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Title: The nemesis of mediocrity
Author: Ralph Adams Cram
Release date: June 19, 2026 [eBook #78895]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1917
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78895
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY ***
THE NEMESIS
OF MEDIOCRITY
By
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
LITT.D., LL.D.
BOSTON
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
MDCCCCXXI
_Copyright, 1917, 1919_
By Marshall Jones Company
_All rights reserved_
First printing, December, 1917
Second printing, May, 1918
Third printing, March, 1919
Fourth printing, June, 1921
THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY
“Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. The
Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power
from the beginning. Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men
renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding,
and declaring prophecies. Leaders of the people by their counsels,
and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people; wise and
eloquent in their instructions. Such as find out musical tunes and
recited verses in writing. Rich men furnished with ability, living
peaceably in their habitations: All these were honoured in their
generations and were the glory of their times.”--ECCLESIASTICUS:
XLIV.
Already the revelations of war have cast their searching and mordant
light on all that was brought over to us out of the last century, and
nothing is as it seemed in those far and half mythical days when there
was no war and we maintained a serene content well grounded on its
broad base of solid accomplishment. It was a proud, even an august
possession, this hoard of coined wealth such as men had never gathered
before, made up as it was of all the broad and shining counters minted
out of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, and with this vast
reserve our solvency seemed beyond suspicion. The touch of war is
like that of the magician in the fairy tale, and enough of the bright
counters already have turned to dried and worthless leaves to make
us wonder if in the end a single coin may remain to us, honest gold,
unclipped and undebased.
Some day the count of these revelations will be made up, but now the
tale is not fully told, and we wait, aghast, as each day some old
truism crumbles into folly, some dogma shows thin and evanescent, some
fundamental principle of modernism reveals itself as a superstition
as groundless as those we long ago had cast away. Meanwhile “here we
have no continuing city;” the sands slide under our feet, and we touch
nothing tangible as we reach out for support in a darkness that shows
no sign of breaking.
Amongst these revelations there is none more unexpected, more baffling
in the fact of its existence or broader in its ramifications, than the
loss of leadership. To-day, when men cry aloud, as never before, for
guides, interpreters, leaders, there is none to answer; in any category
of life, issuing out of any nation. None, that is, that matches in
power the exigency of the demand. There are those that honestly try to
lead; there are those that increasingly lead under the grim schooling
of war, slowly, painfully and towards an end still obscure and
undetermined. Arduously they struggle to build up a following, to see
the insane life of the moment and see it whole; to keep ahead of the
whirlwind of hell-let-loose and direct an amazed and disordered society
along paths of ultimate safety. And always the event outdistances them,
the phantasmagoria of chaos whirls bewilderingly beyond, and either
they follow helplessly or are sucked into the rushing vacuum that comes
in the wake of progressive destruction. In the immediate necessity of
war one august general after another receives command, plays his part
for a day, and disappears, marked by comparative failure if not by
demonstrated incompetence. Potential reputations break down and are
forgotten, in Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Galicia, Roumania, the Trentino,
the Carso, Champagne, the Argonne: on the North Sea, in the Channel,
through the Mediterranean. The battle fronts east, west, south, bury
more than the bodies of dead soldiers, for reputations are interned
with them in a quick and merciful oblivion.
Still, fate is a whimsical arbiter, whose operations are unaccountable,
and any day may appear the great leaders thus far coldly refused to
the desperate and death-locked armies, but there is little hope for
a like mercy in statesmanship. The years just before the war were
tumultuous with the petty machinations of the degenerate political
and diplomatic successors of the masterly manipulators of destiny of
the nineteenth century. Noble or cynical, they were leaders, these
men of a dead generation: Metternich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck,
Gladstone, Gambetta, Lincoln, and they have left few successors, either
to their glory or their infamy. Can there be honest comparison between
the political leaders in Great Britain to-day and Peel, Palmerston,
Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury, between the flotsam and jetsam of
French parliamentary turbulence and Thiers, Gambetta, de Freycinet?
Contrast the men now controlling the destinies of Italy with those
of the epoch of the Liberation; match the present politicians of
Germany with those to the front from 1870 to 1895; place in one column
the members of President Wilson’s Cabinet, the leaders in Congress,
the Governors of the several States, and in the other the American
political forces from 1860 on for the space of a generation. Whether
you like them all or not, these men of an elder age, one thing you must
concede, and that is their capacity and their dominance as leaders.
So one might traverse the fields of religion, philosophy, literature,
art, education, matching each man who claims or is accorded priority,
with those of the immediate past whose historical place is now as
assured as was their acceptance during their lives. Long after the
contemporary list finds “finis” written beneath, the other calendar
continues until its length is greater by tenfold. Not only this, but
there is unquestioned difference in quality; as between Harmsworth and
Gladstone, Bryan and Cleveland, Benedict XV and Leo XIII, Wells and
Emerson, Ornstein and Brahms. The leaders that once were, found their
following through comprehension of their own force and dominance, those
that are now, _faute de mieux_, and because there are no others to lead.
Inch by inch the valleys are being filled and the mountains brought
low. More arduously the man stronger than another lifts above the
level uniformity; a few still continue, lasting over from an earlier
generation, but in a year or two they also will pass, and few indeed
are rising to take their place. Meanwhile “the hungry sheep look up,
and are not fed,” for the soul of sane man demands leadership, and in
spite of academic aphorisms on Equality, a dim consciousness survives
of the fundamental truth that without strong leadership democracy is a
menace; without strong leadership culture and even civilization will
pass away.
Now as always the great mass of men look for the master-man who can
form in definite shape the aspirations and the instincts that in them
are formless and amorphous; who can lead where they are more than
willing to follow, but themselves cannot mark the way; who can act as
a centripetal force and gather into potent units the diffuse atoms of
like will but without co-ordinating ability. So great is this central
human instinct (which was not only the foundation of feudalism but
harks back to the very beginnings of society), that when the great
leader is not revealed he is invented out of the more impudent element
of any potential group, assurance taking the place of competence;
or optimistically assumed, the most available being dragged from his
obscurity and pitched into a position, or burdened with a task, outside
the limits of his ability--as he himself only too often knows.
And as the supply of leaders diminishes the more reckless becomes the
desperate choice. It is perhaps not so much that men now reject all
leadership as it is that they blindly accept the inferior type; the
specious demagogue, the unscrupulous master of effrontery. Men follow
to-day as they always have and always will, the difference lies in the
quality of those that are followed. In default of the leader of the
old type, the man who first saw beyond the obvious and drew others
after him by force of vision and will and personal quality, the group,
and the super-group which we call the mob, create their leaders in
their own image, and out of their own material. Giolitti and Caillaux,
Ramsay Macdonald, Lenine and La Follette are the synthetic product
of a mechanical process of self-expression on the part of groups of
men without leaders, but who must have them and so make shift to
precipitate them in material form out of the undifferentiated mass of
their common inclinations, passions and prejudices.
