creating influences of education and
environment--beyond a certain definite point--than are the amphibians of
Africa or the rampant weeds of my garden.

This is a hard saying and a provocative. The entire course of democratic
theory, of humanitarian thought and of the popular type of scientific
speculation stands against it, and the Christian religion as well,
unless the statement itself is guarded by exact definitions. If the
contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing
that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the
result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery
would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable
process. Since, however, this assumption of materialism is untenable,
and since all men are possessed of immortal souls between which is no
distinction in the sight of God, the situation, regrettable if you like,
is one which at the same time calls for the exercise of a higher
humanitarianism than that so popular during the last generation, and as
well for a very drastic revision of contemporary political and social
and educational methods.

The soul of the man is the localization of divinity; in a sense each man
is a manifestation of the Incarnation. Black or white, conspicuous or
obscure, intelligent or stupid, offspring of a creative race or bound by
the limitations of one that is static or in process of decay, there is
no difference in the universal claim to justice, charity, and
opportunity. The soul of a Cantonese river-man, of a Congo slave, of an
East Side Jew, is in itself as essentially precious and worth saving as
the soul of a bishop, of a descendant of a Norman viking or an Irish
king, or that of a volunteer soldier in the late armies of France or
Great Britain or the United States.

Here lies absolute and final equality, and the State, the Law, the
Church are bound to guard this equality in the one case and the other
with equal force; indeed, those of the lower racial and family types
claim even more faithful guardianship than those of the higher, for they
can accomplish less for themselves and by themselves. But the
fundamental and inescapable inequality, in intellect, in character, and
in capacity, which I insist is one of the conditioning factors in life,
is vociferously denied, but ruthlessly enforced, by the people that will
be the first to denounce any restatement of what is after all no more
than a patent fact.

A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent
regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed
equality between men "on the strength of their manhood alone," the
sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that
show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along
democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality,
are "fond things vainly imagined" which must be radically modified
before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the
great purgation of war.

That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each
of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the
protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure
of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a
claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since
race-values, both of blood and of the _gens_ enter in to establish
differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot
be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which
are practical considerations with society. If we could still hold the
old Darwinian dogmas of the origin of species through the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest, and if the equally august and
authoritative dogma of the transmission by inheritance of acquired
characteristics were longer tenable, then perhaps we might invoke faith,
hope and patience and continue our generous method of imperilling
present society while we fixed our eyes on the vision of that to come
when environment, education and heredity had accomplished their perfect
work. Unfortunately--or perhaps fortunately--science is rapidly
reconsidering its earlier and somewhat hasty conclusions, and the
consensus of the most authoritative opinion seems to be that we must
believe these things no longer. Failing these premises, on which we have
laboured so long and so honestly and so sincerely, we are again thrown
back on the testimony of history and our own observation, and with this
reversal we also are bound to reconsider both our premises and the
constitution of those systems and institutions we have erected on them
as a foundation.

The existence of a general law does not exclude exceptions. The fact
that in the case of human beings we have to take into consideration a
powerful factor that does not come into play in the domain of zoölogy
and botany--the immortal soul--makes impossible the drawing of exact
deductions from precedents therein established. This determining touch
of the divine, which is no result of biological processes, but stands
outside the limitations of heredity and environment and education, may
manifest itself quite as well in one class as in another, for "God is no
respecter of persons." As has been said before, there is no difference
in degree as between immortal souls. The point is, however, that each is
linked to a specific congeries of tendencies, limitations, effective or
defective agencies, that are what they have been made by the parents of
the race. These may be such as enable the soul to triumph in its earthly
experience and in its bodily housing; they may be such as will bring
about failure and defeat. It is not that the soul builds itself "more
stately mansions"; it is that these are provided for it by the physical
processes of life, and it is almost the first duty of man to see that
they are well built.

Again, the soul is single and personal; as it is not a plexus of
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.

At last there came evidences that the limit had been reached; the whole
world had been opened up and pre-empted, labour was beginning to demand
and even get more adequate wages, competition, once hailed as "the life
of trade" was becoming so fierce that dividends were dwindling.
Something had to be done and in self-defense industries began to
coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies.
Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became
international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and
ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naïveté
into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors
could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of
letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines,
expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern
newspaper possible, and ultimately developing the whole system of
propaganda which has now become the one great determining factor in the
making of public opinion.

When the twentieth century opened, that industrialism which had begun
just a century before, had, with its various collateral developments,
financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest
force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale
that man had ever essayed: beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.

The result of this institution, conceived on such imperial lines, was,
in the field we are now considering, the total destruction of the sense
of the holiness of labour and of joy in work. It extended far beyond the
limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all
its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing
issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed
irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are
revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of
our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of
judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other
terms when we try to devise our schemes of redemption. Even the
socialist and the Bolshevik think in imperial terms when they try to
compass the ending of imperialism.

