第 五十九 章 · World

The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest characters among the

small group of honest enthusiasts who were responsible for the outbreak

of the great French Revolution. He had devoted his life to the cause

of the poor and the unfortunate. He had been one of the assistants

of d’Alembert and Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopédie.

During the first years of the Revolution he had been the leader of the

Moderate wing of the Convention.

His tolerance, his kindliness, his stout common sense, had made him

an object of suspicion when the treason of the king and the court

clique had given the extreme radicals their chance to get hold of the

government and kill their opponents. Condorcet was declared “hors de

loi,” or outlawed, an outcast who was henceforth at the mercy of every

true patriot. His friends offered to hide him at their own peril.

Condorcet refused to accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to

reach his home, where he might be safe. After three nights in the open,

torn and bleeding, he entered an inn and asked for some food. The

suspicious yokels searched him and in his pockets they found a copy of

Horace, the Latin poet. This showed that their prisoner was a man of

gentle breeding and had no business upon the highroads at a time when

every educated person was regarded as an enemy of the Revolutionary

state. They took Condorcet and they bound him and they gagged him and

they threw him into the village lock-up, but in the morning when the

soldiers came to drag him back to Paris and cut his head off, behold!

he was dead.

This man who had given all and had received nothing had good reason to

despair of the human race. But he has written a few sentences which

ring as true to-day as they did one hundred and thirty years ago. I

repeat them here for your benefit.

“Nature has set no limits to our hopes,” he wrote, “and the picture

of the human race, now freed from its chains and marching with a firm

tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness, offers to the

philosopher a spectacle which consoles him for the errors, for the

crimes and the injustices which still pollute and afflict this earth.”

[Illustration: WAR]

The world has just passed through an agony of pain compared to which

the French Revolution was a mere incident. The shock has been so great

that it has killed the last spark of hope in the breasts of millions of

men. They were chanting a hymn of progress, and four years of slaughter

followed their prayers for peace. “Is it worth while,” so they ask, “to

work and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed

beyond the stage of the earliest cave men?”

There is but one answer.

That answer is “Yes!”

The World War was a terrible calamity. But it did not mean the end of

things. On the contrary it brought about the coming of a new day.

It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages.

The actors who played their parts upon that long-forgotten stage are

all dead. We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that

applauded their efforts has dispersed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt

their feelings.

But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary

events. The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we

pass through life, are our own problems, and they hurt us too much or

they please us too well to be described with that fairness which is

necessary when we are writing history and not blowing the trumpet of

propaganda. All the same I shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with

poor Condorcet when he expressed his firm faith in a better future.

Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is

created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the

story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the

Renaissance and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these

terms is the most dangerous. The word “modern” implies that we, the

people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement.

Fifty years ago the liberals of England who followed the leadership

of Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representative and

democratic form of government had been solved forever by the second

great Reform Bill, which gave workmen an equal share in the government

with their employers. When Disraeli and his conservative friends talked

of a dangerous “leap in the dark” they answered “No.” They felt certain

of their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would

co-operate to make the government of their common country a success.

Since then many things have happened, and the few liberals who are

still alive begin to understand that they were mistaken.

There is no definite answer to any historical problem.

Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those

sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished.

If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much

broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine

yourself in the position of your own great-great-grandchildren who will

take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But

what will they think of those short four thousand years during which

we have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts?

They will think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the

Assyrian conqueror. Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan

or Alexander the Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an

end will appear in the light of that long commercial conflict which

settled the supremacy of the Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage

fought during one hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of

the sea. The Balkan troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for

freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) to them

will seem a continuation of the disordered conditions caused by the

Great Migrations. They will look at pictures of the Rheims cathedral

which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns as we look upon a

photograph of the Acropolis ruined two hundred and fifty years ago

during a war between the Turks and the Venetians. They will regard

the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a

childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of men who

had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our

laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud will look

like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and mediæval surgeons.

And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are

not “modern” at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last

generations of the cave-dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid

but yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become

truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made

“knowledge and understanding” the foundation upon which to create a

more reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great War

was the “growing-pain” of this new world.

[Illustration: THE SPREAD OF THE IMPERIAL IDEA]

For a long time to come people will write mighty books to prove that

this or that or the other person brought about the war. The Socialists

will publish volumes in which they will accuse the “capitalists” of

having brought about the war for “commercial gain.” The capitalists

will answer that they lost infinitely more through the war than they

made—that their children were among the first to go and fight and be

killed—and they will show how in every country the bankers tried their

very best to avert the outbreak of hostilities. French historians will

go through the register of German sins from the days of Charlemagne

until the days of William of Hohenzollern and German historians will

return the compliment and will go through the list of French horrors

from the days of Charlemagne until the days of President Poincaré.