It is because of this that religion is no longer marked by the
dominance of figures like St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard,
St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, or even like Luther, Calvin,
John Wesley, but rather by the uncouth flotsam of the intellectual
underworld or the obscurantist _faquirs_ of a decadent Orientalism. It
is because of this that no longer a Plato or an Aristotle, a St. Thomas
Aquinas, or a Duns Scotus, a Kant, a Descartes, or a Herbert Spencer
controls the destinies of philosophy, but semi-converted novelists,
jejune instructors in psychology, and imperfectly developed but
sufficiently voluble journalists. It is because of this that salutary
movements like socialism, trades-unionism and political reform are
betrayed by the leaders that, for lack of better, have been pitchforked
into pre-eminence, and who, degraded and debased by dulness, obliquity
of vision and crude incompetence, become not a benefit but a menace.
The argument that we are too near the present (since we ourselves
_are_ the present) to estimate greatness or establish our standard of
comparative values, but that another generation will find amongst our
contemporaries what we have missed, has no validity. I am speaking
of leadership, and leadership is not posthumous. We knew, those of
us who entered into the activities of life about 1880, that we were
“surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses,” that the world was so rich
in leadership--either for wisdom or folly--we lacked no possible
followings for our choice, but rather were confused by the plethora of
options. There was no doubt then that there were great men around and
about us. We were all hero-worshippers then, and there was sufficient
reason for our worship. I have made a list of the men who were living
in 1880, all of whom were great captains, and who would be accepted by
all as leaders of men: there are sixty of them, and I can add another
hundred of only a little less eminence, but whose claims some might
contest. All of these hundred and sixty “immortals” had died before
1905, and I challenge anyone to fill a tenth of the places they left
vacant with the names, unknown in 1880, of men whose claim can be
unquestioned.
A generation that contains such a group as Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin,
Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Bismarck, Disraeli, Cavour,
Wagner, Browning, William Morris, Tourgeneff, Stevenson, Leo XIII,
Cardinal Newman, Karl Marx and von Moltke is a generation that lacks
nothing in leadership, and when is added a further century and a half
of names, all practically of the same grade and class, we can only look
back on those astonishing years with admiration, and then around at
our own time, with the greatest issues in a thousand years clamouring
for solution and almost none to lead in the solving, appalled and
despairing, while we reach out blindly for some explanation of the
cataclysm that has occurred.
There are those who will claim that the leadership has not been lost
but only changed in direction. They will say that the leaders are now
to be found in the ranks of applied science, of industrial exploitation
and organization, of high finance and economic “efficiency.” They
will offer as their contribution Edison and Marconi and Krupp; Sage,
Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie and the great Hebrew financiers of
Europe. They will offer Ford, Harmsworth, Hearst; the packers of
Chicago, the mill magnates of New England, the coal and iron barons of
Pennsylvania. Their contention may be admitted; the leadership exists,
and it _has_ changed direction; the point is, however, that this
leadership, while it may conceivably supplement that of an earlier day
in other fields, may, under no circumstance whatever, be assumed to
serve as a substitute.
Mr. Abraham Flexner may well be held to contribute something (its
essential value is not for the moment in question) to the idea of
education as it was expounded by Cardinal Newman or Arnold of Rugby;
Mr. Carnegie’s vision of culture is not one that came within the
purview of Emerson or Matthew Arnold or William Morris, while the
original and varied, if not always edifying, religious cults of the
last generation open up possibilities not indicated by Dr. Martineau
or Bishop Brooks or even Cardinal Manning. Certainly there is
something in _vers libre_ and post-impressionism and the products of
the cubist sculptors that escapes one in Browning and Burne-Jones and
Saint-Gaudens. Considered in a supplementary sense these protagonists
of modernism may be an extension of the principles of their immediate
precursors (even of all antecedent creators and leaders during the
entire range of recorded history), but when it is assumed that they
take their place the argument needs fortifying by something other than
either the dictum itself or their own accomplishments.
In any case the day of great leaders has passed. If we take the
Cardinal of Malines as a standard, as one man at least who measures up
to the great controlling and directing agencies of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, we shall find it hard to pick others to place
in his class. Certainly not the successor of Leo XIII and Innocent III,
of Gregory VII and Gregory the Great; nor any of the present College
of Cardinals. Honour and devotion, learning and piety are not wanting,
but where is the vision, where the qualities of command and domination,
where the power and the will that mark the captains of men? Neither
from Rome nor Moscow nor Canterbury, neither from the Episcopal Church
nor from the Protestant denominations, comes the high call for men
to rise up and follow along the lines revealed by clear vision and
under the dynamic force of personal leadership. Halting and hesitant,
bewildered by opportunism and expediency, dumb before a crisis beyond
their powers to meet, the shepherds and pastors of flocks already
more than decimated, shake in their indecision, put the great issue
to one side, and while they wait helplessly for a time more in scale
with their abilities, turn to the old round of theological argument
and disciplinary bickerings, leaving the fate of their sheep to be
determined after a fashion they cannot control, and the humbler clergy
busy themselves with parochial routine or, to their honour, find on
the blazing and thundering battle fronts of all Europe opportunity for
heroic service in the trenches and often a glorious death.
Nor in philosophy is the condition very different. There were not
wanting, in the immediate years before the war, men of “light and
leading,” though apart from Bergson, James and Chesterton (though
it may seem strange to name the last in this connection), they were
hardly of the calibre of their forebears. James is dead, Bergson almost
completely silent, while Chesterton, perhaps under the compulsion of
his grave illness, fails to meet the standard of his earlier period,
except perhaps in “The Crimes of England” and “A Short History of
England.” Dr. Jacks comes well to the fore on occasion, and Dr. Figgis
and March Phillips, but Bernard Shaw has silenced his philosophical
cynicism and Wells alone insists on his own narrow vision, brought
over from the ante-bellum epoch, with all its mechanistic formulæ and
indeterminate determinism.
Of all the ruined sanctuaries, that of statesmanship is the most
desolate. It was sufficiently laid waste in the years just before the
war, when diplomacy, degenerate and incompetent, toiled along the
dishonoured road that led from the Congress of Berlin. Into the coil
of cynicism and trickery, Edward VII and President Cleveland brought
some elements of honesty and good sense, but the chancelleries of
Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, Petersburg were united in one thing,
and that their devotion to the secret, the serpentine and the oblique.