Under this supreme system, as I see it, the two essential things I have
spoken of cannot be restored, nor could they maintain themselves if, by
some miracle, they were once re-established. The indictment cannot be
closed here. The actual condition that has developed from industrialism
presents certain factors that are not consonant with sane, wholesome and
Christian living. Not only has the unit of human scale in human society
been done away with, not only have the sense of the nobility of work and
joy in the doing been exterminated, but, as well, certain absolutely
false principles and methods have been adopted which are not susceptible
of reform but only of abolition.

Of some of these I have spoken already; the alarming drift towards
cities, until now in the United States more than one-half the population
is urban; the segregation of industries in certain cities and regions;
the minute division of labour and intensive specialization; the abnormal
growth of a true proletariat or non-land-holding class; the flooding of
the country by cheap labour drawn from the most backward communities and
from peoples of low race-value. Out of this has arisen a bitter class
conflict and the ominous beginnings of a perilous class consciousness,
with actual warfare joined in several countries, and threatened in all
others where industrial civilization is prevalent. With this has grown
up an artificially stimulated covetousness for a thousand futile
luxuries, and a standard of living that presupposes a thousand
non-essentials as basic necessities. Production for profit, not use,
excess production due to machinery, efficient organization, and surplus
of labour, together with the necessity for marketing the product at a
profit, have produced a state of things where at least one-half the
available labour in the country is engaged in the production and sale of
articles which are not necessary to physical, intellectual or spiritual
life, while of the remainder, hardly more than a half is employed in
production, the others are devoting themselves to distribution and to
the war of competition through advertising and the capturing of trade by
ingenious and capable salesmen. It is a significant fact that two of the
greatest industries in the United States are the making of automobiles
and moving pictures.

It is probably true to say that of the potential labour in the United
States, about one-fourth is producing those things which are physically,
intellectually and spiritually necessary; the remaining three-fourths
are essentially non-producers: they must, however, be housed, fed,
clothed, and amused, and the cost of this support is added to the cost
of the necessities of life. The reason for the present high cost of
living lies possibly here.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me say here that under the head of
necessities of life I do not mean a new model automobile each year,
moving pictures, mechanical substitutes for music or any other art, and
the thousand catch-trade devices that appear each year for the purpose
of filching business from another or establishing a new desire in the
already over-crowded imaginations of an over-stimulated populace.
Particularly do I not mean advertising in any sense in which it is now
understood and practised. If, as I believe to be the case, production
for profit, rather than for use, the reversal of the ancient doctrine
that the demand must produce the supply, in favour of the doctrine that
the supply must foster the demand, is the foundation of our economic
error and our industrial ills, then it follows that advertising as it is
now carried on by billboards, circulars and newspapers, by drummers,
solicitors and consular agents, falls in the same condemnation, for
except by its offices the system could not have succeeded or continue to
function. It is bad in itself as the support and strength of a bad
institution, but its guilt does not stop here. So plausible is it, so
essential to the very existence of the contemporary régime, so knit up
with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization
and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison,
the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of
comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at
recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone
may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a
most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the
greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial
commercial agents who opened up new and savage countries to Western
commerce through advertising commodities of which the natives had never
heard, and arousing in them a sense of acquisitiveness that meant more
wealth and business for trade and manufacture, which should support
foreign missions on this ground at least. More recently the head of an
advertising concern in New York is reported to have said: "It is
principally through advertising that we have arrived at the high degree
of civilization which this age enjoys, for advertising has taught us the
use of books and how to furnish our homes with the thousand and one
comforts that add so materially to our physical and intellectual
well-being. The future of the world depends on advertising. Advertising
is the salvation of civilization, for civilization cannot outlive
advertising a century."

It is tempting to linger over such a delectable morsel as this, for even
if it is only the absurd and irresponsible output of one poor, foolish
man, it does express more or less what industrial civilization holds to
be true, though few would avow their faith so whole-heartedly. The
statement was made as propaganda, and propaganda is merely advertising
in its most insidious and dangerous form. The thing revealed its
possibilities during the war, but the black discredit that was then very
justly attached to it could not prevail against its manifest potency,
and it is now universally used after the most comprehensive and
frequently unscrupulous fashion, with results that can only be perilous
in the extreme. The type and calibre of mind that has now been released
from long bondage, and by weight of numbers is now fast taking over the
direction of affairs, is curiously subservient to the written word, and
lacking a true sense of comparative values, without effective leadership
either secular or religious, is easily swayed by every wind of doctrine.
The forces of evil that are ever in conflict with the forces of right
are notoriously ingenious in making the worse appear the better cause,
and with every desire for illumination and for following the right way,
the multitude, whether educated or illiterate, fall into the falsehoods
of others' imaginings. Money, efficiency, an acquired knowledge of mob
psychology, the printing press and the mail service acting in alliance,
and directed by fanatical or cynical energy, form a force of enormous
potency that is now being used effectively throughout society. It is
irresponsible, anonymous and pervasive. Through its operation the last
barriers are broken down between the leadership of character and the
leadership of craft, while all formal distinctions between the valuable
and the valueless are swept away.