And then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other

fellow was guilty of “causing the war.” Statesmen, dead and not yet

dead, in all countries will take to their typewriters and they will

explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked

opponents forced them into it.

The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about these

apologies and vindications. He will understand the real nature of the

underlying causes and he will know that personal ambitions and personal

wickedness and personal greed had very little to do with the final

outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this

misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world

of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the

human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the

well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years

behind the small group of courageous leaders.

A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle

and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a

sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human

being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.

If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It will become

clearer to you in a moment and it will explain many things that have

happened these last six years.

Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, to show you

what I mean. In the movie theatres, jokes and funny remarks are often

thrown upon the screen. Watch the audience the next time you have a

chance. A few people seem almost to inhale the words. It takes them but

a second to read the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take

from twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who do not

read any more than they can help, get the point when the brighter ones

among the audience have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It

is not different in human life, as I shall now show you.

In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire

continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last

Roman Emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of

“imitation empires.” It gave the Bishops of Rome a chance to make

themselves the head of the entire church, because they represented the

idea of Roman world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless

barbarian chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare because

they were for ever under the spell of this magic word “Rome.” All these

people, Popes, Emperors and plain fighting men were not very different

from you or me. But they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was

a vital issue—something living—something which was remembered clearly

both by the father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled

and sacrificed themselves for a cause which to-day would not find a

dozen recruits.

In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious

wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the

Reformation and if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years

War with that on Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery

took place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already

puffing in the laboratories of a number of French and German and

English scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these

strange contraptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion

which to-day causes yawns, but no anger.

And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian will use the

same words about Europe of the out-going nineteenth century, and he

will see how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles

while the laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk

who cared not one whit for politics as long as they could force nature

to surrender a few more of her million secrets.

You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The

engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation,

filled Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with

their telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They

created a new world in which time and space were reduced to complete

insignificance. They invented new products and they made these so cheap

that almost every one could buy them. I have told you all this before

but it certainly will bear repeating.

To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the owners, who

had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw materials and coal.

Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking

in terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and clinging to the

old notions of the state as a dynastic or political organisation. This

clumsy mediæval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle

the highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It

did its best, according to the rules of the game which had been laid

down centuries before. The different states created enormous armies

and gigantic navies which were used for the purpose of acquiring new

possessions in distant lands. Wherever there was a tiny bit of land

left, there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian

colony. If the natives objected, they were killed. In most cases they

did not object, and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did

not interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines

or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they derived many

benefits from the foreign occupation.

Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials

wanted the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a

war. This occurred fifteen years ago when Russia and Japan fought

for the possession of certain territories which belonged to the

Chinese people. Such conflicts, however, were the exception. No one

really desired to fight. Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and

battleships and submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early

20th century. They associated the idea of violence with the long-ago

age of unlimited monarchies and intriguing dynasties. Every day they

read in their papers of still further inventions, of groups of English

and American and German scientists who were working together in perfect

friendship for the purpose of an advance in medicine or in astronomy.

They lived in a busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But

only a few noticed that the development of the state, (of the gigantic

community of people who recognise certain common ideals,) was lagging

several hundred years behind. They tried to warn the others. But the

others were occupied with their own affairs.

I have used so many similes that I must apologise for bringing in

one more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted expression which

is ever new and always picturesque,) of the Egyptians and the Greeks

and the Romans and the Venetians and the merchant adventurers of

the seventeenth century had been a sturdy craft, constructed of

well-seasoned wood, and commanded by officers who knew both their crew

and their vessel and who understood the limitations of the art of

navigating which had been handed down to them by their ancestors.

Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. First one part,

then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions

were increased. The sails were discarded for steam. Better living

quarters were established, but more people were forced to go down into

the stoke-hole, and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative,

they did not like it as well as their old and more dangerous job

in the rigging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden

square-rigger had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. But the

captain and the mates remained the same. They were appointed or elected

in the same way as a hundred years before. They were taught the same

system of navigation which had served the mariners of the fifteenth

century. In their cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which

had done service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. In

short, they were (through no fault of their own) completely incompetent.

The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those

Imperial and Colonial liners began to try and outrun each other,

accidents were bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the

wreckage if you venture to pass through that part of the ocean.

And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful

need of men who will assume the new leadership—who will have the

courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are

only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new

system of seamanship.

They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. They will

have to fight their way to the top against every possible form of

opposition. When they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious crew may

cause their death. But some day, a man will arise who will bring the

vessel safely to port, and he shall be the hero of the ages.