The “Balance of Power,” poisonous heritage from the Treaty of Berlin,
controlled all that was thought or done, and under its malignant spell
considerations of honour, justice and righteousness vanished from
the secret deliberations of the various and ever-changing groups of
inferior conspirators. Since the opening of the war small men, pitched
neck-and-crop into big places, have struggled against this legacy, and
with scant success. Government in France at the opening of the first
of the Seven Seals, was a tangle of political corruption complicated
by terror of what socialism would demand next; the prolonged crisis
has produced--Briand, and no more, a small man, strengthened by
responsibility and opportunity, who bore himself with firmness and
honesty. He has now been deposed through the machinations of the still
operative political cabals, to give place to the venerable but neither
stimulating nor convincing Ribot, the colourless Painlevé and the
superannuated Clemenceau. England offered Asquith, a somewhat sinuous
and agile mediocrity now smashed by an extraordinary journalistic
phenomenon who has also been largely responsible for Lloyd George,
another small man, essentially the middle-class demagogue of the first
decade of the century, who has also been fortified and chastened by
the compelling force of anomalous circumstances. With him appear men
like Churchill, still bending under the weight of tragic fiascos,
Carson, whom the war saved from becoming a rebel and an outlaw,
together with a numerous clan of financiers and industrial magnates,
some of whom had already exchanged their historic Hebraic cognomens for
others associated, if not with their own genealogy, at least with the
Norman conquest. Italy, after getting rid of her political hucksters
and demagogues, has produced none of even moderate distinction to
take their place. In the Balkans Jonescu and the Cretan Venezelos
arrived with some heralding of trumpets, but neither has succeeded
in accomplishing anything in particular, and both are now relegated
to the category of geniuses “without the enacting clause.” Leaping
suddenly into the Russian limelight come Miliukoff, Count Lvoff and
Kerensky; the revolution is effected, the exaltation of the “Oath of
the Tennis Court” is repeated, and at once, from far down amongst the
submerged majority, anarchy and insane folly rise up, insistent, not to
be denied, and already their power is in eclipse, extinguished by the
rising tide of nihilism and dishonour--leaders who could not lead.
As for the Teutonic Empires, from Kaiser to Scheidemann there is only
mediocrity masquerading in the tarnished regalia of Bismarck and
Andrassy. Precariously von Bethmann, with phantasmal Austrian nobles,
insecure Hungarian magnates and Osmanli pashas, struggles to meet
increasingly impossible problems at home and abroad, and the time is
not far away when the final crisis a Bismarck might victoriously have
met, will show them thin and evanescent, pale futilities who could not
lead, neither could they control. And America? Well, when the war broke
we had three potential leaders, the President, Colonel Roosevelt and
Mr. Bryan, together with the untried forces of Cabinet, Congress and
the State and municipal governments. What had been the result on these
varied personalities of the unexampled stimulus of a world in chaos if
not in dissolution? Thus far, apart from the President, the three and
a half years of universal liquidation have neither produced a leader
unknown before nor raised the standard of individuals or of the general
mass of politicians. On the whole the average has been lowered. If
on the one hand we have the reliable honesty and ability of men like
Senators Lodge, Borah and Williams, with the mysterious and promising
figure of Colonel House, we find on the other the ominous figures of
Stone, Cummins, Gronna, Clark, Vardaman, La Follette, together with
the depressing personalities that dominate and give its colour to the
Cabinet. Outside administration circles the reader may pick from the
several States such men as he considers measure up to the old standard
of effective leadership, or even to that of the era just preceding the
war. Of the three conspicuous figures first named, one appears to have
forfeited the position open to him of great constructive leadership
while honourably refusing to follow up the sinister opportunities
revealed in the earlier days of the war, and has retired into an
oblivion only broken in the beginning by sheer force of ingratiating
oratory. The second strove for a renewal of that popular confidence
and to restore that popular following he so eminently deserved, and
failed, though in this failure was less of discredit to him than to
a public somewhat defective in its powers of perception and in its
standard of comparative values. And the third, the most august figure
of all? Here, if anywhere to-day, is revealed the argument against the
thesis I adduce--perhaps as the exception that proves the rule. The
most astute politician America has produced since Andrew Jackson (if
not since Jefferson), with an infallible sense for apprehending the
unexpressed will of a working majority, he pursued for three years
the standard method of contemporary politics, gauging this will by
impeccable instinct, making it his own, and so becoming the acceptable
type of leader who does not lead but obediently follows on where the
majority-will indicates the way. Then almost insensibly this method
changed; little by little as the inclusive incapacity of the democratic
method revealed itself it was relegated to the background while a
very real and equally constructive leadership took its place. Step
by step the advance has been progressive and explicit; miraculously
the nation as a whole acknowledges and accepts, while the influence
of this novel and reassuring leadership daily reaches further and
further into the other nations of the earth. It is a single leadership:
Cabinet and Congress are granted little part therein and only the
mysterious influences of unofficial and personal advisers shyly reveal
themselves from time to time. It is a real leadership, of the old and
almost forgotten type, and increasingly is it bringing coherency out
of the debilitated confusion of democratic methods and parliamentary
incapacity that have hampered our allies and imperilled their cause
since the beginning of the war. And now opportunity opens before him;
opportunity not only national but world-wide. If he wills he may
become the co-ordinating, the directing, and the constructive force in
the world, Arbiter of Democracy, re-creator of the true democracy of
ideal. The old tradition of politics, the sensitive appreciation of a
vacillating majority-will and the subtle following thereof in all its
tergiversations, has been abandoned in favour of a daring and therefore
true leadership prefigured by some of the finest verbal pronouncements
of high principle the Republic has thus far heard. The old days when
we were told of a “peace without victory,” and that we as a nation had
no quarrel with the German people; the days when we were assured that
the aims of Germany and those of the Allies were apparently much the
same; the days of experimental adventures in compromise are now very
far away. Does this mean that from now on the course followed will be
increasingly exalted, high-spirited and courageous? It may well be; if
so, and to that extent, the present lack of world-leadership will be
corrected.
Tested by every standard this leadership is now deficient both in
quantity and quality. To what are we to attribute this anomalous
condition? Why is it that our lack is not only appalling when compared
with those periodical moments of the past when, as in the eleventh
century, every nation of Europe was following leaders as amazing in
number as they were commanding in ability, but even in contrast with
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was not an epoch to
which future generations will look back with any notable degree of
pride, yet it left us a heritage of great names that, as I have said
before, reached the number of one hundred and fifty, a count that could
be increased to two hundred if the arbitrary quarter century I have
chosen, during which all were still living, were extended by ten years
before 1880 and by five after 1905.
The answer is simple, but it is an answer that will be rejected with
practical unanimity. Democracy has achieved its perfect work and has
now reduced all mankind to a dead level of incapacity where great
leaders are no longer either wanted or brought into existence, while
society itself is unable, of its own power as a whole, to lift itself
from the nadir of its own uniformity.