I have spoken at some length of this particular element in the present
condition of things, because in both its aspects, as the support of our
present industrial and economic system and as the efficient moulder of a
fluid and unstable public opinion, it is perhaps the strongest and most
subtle force of which we must take account.

With a system so prevalent as imperial industry, so knit up with every
phase of life and thought, and so determining a factor in all our
concepts, united as it is with two such invincible allies as advertising
and propaganda, it is inconceivable that it should be overthrown by any
human force from without. Holding it to be essentially wrong, it seems
to me providential that it is already showing signs of falling by its
own weight. Production of commodities has far exceeded production of the
means of payment, and society is now running on promises to pay, on
paper obligations, on anticipations of future production and sale, on
credit, in a word. The war has enormously magnified this condition until
an enforced liquidation would mean bankruptcy for all the nations of the
earth, while the production of utilities is decreasing in proportion to
the production of luxuries, labour is exacting increasing pay for
decreasing hours of work and quality of output, and the enormous
financial structure, elaborately and ingeniously built up through
several generations, is in grave danger of immediate catastrophe. The
whole world is in the position of an insolvent debtor who is so deeply
involved that his creditors cannot afford to let him go into bankruptcy,
and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor's Court by doling out support
from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going;
what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts
of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with
enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no
evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present
advantage sufficiently to make this possible; even if it did, payment
must be in the form of exchange or else in further promises to pay,
while the capacity of the world for consumption is limited somewhere,
though thus far "big business" has failed to recognize this fact. At
present the interest charges on debts, both public and private, have
reached a point where they come near to consuming all possible profits
even from a highly accelerated rate of production. Altogether it is
reasonable to assume that the present financial-industrial system is
near its term for reasons inherent in itself, let alone the possibility
of a further extension of the drastic and completely effective measures
of destruction that are characteristics of Bolshevism and its
blood-brothers.

Assuming that this is so, two questions arise: what is to take the place
of imperial industry, and how is this substitution to be brought about?

I think the answer to the first is: a social and industrial system based
on small, self-contained, largely self-sufficing units, where supply
follows demand, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where in all industrial operations some system will obtain which is more
or less that of the guilds of the Middle Ages. I should like to go into
this a little more in detail before trying to answer the second
question.

The normal social unit is a group of families predominantly of the same
race, territorially compact, of substantially the same ideals as
expressed in religion and the philosophy of life, and sufficiently
numerous to provide from within itself the major part of those things
which are necessary to physical, intellectual and spiritual well-being.
It should consist of a central nucleus of houses, each with its garden,
the churches, schools and public buildings that are requisite, the
manufactories and workshops that supply the needs of the community, the
shops for sale of those things not produced at home, and all necessary
places of amusement. Around this residential centre should be sufficient
agricultural land to furnish all the farm products that will be consumed
by the community itself. The nucleus of habitation and industry,
together with the surrounding farms, make up the social unit, which is
to the fullest possible degree, self-contained, self-sufficient and
self-governing.

Certain propositions are fundamental, and they are as follows: Every
family should own enough land to support itself at need. The farms
included in the unit must produce enough to meet the needs of the
population. Industry must be so organized that it will normally serve
the resident population along every feasible line. Only such things as
cannot be produced at home on account of climatic or soil limitations
should be imported from outside. All necessary professional services
should be obtainable within the community itself. All financial
transactions such as loans, credits, banking and insurance should be
domestic. Surplus products, whether agricultural, industrial or
professional, should be considered as by-products, and in no case should
the producing agency acquire such magnitude that home-consumption
becomes a side issue and production for profit take the place of
production for use.

All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present
system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore
vicious. I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the
failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the
factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of
industries, is equally objectionable. To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be
slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured
product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a
great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000
miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles,
while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren;
to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool
and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the
greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second
and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that
it belongs in Gulliver's Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly
intelligent people. The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to
the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and
forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and
reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer. The
penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large,
not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities,
each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same
work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active
co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of
the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social
synthesis.

With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an
almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour. Under a
right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified. The
dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as
possible each man should carry through one entire operation. This is of
course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization,
impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and
craftsmanship. The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done
away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is
only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made
to pay. Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is
reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social
units, but in the ideal community--and I am dealing now with ideals--it
would not exist.

