622 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
troops in the van of the atheist army's order of battle were now standing
in the way of a Marxian task-force that had the weapons and the will to
bring the battle to a decision by charging home. To Communist minds
the only open question was whether the Liberals had been making fools
of themselves unintentionally in allowing their weapons to be put out of
action by the weather and in taking up a position in which they were
now nothing but a nuisance to their own side, or whether their ostensible
ineptitude was in reality a cunning camouflage for a treacherous col-
lusion with theists who, in theory, were Liberalism's and Communism's
common enemies. The Communist answer to this question would be the
verdict on Liberalism in the court of Marxian history; but for current
practical purposes the question was academic; for the Marxian heavy
cavalry had already made up their minds that they must clear the field
for a decisive assault upon their ultimate adversaries the theists by
riding the obstructive Liberals down; and, whether the prospective
victims of this military necessity were fools or whether they were knaves,
the necessity was in either case imperative.

In the face of the Communists' implacable determination to sweep
the Liberals out of their path, the Liberals were in a sorry plight; for the
negative Liberal ideal of civil liberty for individual men and women
was as ineffective a weapon as an unstrung crossbow to pit against the
positive Communist ideal of a self-sacrificing devotion to the service of
a Collective Humanity. The apparent grandeur of the Communist ideal
made the Liberal ideal appear trivial; yet there was one unquestionably
genuine fact with which these appearances did not tally, and this was
that in their allegiance to a seemingly trivial ideal the Liberals were
thoroughly in earnest. Their belief in individual liberty, and the willing-
ness of at least a few zealous souls to demonstrate their sincerity by going
to the length of dying for this belief in the last resort at the hands of
National Socialist German and Communist Russian and Chinese per-
secutors, were the one article of faith and the one spark of the martyrs'
fiery spirit that were unquestionably still alive in a post-Christian
Western World which had deliberately repudiated its title to the name
'Western Christendom* .* Considering how feeble this latter-day Western
ideal of personal liberty appeared to be when it was held up to scorn
against the foil of Communisni's zeal for the welfare of the Human Race,
it might seem strange that it should have retained so singular a hold
upon the feelings of an otherwise prosaically utilitarian-minded society.
What was the explanation of this mystery ?

In attempting to explain the strength of a twentieth-century Western
feeling for Liberty, an historian's first move would be to look into its
origins; and he would begin his retrospective investigation by pointing
out that the Liberals were allowing the Communists to do them a gross
injustice in allowing them, to state the issue between Liberalism and
Communism in economic terms. Theright of private entrepreneurs to take
their profits might indeed seem a less worthy cause to champion than the
right of Mankind to make its collective economic interests prevail over
the selfish economic aims of a few able or privileged individuals; but this
* See I, i.34.