“The world must be made safe for democracy” is a noble phrase, but it
is meaningless without its corollary, “democracy must be made safe
for the world.” This latter condition does not exist. For exactly one
hundred years democracy has suffered a progressive degeneration until
it is now not a blessing but a menace.
This categorical statement demands both amplification and explanation.
In the first place the word “democracy” is used in its current sense,
as representing both the implicit aim and the explicit result of
individual and community life during the last two generations in Great
Britain, France and the United States; and in all other countries
where any portion of the democratic system has been put in practice,
including the very recent “republics” of Portugal, China and Russia.
It covers not only political agencies and methods but all those other
forms of activity, such as organized religion, education and social
life, where democratic principles and devices have been increasingly
adopted.
It does not mean the real democracy, which is the noblest ideal
ever discovered by man or revealed to him. True democracy means
three things: Abolition of Privilege; Equal Opportunity for All; and
Utilization of Ability. Unless democracy achieves these things it
is not democracy, and no matter how “progressive” its methods, how
apparently democratic its machinery, it may perfectly well be an
oligarchy, a kakistocracy or a tyranny. The three imperative desiderata
named above may be achieved under a monarchy, they may be lost in a
republic, the mechanism does not matter. One of the chief faults with
what we call our democracy is our stolid failure to understand that
there is a democratic ideal and a democratic method, that there is not
necessarily any connection between the two, and that generally speaking
the democratic method (unstable, constantly changing its form) is
incapable of accomplishing the democratic ideal.
That “democracy” for which the war is to make the world safe is
of course the democracy of ideal; it could not conceivably be the
democracy of method for this had proved itself in the two generations
before the war corrupt, incompetent and ridiculous, while during the
war it has revealed increasingly its almost sublime incapacity in
all matters where it has had a part; from Westminster to Rome, from
Washington to Petrograd. The only thing that has thus far saved the
Allies from the utmost penalty of their common democracy of method
has been the process which has proceeded everywhere of eliminating
the democracy and substituting a pure and perfectly irresponsible
absolutism, whether of one man or a very small committee.
Now for the last hundred years the world has abandoned itself to an
insane devising of new mechanical toys for the achieving of democracy:
representative government, the parliamentary system, universal
suffrage, the party system, the secret ballot, rotation in office, the
initiative, referendum and recall, popular election of members of upper
legislative houses, woman suffrage, direct legislation. All have failed
to obtain abolition of privilege, equal opportunity and utilization of
ability, on the contrary, they have worked in the opposite direction,
and so far as these three things are concerned, the peoples are worse
off than they were fifty years ago, while during the same period
government and society have become progressively more venal, less
competent and further separated from the ideals of honour, duty and
righteousness. Meanwhile so obsessed have we become by our pursuit of
new devices for obtaining democracy, and by our search for nostrums to
cure the ills of our constant failures, we have now wholly forgotten in
what democracy consists.
In the year before the war the government of the great
democracies--Great Britain, France and the United States--was
illogical, inefficient, and widely severed from the one object of
obtaining for all men justice and the rule of law. It was profoundly
cursed by the incubus of little men in great office, by chaotic,
selfish and unintelligent legislation, dull, stupid and frequently
venal administration, and by partial, unscrupulous and pettifogging
judicial procedure. Everywhere the bulk of legislation increased to
preposterous proportions as its quality degenerated. Superficial,
doctrinaire, and engendered by selfish personal interests, it ceased
to command respect or even obedience in proportion as it became
vacillating and insecure. Legislative decrees, subject to sudden
abrogation or reversal, took the place of laws. With the party system
dominant (now severed entirely from fundamental principle and become
simply the engine of spoils), democratic administrative machinery
became the obedient agency of a partizan and irresponsible committee,
maintaining itself through purchased “honours,” and exemption from
well-deserved penalties, in England; through alliances with secret
and equally irresponsible cabals whose object was plunder of one sort
or another, in France; and through deals, spoils and “pork,” in the
United States. Everywhere the standard of personal ability sank lower
and lower, until all manner of ignorant, incapable and frequently
venal men, without culture, tradition or principle, forced up from the
submerged strata of society, entered into the legislative and executive
and administrative departments of government and took possession. The
kind of men rife in the Chambre des Députés and in the short-lived
ministries were of the same type found in the provincial _mairies_,
ignorant, doctrinaire, self-sufficient, with the insolence of power
clouding even what flickerings of native intelligence or honour they
may have possessed. The full story of what happened in England between
the death of Gladstone and the triumph of Lloyd George has not yet been
written, but the facts are known if unavowed. Autocracy in its worst
form, in Byzantium, the Renaissance or the eighteenth century, contains
no more sordid examples of base trafficking in honours, emoluments and
privileges, while never was the personal quality of the beneficiaries
so radically unworthy and so malevolent in its influence on the State.
During the Middle Ages, when the ideal of democracy was at its
highest point, and when it was most nearly achieved, it was held
as incontrovertible that the purpose of political organization was
primarily ethical and moral, and that its function was the achievement
of righteousness and justice. Authority was from God, and the power
also to enforce that authority, but both were operative only when they
were used for right ends. “_La dame ne le sire n’en est seigneur se non
dou dreit._” Equally unquestioned was the fact that law was not made,
but was the concrete expression of that morality, right and justice
that had grown with the life of the community, exactly expressing
the needs of society, and with the moral sanction of communal life
behind it. “There is no King where will rules and not law” was the
Mediæval conviction as opposed to the absolutism of the Renaissance
first expressed in theoretical form by Machiavelli. Finally the Middle
Ages asserted that Government was a solemn contract between ruled and
rulers, to be broken by neither without the abrogation of the contract.
Treason on the part of the sovereign was then as clearly recognized a
possibility as treason on the part of the people.
This great ideal, the noblest man has yet conceived in the realm of
civil law, was completely destroyed by the Renaissance, and absolutism
took its place. This, having made itself intolerable, was in its turn
destroyed in the latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter
of the nineteenth century, when once more the old ideals of Mediæval
freedom came to the front though in a somewhat different verbal guise.