Allied with this is the whole question of the factory method and the use
and misuse of machinery. It seems to me that the true principle is that
machinery and the factory are admissible only when so employed they
actually do produce, in bulk operations, a better product, and with less
labour, than is possible through hand work. Weaving, forging and all
work where human action must be more or less mechanical, offer a fair
field for the machine and the factory, but wherever the human element
can enter, where personality and the skilled craft of the hand are given
play, the machine and the factory are inadmissible. The great city,
creation of "big business," segregation of industries, advertising,
salesmanship and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built
up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines
where the handicraft should function. It becomes necessary--let us
say--to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million
dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years)
and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can
meet this demand. Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should
be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many
other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.

For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward
from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of
creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small
and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter
downward from above. This is the only true democracy, and the thing we
call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best
energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have
inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating,
tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the
sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society. Neither the
vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice
can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established
in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.

If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in
which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of
social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and
self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of
labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a
much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what
organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It
is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life
itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate
the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative
values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights
and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and
jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be
able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles,
and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic
forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.

I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society.
The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think,
follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages. They
will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English
protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be
variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the
basic principles will be preserved. Whatever happens, I am sure it will
not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and
profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in
any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Here, as in government, education and
social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline,
government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the
operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and
to the social and economic groups. We live now under a more tyrannical
and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its
democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records.
Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of
this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and
intolerable. We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last
semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a
nominal despotism or theocracy.

The guild system was the solution of the industrial problem offered and
enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed
the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if
conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern
institutions. "National guilds" is a contradiction in terms: it takes on
the same element of error that inheres in the idea of "one big union."
In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade
union, but it differed from it in more ways, and it seems to be true
that wherever this difference exists the guild was right and the union
is wrong. Community of fellowship and action amongst men of each craft
trade or calling is essential under any social system, good or bad, and
it would be inseparable from the better society that must sometime grow
up on the basis of the unit of human scale, for these autonomous groups,
in order to furnish substantially all that their component parts could
require, would have to be of considerable size as compared with the
little farming villages of New England, though in contrast with the
great cities of modernism they would be small indeed. In these new
"walled towns" there would be enough men engaged in agriculture, in the
necessary industrial occupations, in trade and in the professions to
form many guilds of workable size, and normally these guilds would
neither contain members of two or more professions or occupations, nor
those from outside the community itself. The guild cannot function under
intensive methods of production or where production is primarily for
profit, or where the factory system prevails, or where capitalism is the
established system, or under combinations, trusts or other devices for
the establishing and maintenance of great aggregates tending always
towards monopoly. However much we may admire the guild system and desire
its restoration, we may as well recognize this fact at once. The
imperial scale must go and the human scale be restored before the guild
can come back in any general sense.

I am assuming that this will happen, either through conscious action on
the part of the people or as the result of catastrophe that always
overtakes those who remain wedded to the illusions of falsity. On this
assumption what are these enduring principles that will control the
guild system of industry in the new State, however may be its form?

The answer is to be found in the old guilds, altars, shrines, vestments
and sacred vessels were given in incredible quantities for the
furnishing and embellishment of the chapel or church; funds also for the
maintenance of priestly offices especially dedicated to the guild.

Closely allied with the religious spirit was that of good-fellowship and
merrymaking. Every sort of feast and game and pageant was a part of the
guild system, as it was indeed of life generally at this time when men
did not have to depend upon hired professional purveyors of amusement
for their edification. What they wanted they did themselves, and this
community in worship and community in merrymaking did more even than the
merging of common material interests, to knit the whole body together
into a living organism.

In how far the old system can be revived and put into operation is a
question. Certainly it cannot be adopted as a fad and imposed on an
unwilling society as a clever archaeological restoration. It will have
to grow naturally out of life itself and along lines at present hardly
predicable. There are many evidences that just this spontaneous
generation is taking place. The guild system is being preached widely in
England where the defects of the present scheme are more obvious and the
resulting labour situation--or rather social situation--is more fraught
with danger than elsewhere, and already the restoration seems to have
made considerable headway. I am convinced, however, that the vital
aspects of the case are primarily due to the interior working of a new
spirit born of disillusionment and the undying fire in man that flames
always towards regeneration; what the ardent preaching of the
enthusiastic protagonists of the crusade best accomplishes is the
creation in the minds of those not directly associated with the movement
of a readiness to give sympathy and support to the actual accomplishment
when it manifests itself. Recently I have come in contact here in
America with several cases where the workmen themselves have broken away
from the old ways and have actually established what are to all intents
and purposes craft-guilds, without in the least realizing that they were
doing this.