The Oath of the Tennis Court, the Declaration of Independence, the
Reform Laws of England were all assertions of the true principles
of the real democracy, but they were destined either to fail of
fulfillment or to only a brief duration of power, partly because of
the shattering of the sense of right and wrong by Calvinism and other
Protestant phenomena, partly because their birth coincided with an
industrial development that blotted out for the time all considerations
except those of material benefit and of selfish advancement. Here and
there, for brief periods of time, righteous impulses made operative a
true democracy, but by the middle of the century the battle had been
lost: materialism, omnipotent in its power, invincible through its
self-created energies, was everywhere supreme, and from then on was
recorded only the progressive development of a conscienceless material
imperialism, the incessant invention of new and always unsuccessful
machines for the obtaining of the old democratic ideals, the growth,
through rage and impotence at the solemn mockery, of violent and
revolutionary propaganda along nihilistic, anarchistic or socialistic
lines, and finally the apotheosis of inefficiency, injustice and
unrighteousness that held the democracies of the world when the
Teutonic Powers made their desperate but perfectly logical attempt to
establish the hegemony of Europe under the dominion of efficiency,
materialism and force.
That very wise Frenchman, Emile Faguet, has said, “The sum and
substance of the Revolution was to substitute for ‘Votre Majesté’
‘Votre Majorité.’” The absolutism and the tyranny remained, only its
habitat and its personality were changed. Something however was lost,
and that the possibility that legislation and the execution of the laws
might sometimes approach intelligence and efficiency. In another place
the same author says: “Our examination of modern democracy has brought
us to the following conclusions. The representation of the country is
reserved for the incompetent and also for those biassed by passion,
who are doubly incompetent. The representatives of the people want
to do everything themselves. They do everything badly and infect the
government and the administration with their passion and incompetence.”
Democratic government for the last twenty-five years has neither
desired nor created leaders of an intellectual or moral capacity above
that of the general mass of voters, and when by chance these appear
they are abandoned for a type that is not of the numerical average
but below it, and the standard has been lowering itself steadily
for a generation. The strong man, strong of mind, of will, of moral
sense, the man born to create and to lead, now seeks other fields for
his activity, or rather one field alone, and that the domain of “big
business” and finance. Here at least he finds scope for his force
and will and leadership, even if the opportunities to use his moral
sense to advantage leave something to be desired. The world no longer
wants or knows how to use statesmen, philosophers, artists, religious
prophets and shepherds, but rather “captains of industry,” directors of
“high finance,” “efficiency experts,” shrewd manipulators of popular
opinion through journalism, or of popular votes through primaries,
political conventions, and the legislative chambers of representative
government. Here also the demand creates the supply.
Tributary to this demand is the current system of popular education,
probably the worst ever devised so far as character-making is
concerned. Secularized, eclectic, vocational and intensive educational
systems do not educate in any true sense of the word, while they do
not develop character but even work in the opposite direction. The
concrete results of popular education, as this has been conducted
during the last generation, have been less and less satisfactory
both from the point of view of culture and that of character,
and the product of schools and colleges tends steadily towards a
lower and lower level of attainment. Why anything else should be
expected is hard to see. The new education, with religion and morals
ignored except under the aspect of archæology; with Latin and Greek
superseded, and all other cultural studies as well; with logic,
philosophy and dialectic abandoned for psychology, biology and
“business administration”; the new education with its free electives
and vocational training, and its apotheosis of theoretical and applied
science (a glory and a dominion mitigated only by the insidious
penetration of semiprofessional athletics)--this new education was
conceived and put in practice for the chief purpose of fitting men for
the sort of life that was universal during the elapsed years of the
present century, and this life had no place for pre-eminence, no use
for leadership, except in the categories of business, applied science
and finance. It did its work to admiration, and the result is before
us in the shape of a society that has been wholly democratized, not by
filling in the valleys and lifting the malarial swamps of the submerged
masses, but by a levelling of all down to their own plane.
The disappearance of religion as a vital force in human life and
society, during the last century, has been a very potent agency in
urging political, educational and industrial democracy towards its
final triumph, and in fixing the manacles of capitalism and industrial
slavery on the world. Since the Reformation religion has been only a
dissolving tradition, without any real force or potency in and over
society. For individuals it has, from time to time, possessed all its
old energy: over them it has exerted all its old influence, and just as
great saints, confessors and even martyrs have shed their glory over
the last century as at any time in the past. But since the Reformation
religion has gone back to the catacombs whence Constantine had drawn
it fifteen centuries ago: it is now the precious possession of the
individual, hidden, cloistered, fearful of coming to the light. As a
dominating influence over states, as a controlling power in diplomacy,
business, politics, philosophy, education, art, or over communities as
such, it is now, and has been for a long time, a negligible factor.
This is true as well of Catholicism as of Protestantism. For
generations at a time it has been the effective moral and spiritual
guardian of nations, and while this was true civilization flourished
as neither before nor since. The Renaissance destroyed the claim of
the Church, as it was then, to such moral and spiritual leadership,
and the Reformation and Revolution destroyed the fact. For a time, as
a result of the Counter-Reformation, something of the old leadership
was restored in all its plenitude, where Protestantism had not taken
effect, but little by little it surrendered to the new spirit in the
world, until now it is not only impotent amongst the nations, it is
as well conditioned by the same considerations of materialism and
opportunism and a false democracy, as Protestantism, industrialism and
the capitalistic-scientific state. The Church still carries _in petto_
all that was ever her possession, including infinite possibilities
of beneficent action and influence; at present, however, this is
inoperative, and with the rest of the world she stands hesitant and
diffident, rejected by the majority of men, ignored by states and
denied even the form of leadership.
Democracy in government and democracy in education have each played
their part in the destruction of leadership and the establishing of the
reign of mediocrity. There is yet a third aspect, or rather result, of
the same force, which may perhaps prove in the end the most significant
of all, and that is the democratization of society by the breaking down
of the just and normal barriers of race, first through the so-called
“melting pot” process, second through the substitution of the mongrel
for the product of pure blood by reason of the free and reckless mixing
of incompatible strains. From the beginning of modern democracy it
has been with its adherents a cardinal point of faith that a “free
country” should set no limits to immigration of any race, class or
degree of cultural development. It is equally a dogma that under a true
democracy there is no discrimination possible between individuals on
the score of difference in race, blood or status, and that therefore
no restrictions should be recognized or established which would control
or limit absolute freedom of union in marital relations and the legal
procreation of children.
The nineteenth century superstition, erected by the doctrinaire
protagonists of “evolution,” that human progress was both automatic and
constant, through the acquisition of new qualities by education, the
force of environment, and “natural selection,” has been the scientific
justification for the supposedly “democratic” principle of free
immigration and free mating. Were the theory demonstrably true it would
indeed negative the chief arguments for the scrupulous recognition
and preservation of race values both in marriage and control of
immigration. If character is determined by education and environment,
and is transmitted in substance generation after generation, the
question is manifestly only one of enough education, of the right kind,
and distributed with sufficient generality. Mongol and Slovak, Malay
and Hottentot stand on the same plane with Latin and Saxon and Celt,
for it is merely a question of education, environment and continued
breeding; good is cumulative, automatically transmitted, and time is
the answer to all.
On this superstition has been erected the great modern system of
universal state education. With a mechanical exactness it has failed
to produce appreciable results. State education, secularized,
standardized, compulsory, has left native character untouched,
furnishing only a body of faculties, used to good ends if such was
the character-predisposition of the individual, for base ends if this
race or family predisposition so determined. Nor is there any evidence
whatever that what the father acquires the son inherits. It is a
commonplace of sociology that the American-born son of the foreign-born
immigrant of a decadent race or inferior blood who himself had reacted
to the stimulus of a new environment and unprecedented educational
opportunities, is not in general an advance over his progenitor either
in character or capacity, but rather, however great his educational
acquirement, a retrogression and a return to type.
Empirical “science” of the nineteenth century yields to the more exact
science of the twentieth century, and it is now admitted that acquired
characteristics are not heritable. That which persists is some
indelible quality of blood or of race, modified by the conjunction of
two germ plasms in generation; while new species are not the result of
the building up of one characteristic added to another by inheritance
and the process of “natural selection” and the “survival of the
fittest,” but of some cataclysmic action the nature and source of which
no scientist has determined or dared to assume.
With the breakdown of this once popular theory, the factor of blood
becomes no longer negligible and the doctrine of the omnipotence of
education and environment falls to the ground, yet we still continue
debauching race by free movement of peoples through immigration, and by
unrestrained mating amongst men and women of alien racial qualities. In
large sections of America society is now completely mongrel, and the
same is true of portions of Europe where the process is of increasing
force. Through uncontrolled alliances the same thing is happening in
blood, and apparently the whole world is about to repeat what already
has happened in Russia, the Balkans and Central America.
The appeal of the eugenist to biology and the testimony of botany and
zoölogy is dangerous when carried too far--as it generally is--for
it leaves out of account the element of the soul, which is a factor
that enters into the human consideration and is not operative in the
case of plants and beasts. For those who deny its existence except as
a biological product of the working of purely physical forces, the
democratic principle of the free movement, intercourse and mating of
peoples of every known blood, race and status can only appear the
blackest and most imbecile crime in the human calendar. Continued for
another generation or two the result can only be universal mongrelism
and the consequent end of culture and civilization. Cross-fertilization
and the producing of special and higher types thereby is a perfectly
artificial process, and however brilliant the result in the first
instance the tendency of reversion to type is inexorable. Either the
result is a hybrid without power of propagation, or a precarious
phenomenon tending inevitably towards a retrogression that in a few
generations comes back to the normal type.
Nor is the situation much better when regarded from the standpoint of
those who postulate of each individual a spiritual factor that is not
the product of biological processes but is something of a different
nature added thereto. This element in the human entity works towards
the negativing or amelioration of the conditions consequent on the
predispositions determined by heredity--race factors, blood tendencies,
new inclinations that are the result of the combining of two different
sets of parental characteristics--and towards the utilization of the
possibilities inherent in education and environment. It is, however,
not omnipotent; it is conditioned by the nature of the various forces
with which it deals, and it can rise superior to them only when it
calls into play the energy of those kindred spiritual forces that
exist, are universally available, and are the only sure instrument
of victory over the gravitational pull of a predetermined natural
handicap. Recognition of, and reliance on, these remedial factors
decrease in inverse ratio to their necessity, and this is true both of
the individual and the community as a whole. The time comes for both
when the power of the degenerative forces becomes so great through
poverty of blood, hybridization of race and depravity of status, that
the energy of the spiritual factor is negatived, and the individual
or the community or the race declines, completes the final surrender,
and fails, disappearing in ignominy and oblivion. There is no tragedy
greater than that of the human soul full of the promise and potency and
desire of good things, imprisoned in the forbidding circle of mongrel
blood, inimical inheritance and pernicious environment against which it
desperately rebels, but from which there is no possibility of escape
except through the power of supernatural assistance on which it no
longer possesses the impulse or the will to call.
Democracy of method then, not democracy of ideal, has not only failed
to attain the supreme objects for which, in its protean forms, it has
been devised, it has as well brought into existence a system that has
practically eliminated sane, potent and constructive leadership and has
therefore betrayed society, involving it in a profound mediocrity which
now confronts that fate which always follows identical progress in
other categories of the organic world,--reversion to type and ultimate
sterility.
And so we stand to-day where the Great War has revealed us, peoples
without leaders; helpless, inefficient and, barring the miracle of
redemption through bitter chastizement, hurrying on to anarchy or
slavery as the fortunes of war may determine. The true democracy of
St. Louis, Edward I and Washington is forgotten and a false democracy
has taken its place, employing the old shibboleths but ignoring
the thing itself, while inventing one new device after another to
serve as a red herring drawn across the trail pursued implacably by
the ever-increasing numbers of those who see the inefficiency and
deceitfulness of it all, and maintain their pursuit so that in the end
they may establish what is to them democracy pure and simple, but is in
fact its _reductio ad absurdum_.
Whatever the issue of the war there is for the world neither release
from intolerable menace nor yet a proximate salvation. The war that
is redeeming myriads of souls leaves the organic system of society,
both material and spiritual, untouched. Were peace to come to-morrow,
after a brief period of readjustment life would go on much as before,
with industrialism supreme and capitalism _versus_ proletarianism
the conditioning clauses of its unstable equilibrium; with the
parliamentary system still in vogue, and all this means of incapacity,
opportunism and the political survival of the unfit; with religion in
a condition of heresy against heresy and all against a thin simulacrum
of Catholicity; with philosophy still clinging to the shreds and
tatters of evolution or remodelling itself on the plausible lines of
an intellectualized materialism; with the mongrelizing of blood and
community going steadily forward, and with education prowling through
the ruins of scientific determinism, and struggling ever to build out
of its shreds and shards some new machine that will make even more
certain the direct application of scholastic results to the one problem
of wealth production--with education failing as before to produce
leaders to fill a demand that no longer exists.