I think the process is bound to continue, for the old order has broken
down and is so thoroughly discredited it can hardly be restored. If time
is granted us, great things must follow, but it is increasingly doubtful
if this necessary element of time can be counted on. Daily the situation
grows more menacing. Capital, which so long exploited labour to its own
fabulous profit, is not disposed to sit quiet while the fruits of its
labours and all prospects of future emoluments are being dissipated, and
it is hard at work striving to effect a "return to normalcy." In this it
is being unconsciously aided by the bulk of union labour which,
encouraged by the paramount position it achieved during the war,
influenced by an avarice it may well have learned from its former
masters, as narrow in its vision as they, and increasingly subservient
to a leadership which is frequently cynical and unscrupulous and always
of an order of character and intelligence which is tending to lower and
lower levels, is alienating sympathy and bringing unionism into
disrepute. In the United States the tendency is steadily towards a very
dangerous reactionism, with a corresponding strengthening of the radical
element which aims at revolution, and that impossible thing, a
proletarian dictatorship. It is this latter which is rampant and at
present unchecked in Europe, and this also is a constant menace to the
success of those sane and righteous movements which take their lead from
the guild system of the Middle Ages. A third danger, but one which is
constantly on the decline at present, partly because of the general
disrepute of governments and partly because of the enormous accessions
of power now accruing both to reactionism and radical revolutionism, or
"Bolshevism," is state socialism or nationalization, which leaves
untouched all the fatal elements in industrialism while it changes only
the agents of administration. The complete collapse of able and
constructive and righteous leadership, which is one of the startling
phenomena of modernism, has left uncontrolled the enormous energy that
has been released during the last three generations, and this is working
blindly but effectively towards a cataclysm so precipitate and
comprehensive that it is impossible not to fear that it may determine
long before the sober and informed elements in society have accomplished
very much in the recovery and establishment of sound and righteous
principles and methods.

Of course we can compass whichever result we will. We may shut our eyes
to the omens and let matters drift to disaster, or we may take thought
and council and avert the penalty that threatens us; the event is in our
own hands. It is as criminal to foresee and predict only catastrophe as
it is to compass this through lethargy, selfishness and illusion. We are
bound to believe that righteousness will prevail, even in our own time,
and believing this, what, in general terms will be the construction of
the new system that must take the place of industrialism?

I have already indicated what seem to me the fundamental ideas as: the
small social unit that is self-sustaining; production primarily for use,
coöperation in place of competition; a revived guild system with the
abolition of capitalism, exploitation and intensive specialization as we
now know these dominant factors in modern civilization. In the
application of these principles there are certain innovations that will,
I think, take place, and these may be listed somewhat as follows:

Land holding will become universal and the true proletariat or landless
class will disappear. It may be that the holding of land will become a
prerequisite to active citizenship. Industrial production being for use
not profit, the great city becomes a thing of the past, and life is
rendered simpler through the elimination of a thousand useless and
vicious luxuries; those employed in mechanical industries will be
incalculably fewer than now, while those that remain will give only a
portion of their time to industrial production, the remainder being
available for productive work on their own gardens and farms. The
handicrafts will be restored to their proper place and dignity, taking
over into creative labour large numbers of those who otherwise would be
sacrificed to the factory system. Where bulk production, as in weaving
and the preparation and manufacturing of metals, is economical and
unavoidable and carried on by factory methods, these manufactories will
probably be taken over by the several communities (not by the state as a
whole) and administered as public institutions for the benefit of the
community and under conditions and regulations which ensure justice and
well-being to the employees. All those in any community engaged in a
given occupation, as for example, building, will form one guild made up
of masters, journeymen and apprentices, with the same principles and
much the same methods as prevailed under the ancient guild system.
Fluctuating scales of prices determined by fluctuating conditions of
competition, supply and demand, and power of coercion, will give place
to "the fair price" fixed by concerted community action and revised from
time to time in order to preserve a right balance with the general scale
of cost of raw materials and cost of living. A maximum of returns in the
shape of profits or dividends will be fixed by law. The community itself
will undertake the furnishing of credits, loans and necessary capital
for the establishing of a new business, charging a small rate of
interest and maintaining a reserve fund to meet these operations.
Private banking, insurance and the loaning of money on collateral will
cease to exist.

I dare say this will all sound chimerical and irrational in the extreme;
I do not see it in that light. Its avowed object is the supersession of
"big business" in all its phases by something that comes down to human
scale. It aims to reduce labour and divide it more evenly by making the
great mass of non-producers--those engaged in distribution,
salesmanship, advertising, propaganda, and the furnishing of things
unnecessary to the bodily, intellectual and spiritual needs of
man--actual producers and self-supporting to a very large extent. It
aims at restoring to work some sense of the joy in creation through
active mind and hand. It aims at the elimination of the parasitic
element in society and of that dangerous factor which subsists on wealth
it acquires without earning, and by sheer force of its own opulence
dominates and degrades society. It does not strike at private ownership,
but rather exalts, extends and defends this, but it _does_ cut into all
the theories and practices of communism and socialism by establishing
the principle and practice of fellowship and coöperation. Is this
"chimerical and irrational"?

Meanwhile the "walled towns" do not exist and may not for generations.
"Big business" is indisposed to abrogate itself. Trade unionism is
fighting for its life and thereafter for world conquest, while the
enmity between capital and labour increases, with no evidence that a
restored guild system is even approximately ready to take its place.
Strikes and lockouts grow more and more numerous, and wider and more
menacing in their scope. The day of the "general strike" has only been
delayed at the eleventh hour in several countries, and a general strike,
if it can hold for a sufficient period, means, where-ever it occurs and
whenever it succeeds, the end of civilization and the loosing of the
floods of anarchy. There is hardly time for us patiently to await the
slow process of individual and corporate enlightenment or the
spontaneous development of the autonomous communities which, if they
were sufficient in number, would solve the problem through eliminating
the danger. What then, in the premises, can we do?

There are of course certain concrete things which might help, as for
instance the further extension and honest trying out of the "Kansas
plan" for regulating industrial relations; the forming of "consumers
leagues," and all possible support and furtherance of coöperative
efforts of every sort. There are further possibilities (perhaps hardly
probabilities) of controlling stock issues and stock holdings so that
dividends do not have to be paid on grossly inflated capitalization, and
fixing the maximum of dividends payable to non-active stockholders.
Equally desirable but equally improbable, is the raising of the level of
leadership in the labour unions so that these valuable institutions may
no longer stultify themselves and wreck their own cause by their unjust
and anti-social regulations as to apprentices, control of maximum output
and its standard of quality, division of labour with ironclad
inhibitions against one man doing another's work and against one man
doing what six men can do less well, and as to the obligation to strike
on order when no local or personal grievance exists. Most useful of all
would be a voluntary renunciation, on the part of the purchasing public,
of nine-tenths of the futile luxuries they now insanely demand, coupled
with the production by themselves of some of the commodities which are
easily producable; in other words, establishing some measure of
self-support and so releasing many men and women from the curse of
existence under factory conditions and giving them an opportunity of
living a normal life under self-supporting circumstances. This, coupled
with a fostering of the "back to the farm" movement, and the development
of conditions which would make this process more practicable and the
life more attractive, would do much, though in small ways, towards
producing a more wholesome and less threatening state of affairs.

Back of the whole problem, however, lies a fallacy in our conception of
existence that must be eliminated before even the most constructive
panaceas can possibly work. I mean the whole doctrine of natural rights
which has become the citadel of capitalism in all its most offensive
aspects, and of labour in its most insolent assumptions. The "rights" of
property, the "right" to strike, the "right" to collective bargaining,
the "right" to shut down an essential industry or to "walk out" and then
picket the place so that it may not be reopened, the "right" to vote and
hold office and do any fool thing you please so long as it is within the
law, these are applications of what I mean when I speak of a gross
fallacy that has come into being and has stultified our intelligence
while bringing near the wrecking of our whole system.

Neither man nor his community possesses any _absolute_ rights; they are
all conditioned on how they are exercised. If they are not so
conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to
conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and
democracy and every other effort towards human emancipation have set
themselves up to destroy. Even the "right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness" is conditioned by the manner of use, and the same
is true of every other and unspecified right. I do not propose to speak
here of more than one aspect of this self-evident truth, but the single
instance I cite is one that bears closely on the question of our
industrial and economic situation; it is the responsibility to society
of property or capital on the one hand and of labour on the other, when
both invoke their "rights" to justify them in oppressing the general
public in the pursuit of their own natural interests.

During the Middle Ages, just as the political theory maintained that
while a king ruled by divine right, this right gave him no authority to
govern wrong, so the social theory held that while a man had a right to
private property he had no right to use it against society, nor could
the labourer use his own rights to the injury of the same institution.
Power, property and labour must be used as a _function_, i.e., "an
activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose."
Unless I am mistaken, this is at the basis of our "common law."

As Mediaevalism gave place to the Renaissance this Christian idea was
abandoned, and increasingly the obligation was severed from the right,
which so became that odious thing, privilege. Intolerable in its
injustice and oppression, this privilege, which by the middle of the
eighteenth century had become the attribute of the aristocracy, was
completely overthrown, in France first of all, and a new doctrine of
rights was enunciated and put in operation. Unfortunately the result was
in essence simply a transforming of privilege from one body to another,
for the old conception of social purpose, as the necessary concomitant
of acknowledged rights, did not emerge from the shadows of the Middle
Ages; it had been too long forgotten. The new "rights" were exclusively
individualistic, in practice, though in the minds of the idealists who
formulated them, they had their social aspect. Their promulgation
synchronized with the sudden rise and violent expansion of
industrialism, and as one country after another followed the lead of
England in accepting the new system, they hardened into an iron-clad
scheme for the defence of property and the free action of the holders
and manipulators of property. Backed by the economic philosophy of
Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the
evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an
endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property
holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their
property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism.
Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially. Rights were
personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they
were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.