The best that one can say, if peace really comes again and man returns
once more to his old ways of life, is that this return will be for the
briefest of periods. The war is only the first of a series, for one war
alone cannot undo the cumulative errors of five centuries. Either after
a year or two for the taking of breath, or merging into it without
appreciable break, will come the second world-wide convulsion, the
war for the revolutionizing of society, which will run its long and
terrible course in the determined effort to substitute for our present
industrial system of life (in itself perhaps the worst man has devised)
something more consonant with the principles of justice. And the third,
which may also follow immediately after the second, or merge into it,
or even precede it, will be the war between the false democracy, now
everywhere in evidence, and whatever is left of the true democracy
of man’s ideal. From these three visitations there is no escape. The
thing we have so earnestly and arduously built up out of Renaissance,
Reformation and Revolution, with industrialism and scientific
determinism as the structural material, is not a civilization at all,
and it must be destroyed in order that the ground may be cleared for
something better. At first it seemed that one war might do the work,
when we considered the glorious regeneration of France and the heroism
and self-sacrifice of all our allies. We know better now. We can see
that the war has not touched the industrial problem at all, nor the
religious nor the social nor the political. Capitalist on the one
hand, proletarian on the other, when they stop to think of themselves
in either capacity, are just of the same old kidney as before, and the
problem of final solution only hangs in abeyance. The same is true
of government in France, England, America. Patriotism and devotion,
genuine as they are in many cases, serve only as a costume easily
laid aside, and underneath is just the same old politician, learning
nothing, forgetting nothing. Nothing is added to the issue by rotund
phrases about the warfare for universal democracy. When nations are
blindly and half unconsciously fighting for the last shreds of honour
and liberty left over from an old Christian civilization, their case
is not fortified by suggestions that they really are struggling to
preserve and extend representative government, universal suffrage or
direct legislation; rather something is taken away from a holy cause.
Great leaders could not have averted the war, and when Lloyd George
declares that if Germany had been a democracy the war could not have
occurred, he is simply indulging in the standard type of political
jargon. The issue was too great to be set aside by a change from
imperialistic efficiency to democratic incapacity.
On the other hand, it is true that men competent to see clearly,
capable of thinking constructively, and with will to lead capably,
might, at this juncture, make this the last war and avert the grim
terror of the two others to come. “Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” is on the
wall in words of fire and blood, and the Belshazzars of modernism can
neither understand them, nor, which is worse, find their interpreter,
therefore they and we go on to our predestined fate.
Democracy, without the supreme leadership of men who by nature or
divine direction can speak and act with and by authority, is a greater
menace than autocracy. Men and nations have been what they have been,
either for good or evil, not by the will of a numerical majority but by
the supreme leadership of the few--seers, prophets, captains of men;
and so it always will be. When, as now, the greatest crisis in fifteen
centuries overpasses the world, and society sinks under the nemesis
of universal mediocrity, then we realize that the system has doomed
itself, since, impotent to produce leaders, it has signed its own death
warrant.
What we confront through democracy _as it is interpreted to-day_ is
a degradation of the human potential through a double dissipation of
energy. With no defensible standard of comparative values, all the
spiritual and mental force in men is turned towards the realization of
the unimportant, to which accomplishment it is given with a prodigality
hardly equalled in the Middle Ages when it was lavished on the
realization of the essential. Simultaneously man has been dissipating
the stored-up energy of the world through his mastery of thermodynamics
and his precarious dominion over electrical forces, at such a rate
that physical potential has been degraded in a hundred years more than
in the preceding hundred centuries. Of what becomes of this fabulous
force, what the permanent contributions may be to human life, he cares
little. It is sufficient for him to realize that he is the arbiter
of this gigantic power, and if it is exploited and dissipated, with
nothing of lasting value to show, he cares no more than any other type
of spendthrift.
As Henry Adams has said, with cold irony, “Neither historians nor
sociologists can afford to let themselves be driven into admitting
that every gain of power--from gunpowder to steam, from the dynamo to
the Daimler motor--has been made at the cost of man’s and of woman’s
vitality.” Yet the fact remains that this is true, and our present
deplorable estate is partly the result of this very degradation and
dissipation of energy, which has been lavished on activities totally
unproductive so far as lasting benefits are concerned, and spread out
over a vast area where it disappears without results.
It would seem that there is in the world at any one time only a
certain amount of available spiritual energy, which may be preserved
and made effectively operative through concentration, or lost through
dissipation, while the physical energy, stored up out of endless ages,
is limited in its original quantity, and only added to, if at all, in
a very small degree. At the beginning of each new era this spiritual
force is precipitated in the form of great leaders who translate it,
and transmit it in available form (and directed toward productive ends)
to the general mass of men. Later, the specific era having reached
its meridian, the leaders pass as the prophets before them, and the
force once concentrated in them, and made operative, spreads thin and
ineffective, and at last is dissipated through the general mass of men.
At the end the prodigal majority, having wasted its inherited substance
in riotous living, falls into puerile contests and finally destroys
itself, and another era takes its place in history to the accompaniment
of war and anarchy. So Greece lost its leaders and squandered its
intellectual heritage; so Rome dissipated its Imperial force and
succumbed to barbarism; so Mediævalism played fast and loose with its
spiritual capital, and so modernism is now wasting all it had inherited
from these three antecedent periods, and prepares to take its place
with antiquity.
From the earliest Renaissance, great men in whom were concentrated the
dynamic force of a crescent era, built up the imposing and consistent
thing called modernism. Great men transformed this into the terms of
industrial civilization, when they had given their commanding abilities
to the discovery and the utilization of the latent physical forces
inherent in the world, hitherto untouched by antecedent generations.
Then they ceased, almost by a cataclysmic cutting-off, and little
men, little in spirit and crafty rather than creative, took into their
hands the carrying out of the last phase of epochal development--the
establishing of the hegemony of the world on a basis of physical and
intellectual force from which the last elements of morality had been
purged away. Little men, blinded, puzzled and appalled, met the crisis
as best they could, and for three years the world has been plunged in
carnage and destruction, while military, political and psychological
blunders have followed each other in a witches’ sabbath of incapacity.
And now the victory of the shrewd, cynical and definitely immoral
forces, so long held impossible even in thought, is more clearly
indicated than at any time since the Battle of the Marne. The exploits
of Russia in its efforts to make the “world safe for democracy”
may very well prove the determining factor. A miracle is of course
possible, but at present not predicable. A Napoleon there, a
Charlemagne in France, a Washington here, even a Cromwell in England,
might avert the nemesis of mediocrity, but a Kerensky, a Painlevé,
a Lloyd George does not fill the bill. With a German victory and a
German peace, modernism, supreme over all the world, may establish
a régime of mechanistic efficiency. Imperial, Godless, temporally
superb, but without real leaders, it can only prove an interlude of
plausibility, a preface to sudden degeneration, and the chaos of the
end of the century, when the world-slavery of Teutonistic modernism
goes down to its final ruin, will leave the record of the present war
as that of a mere rehearsal.
And if the miracle happens; if the leader comes who can shatter the
Brumagem efficiency of Prussia, and so the world is saved from a fate
it richly deserves, can we say that we have a better hope? Yes, if with
victory comes realization of what the war means, and why it came upon
us. For this realization one of two things is necessary: either such a
spiritual regeneration of the great mass of people, through suffering
and sorrow and privation and the bitter schooling of the trenches,
that they will follow up their victory over the enemy in the field by
an even greater victory over the enemy at home in religion, philosophy
and society, purging a chastened world of the last folly and the last
wickedness of modernism; or the coming once more of the great prophets
and captains of men who alone can lead as their predecessors have
always led, and so build up a new life on the ruins of an old that has
passed in blood and flame and dishonour.