Now the result of this profound error as to the existence, nature and
limitation of these personal rights has meant simply the destruction of
a righteous and unified society which works by coöperation and
fellowship, and the substitution of individuals and corporate bodies who
work by competition, strife and mutual aggression towards the attainment
of all they can get under the impulse of what was once praised as
"enlightened self interest." In other words--war. The conflict that
began in 1914 was not a war hurled into the midst of a white peace, it
was only a military war arising in the centre of a far greater social
war, for there is no other word that is descriptive. Rights that are not
contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but
hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which
in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both
precedes and follows conflict.

The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice,
warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is
rampant--for a time--and warfare of one sort or another seems
inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but
hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is
its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is
synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to
its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its
turn. Righteous anger roused the nations into the war that hate had
engendered, but hate has followed after and for the moment is
victorious. Russia seethes with hatred and is perishing of its poison,
while there is not another country in Europe, of those that were
involved in the war, where the same is not true in varying degrees;
hatred of race for race, of nation for nation, of class for class, of
one social or industrial or economic or political institution for
another. This, above all else, is the disintegrating influence, and
against it no social organism, no civilization can stand. Unless it is
abrogated it means an ending of another epoch of human life, a period of
darkness and another beginning, some time after the poison has been
worked out by misery, adversity and forced repentance.

It is this prevalence of hatred, reinforced by avarice and perpetuated
by incessant warfare, that negatives all the efforts that are made
towards effecting a correspondence between the divided interests that
are the concomitant of industrialism. Strikes and lockouts, trades
unions and employers' associations as they are now constituted and as
they now operate, syndicalism and Bolshevism and proletarian
dictatorships, protective tariffs and commercial spheres of influence,
propaganda and subsidized newspapers are all energized by the principle
of hate, and no good thing can come of any of them. Nor is it enough to
work for the re-establishment of justice even by those methods of
righteousness, and with the impulse towards righteousness, which are so
different from those which are functioning at present along the lines of
contemporary industrial "reform." Justice is a "natural" virtue with a
real place in society, but the only saving force today is a supernatural
virtue. This, amongst other things, Christ brought into the world and
left as the saving force amongst the race He had redeemed and in the
society reconstituted in accordance with His will. This supernatural
virtue is Charity, sometimes expressed in the simpler form of Love, the
essence of the social code of Christianity and the symbol of the New
Dispensation as justice was the symbol of the Old. Just in so far as a
man or a cult or an interest or a corporation or a state or a generation
or a race, relinquishes charity as its controlling spirit, in so far it
relinquishes its place in Christian society and its claim to the
Christian name, while it is voided of all power for good or possibility
of continuance. Where charity is gone, intellectual capacity, effectual
power, and even justice itself become, not energies of good, but potent
contributions to evil. Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of
contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in
the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest,
between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of
Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its
enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once
consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an
acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution.

I am not charging any class or any interest or any people with exclusive
apostacy. In the end there is little to choose between one or another.
Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the
industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than
the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful
acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself,
industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and
derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to
condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery
be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. Charity,
that is to say, fellowship, generosity, pity, self-sacrifice, chivalry,
all that is comprehended in the thing that Christ was, and preached, and
promulgated as the fundamental law of life, cannot come back to the
world so long as avarice, warfare and hate continue to exist, and
through Charity alone can we find the solution of the industrial and
economic problem that _must_ be solved under penalty of social death.




V


THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY

In these essays, which look towards a new social synthesis, I find
myself involved in somewhat artificial subdivisions. Industrial, social
and political forces all react one upon another, and the complete social
product is the result of the interplay of these forces, coördinated and
vitalized by philosophy, education and religion. To isolate each factor
and consider it separately is apt to result in false values, but there
seems no other way in which the subject, which is essentially one, may
be divided into the definite parts which are consequent on the form of a
course of lectures. In considering now the political estate of the human
social organism it will be evident that I hold that this must be
contingent on many elements that reveal themselves in a contributory
industrial system, in the principles that are embodied in social
relationships, and in the general scheme of such a working philosophy of
life as may predominate amongst the component parts of the synthetic
society which is the product of all these varied energies and the
organic forms through which they operate.

Political organization has always been a powerful preoccupation of
mankind, and the earliest records testify to its antiquity. The
regulation of human intercourse, the delimiting of rights and
privileges, protection of life and property, the codifying of laws,
vague, various and conflicting, the making of new laws and the enforcing
of those that have taken organic form; all these and an hundred other
governmental functions, appeal strongly to the mind and touch closely on
personal interests. It is no wonder that the political history of human
society is the most varied, voluminous and popular in its appeal. At the
present moment this problem has, in general, an even more poignant
appeal, and no rival except the industrial problem, for in both cases
systems that, up to ten years ago, were questioned only by a minority
(large in the case of industry, small and obscure in the case of
government) have since completely broken down, and it is probable that a
political system which had existed throughout the greater part of Europe
and the Americas for a century and a half, almost without serious
criticism, has now as many assailants as industrialism itself.

The change is startling from the "Triumphant Democracy" period, a space
of time as clearly defined and as significant in its characteristics as
the "Victorian Era." Before the war, during the war, and throughout the
earlier years of the even more devastating "peace," the system which
followed the ruin of the Renaissance autocracies, the essential elements
in which were an ever-widening suffrage, parliamentary government, and
the universal operation of the quantitative standard of values, was
never questioned or criticised, except in matters of detail. That it was
the most perfect governmental scheme ever devised and that it must
continue forever, was held to be axiomatic, and with few exceptions the
remedy proposed for such faults as could not possibly escape detection
was a still further extension of the democratic principle. Even the war
itself was held to be "a war to make the world safe for democracy." It
is significant that the form in which this saying now frequently appears
is one in which the word "from" is substituted in place of the word
"for." It is useless to blink the fact that there is now a distrust of
parliamentary and representative government which is almost universal
and this distrust, which is becoming widespread, reaches from the
Bolshevism of Russia on the one hand, through many intermediate social
and intellectual stages, to the conservative elements in England and the
United States, and the fast-strengthening royalist "bloc" in France.

In many unexpected places there is visible a profound sense that
something is so fundamentally wrong that palliatives are useless and
some drastic reform is necessary, a reform that may almost amount to
revolution. Lord Bryce still believes in democracy in spite of his keen
realizations of its grievous defects, because, as he says, hope is an
inextinguishable quality of the human soul. Mr. Chesterton preaches
democracy in principle while condemning its mechanism and its workings
with his accustomed vigour; the Adamses renounce democracy and all its
works while offering no hint as to what could consistently take its
place with any better chance of success, while the royalists excoriate
it in unmeasured terms and preach an explicit return to monarchy.
Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do
kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized
labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious
proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established
a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will
hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general
public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its
own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by
experience it cannot mend.

It is useless to deny that government, in the character of its
personnel, the quality of its output, the standard of its service and
the degree of its beneficence has been steadily deteriorating during the
last century and has now reached, in nearly every civilized country, a
deplorably low level. Popular representatives are less and less men of
character and ability; legislation is absurd in quantity, short-sighted,
frivolous, inquisitorial, and in a large measure prompted by selfish
interests; administration is reckless, wasteful and inefficient, while
it is overloaded in numbers, without any particular aptitude on the part
of its members, and in a measure controlled by personal or corporate
interests. The whole system is in bad odour for it is shot through and
through with the greed for money and influence, while the cynicism of
the professional politician and the low average of character,
intelligence and manners of the strata of society that increasingly are
usurping all power, work towards producing that general contempt and
aversion that have become so evident of late and that are a menace to
society no less than that of the decaying institution itself.

Confronted by a situation such as this, the natural tendency of those
who suffer under it, either in their material interests or their ideals,
is to condemn the mechanism, perhaps even the very principles for the
operation of which the various machines were devised. Some reject the
whole scheme of representative, parliamentary government, and, failing
any plausible substitute, are driven back on some form of the soviet, or
even government by industrial groups. Those that go to the limit and
reject the whole scheme of democracy are in still worse plight for they
have no alternative to offer except a restored monarchy, and this, the
_terminus ad quem_ of their logic, their courage will not permit them to
avow.

It is a dilemma, but forced, I believe, by the fatal passion of the man
of modernism for the machine, the mechanical device, the material
equivalent for a thing that has no equivalent, and that is the personal
character of the constituents of society and the working factors in a
political organism. There was never a more foolish saying than that
which is so frequently and so boastfully used: "a government of laws and
not of men." This is the exact reversal of what should be recognized as
a self-evident truth, viz, that the quality of the men, not the nature
of the laws or of the administrative machine, is the determining factor
in government. You may take any form of government ever devised by man,
monarchy, aristocracy, republic, democracy, yes, or soviet, and if the
community in which this government operates has a working majority of
men of character, intelligence and spiritual energy, it will be a good
government, whereas if the working majority is deficient in these
characteristics, or if it makes itself negligible by abstention from
public affairs it will be a bad government. There is no one political
system which is right while all others are wrong. The monarchy of St.
Louis was better than the Third Republic, as this is better than was the
monarchy of Louis XV. The aristocracy of Washington was better than the
democracy of this year of grace, as this in itself is better than the
late junker aristocracy of Prussia. You cannot substitute a machine in
place of character, you cannot supersede life by a theory.

This does not mean that the form of government is of no moment, it is of
the utmost importance for I cannot too often insist that the organic
life of society is the resultant of two forces; spiritual energy working
through and upon the material forms towards their improvement or--when
this energy is weak or distorted--thei

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