If none of these things happens, if there is a German peace, or an
inconclusive “peace through negotiation,” or a victory in the field for
the Allies that is followed by no attainment of a new vision; if in the
end the world returns to the same system, the same basis of judgment,
the same standard of comparative values that held before the war--what
then?
Russia already has given the answer.
POSTSCRIPT
Written in the spring of the year 1918, as it was, “The Nemesis of
Mediocrity” may very well have become superannuated as to its estimates
of world-leaders by the time it was published, for events moved as
the avalanche and years were compressed into days. I have been asked
if I should write differently now, and criticized for ignoring some
unquestionable leaders whose glory has filled the consciousness of men
since that mysterious twenty-fifth of August, 1918, when, in an hour,
it would seem, overwhelming German victory turned into inevitable and
crushing defeat, a defeat eternally recorded in history ten weeks later
on that epic Eleventh of November.
Yes, in one respect a different estimate would be set down, but its
nature makes only more salient the lack of real leadership in the
categories of civil life and thought. Leadership in religion and
philosophy is perhaps a degree less evident than it was nine months ago
and the achievement of “victory without peace” instead of instigating
constructive activity along these lines seems rather to have acted as
a further deterrent. Lenine and Trotsky are more to the front with
a certain leadership that is at least striking, if one is disposed
to accept what they offer as constituting the sort of thing one has
in mind when thinking of the great leaders of the past. So it may
be admitted were Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg until their summary
taking-off. In politics and statecraft the world on the one hand
has lost a real leader in Roosevelt, while on the other a sort of
merger has been effected whereby--for the moment at least--all issues
have been pooled in one extraordinary Personality who has become a
kind of super-leader, universal dictator, Manager of the World--the
adequate phrase does not suggest itself. That here is leadership of
Brobdignagian degree no one could deny, but in a way this supersession
of the many by the one would seem to argue in favour of the original
hypothesis that leadership, as a working fact in society as a whole,
has ceased. Never before, except perhaps in the case of the Dark Ages,
when Charlemagne stood as the one lone personality in the midst of
blank incompetence, has a phenomenon such as this presented itself. Of
the ultimate result for the world it is still too early to venture a
forecast. On the historians of the far future must fall the burden of
estimate.
At the present writing this singularity of leadership would appear
to be threatened by M. Clemenceau who in the first edition of this
book was carelessly referred to as “the superannuated.” Again the
word was hardly descriptive, but it was used at a time when the once
redoubtable “Tiger” had just made his sensational re-entry on the
scene where he was, it appears, destined to play a part (at present
unfinished) that at the time was hardly subject to anticipation. The
word is hereby withdrawn with sincere apologies: “superannuated” he
conspicuously is not. Whether his astute direction of baffling affairs
is, or may become, great constructive leadership is another matter
not yet determined. By the time this “Postscript” is published not
his alone, but other salient claims to man-mastership, may have been
decided either in the negative or the affirmative.
There is one field however in which real leadership has appeared,
manifesting itself very largely since this book was written: the field
of action. If it had not been so there would have been no editions of
this book subsequent to the first, nor of any other for that matter.
Barring this miraculous emergence of great captains, we should by now
have become a series of conquered peoples in vassalage to Imperial
Teutonism.
To have omitted the name of King Albert of Belgium was a blunder, but
it was of carelessness rather than of false measure. A great captain
he is, of an army and of a people, in the sense of all historical
greatness; and the name of Marshal Joffre should also have been set
down in reverence and gratitude. Since the great Eighteenth of July,
men of action have leaped to the front with a swiftness that is matched
only by quality. Set first the immortal name of Marshal Foch, the
Great Captain of the Great War, and then Field Marshal Haig, Generals
Pershing, Petain, Allenby, Castelnau, Diaz; Admirals Jellicoe, Beatty,
Sims and, thank God, many others. In six months the lack of four years
was supplied, and had the war gone on another three months to the final
annihilation of the enemy in the field, who can doubt that the list
would have run to four times its present length? The quality of the
men in the trenches was a glory and an amazement; on land and sea and
in the air young officers were finding themselves and revealing both
mettle and character as never could have been during peace. What was
is earnest of what might have been--of what may be, and here lies the
great hope in a time of great doubt.
In the field of action leadership at last has shown itself. What
democracy and universal education and wealth and science and
industrialism had failed to make manifest was hammered out on its hard
anvils. Can this tempered steel be turned from its original destiny;
can the fine swords of the new men of action be beaten into pruning
hooks to gather the ripe harvest of mingled wheat and tares, and into
ploughshares for the ploughing of the war-fields in preparation for the
greater harvest that is to come? It is the fateful question on whose
answer hangs all the future.
The peril of war has given place (at least for the moment) to the
far greater peril of an untimely “peace” wherein the masters of our
destiny flounder as in the first years of conflict. Paris at the
present moment, or Europe for that matter, can hardly be called a
centre and source of serene confidence. “Secret diplomacy” has yielded
to a confusion of words which are again being employed with notable
success for the concealing of thoughts. Russia and Germany are midnight
mysteries with no Sherlock Holmes to probe their sinister depths. No
one really knows anything about anything, and he is told less--so
far as the real things are concerned. Meanwhile the old influences
become operative again; the old two alternatives, conservatism and
radicalism, or under the new nomenclature, reactionism and Bolshevism,
offer themselves as the only choice, while the third alternative
(which always exists and is always right, and is never recognized or
victorious) finds neither leaders nor adherents, although the Great
Alternatives represent only a mean minority on either hand. Legislation
grows more leaderless and imbecile; ridiculous individuals are
increasingly chosen for important executive and diplomatic positions;
organized religion is either silent on the one hand or on the other
offers as its great solution the raising of some hundreds of millions
for the purpose of bringing the blessings of Methodism or Puritanism to
the benighted peoples of the Catholic countries; philosophy is merged
in the sentimental pacifism or the parlour Bolshevism of the weekly
press; art and letters wander in the “vast inane” and the feeble
gleams of an old liberty are extinguished in the water-floods of
doctrinaire legislation.
One is impelled to pray for the quick return of all the men of all the
armies, for in them alone seems the possibility of salvation through
leadership, if (and this is fundamental) they bring back with them,
operative and undiminished, the vision and the idea of justice and the
good sense the war has revealed in them, and to them, when all else has
failed. Bring them back and offer them in strong support. Without this,
the future is not entirely clear.
R. A. C.
Boston, 12th February, 1919.
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