The Fate Of Man

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D DDDi ommna

THE FATE

H. G. WELLS

THE FATE

OF MAN

An unemotional Statement of the Things
that arc happening to him now, and of
the iwtnediMc Possibilities confronting him

ALLIANCE BOOK CORPORATION
LONGMANS, GRKBN AND CO.

Nl'W YORK AND TORONTO

COPYRIGHT 19^9

BY
H. C. WELIS

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA

CONTENTS

PAGK

INTRODUCTION . 1

OIAMJK

1* PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 15

2. BIOLOUY INVADES HISTORY 18

,?. How SPECIES SURVIVE 21

4. HISTORY RKCOMKS ECOLOGY 27

5, UNION Now? 39

6* WHAT Is DEMOCRACY? 44

7, WHERE Is DEMOCRACY? 58

8, WHAT MAN HAS TO LEARN 64

9, SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 65

10* ESTIMATING HOPE 85

11. SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES . 93

12. THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 102

13. CHRISTENDOM . . , 118

14. WHAT Is PROTESTANTISM? 134

V

vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

15. THE NAZI RELIGION 142

16. TOTALITARIANISM 151

17. THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 155

18. SHINTOISM 167

19. THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 175

20. SUBJECT PEOPLES 189

2L COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 197

22. AMERICAN MENTALITY 210

23. THREE FACTORS IN EVERYONE 226

24. SUMMARY 230

25. IMPOSSIBILITY OF UTOPIANISM 232

26. DECADENT WORLD 235

NOTES 249

THE FATE OF MAN

INTRODUCTION

I HAVE BEEN ASKED to set down as simply and clearly as I
can, in one compact hook, the reality of the human situation;
that is to say I have been asked to state the world as I see it
and what is happening to it. This is the result,

A very large part of my conscious life has been a struggle
for effective knowledge. I have attempted to collect and
summarise existing knowledge so that it could be made
available in human living, and to induce other and abler
people to take up the same work, I have worked also to
bring together incompatible systems of thinking about real-
ity, systems which ignore each other stupidly and wastefully,
and are manifestly answerable for much fundamental con-
fusion in human thought. These unresolved, contradictory
philosophies and theologies encumber the human mind, and
their irresolution is largely due to an elaborate mutual dis-
regard. I am exceptionally intolerant of such inconsistencies,
because if I attempt to deal with them they worry and en-
tangle me* I cannot make the necessary reservations and
adjustments.

The peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of my
mind are one and the same quality. Put favorably, mine is a
very direct mind; put unfavorably, it is unsubtle. I am
impatient of complicating details and conventional mis-
statements because I am afraid of them. The reader will find

i

2 THE FATE OF MAN

this book ego-centered, for so we all began, and also in-
sistent. I hammer at my main ideas, and this is an offense
to delicate-minded people. If a door is not open I say it is
shut, and I am impatient with the suggestion of worldly
wisdom that it may be possible to wangle a way round. Yet
there may be a way round if you do not lose yourself getting
there. You have been warned that I shall not be with you
in any such uncertain enterprise. I work not simply for
knowledge but for a stark clarity of thought about it. It
seems to me a fair challenge to demand a lucid statement
of- the vision of the universe to which this directness of
inquiry and assemblage have brought me.

That vision may affect many readers as unflattering to
human self-esteem. I cannot help that; it is the way in which
reality has unfolded itself before me.

By way of Introduction I will tell how I came to see the
world as I do. Then in the subsequent sections I will give
the conclusions at which I have arrived today. I will tell
what I first saw of life. How I saw it. How I was allowed
to see it. How my range of vision extended. How knowl-
edge, experience and imagination accumulated and horizon
opened beyond horizon.

I was born in a rather unprosperous home; there was no
nursery and most of my waking day was spent in an under-
ground kitchen. Very little remains in my memory now of
that first world, my infantile world. As I saw it then, it
seemed to be the only world. When I put together the notes
for this Introduction, I sat for a time, doing my utmost to
recall what picture of the world I had in early childhood.
I get scarcely anything at all

It must have been a very limited picture. I had few gen-

INTRODUCTION 3

eral ideas. Or none. For instance, my mind was not living
in a ilat world or a round world or anything of that sort,
I was not bothering about any shape or size of the world. I
was entirely incurious about all that. I was just living in
"the world/' I was informed that there was a home for
little children above the bright blue sky, but I do not
remember that that interested me in the slightest degree.
I was rather more concerned about Old Bogey who
would come and fetch me if I told fibs and so on, and
I rather disliked (but I did not think very much about)
a certain divine eye that was always watching me generally
with disapproval But as far as my recollections go, I was
much more afraid of bears, tigers, black men, red Indians
and other dangers, lurking in the shadows upstairs and round
the corner. That infantile world was a world of vivid, im-
mediate, inconsecutive realities against a background of
nothingness that evoked no curiosity. There was the house
next door, there was the moon, there was night, there was
day and so forth. Why not? With the utmost effort, that is
all I can reconstruct of the world I saw before I began to
read books and see pictures, go for walks, go to school, and
inspect and inquire with the freedom of seven or eight
years old.

I have a fuller conception of what I was seeing after that
stage. My imagination was being used to amplify and ex-
tend what I saw and heard and felt directly. A rather foggy
time-background was taking shape. I heard about "Once
upon a time/* before I existed. I had a jumbled idea of old
England, mostly forests with turrets peeping out o them,
old Paris, Rome, where it was always -Nero and Christians
fighting beasts in the Coliseum. My historical ideas centered

4 THE FATE OF MAN

upon Windsor Castle. I had seen Windsor Castle, and I
firmly believed that that grandiose round tower, which
George the Fourth clapped upon it, was built by William
the Conqueror. Rome, Greece, Babylon, Jerusalem and
Egypt, arranged anyhow, crowded the background, and the
Creation, seen across the shining waters of the Flood and a
curious procession of very, very, very old gentlemen
Methuselah beat the record sealed up the vista of the past.

I was interested in geography chiefly because it provided
varied scenery for imaginary adventures. I thought China
and Japan were made to be laughed at, though their porce-
lain and silks and fans were clever. I knew that there were
also savages for whom Britain provided missionaries and
machine-guns. Savages were generally cannibals and wore
few or no garments, which seemed to me very rude of them
indeed. I knew the world was round because everybody told
me so. If they had told me the world was cone-shaped or
flat, I should have known that with equal conviction and
it was only years afterwards that I realized how difficult it
is to prove that the world is a globe. There were upper
classes one respected and lower classes that one didn't,
and poor people had to work, and that was how things
were. The nearer I could edge up to the upper classes the
better it would be for me.

So I saw the world about the year 1880, when I was rising
fourteen years old, and I think most of my readers will
agree with me that I was seeing the world then in a very
distorted and foggy fashion. And yet I was seeing it as
most people in Great Britain were seeing it at that time.
I was seeing it as vast multitudes of people arc seeing it
today. I was seeing it as it was shown to me. For a score of

BIOLOGY INVADES HISTORY 19

causes. These processes of primitive waste were too rela-
tively slow to be perceptible from lifetime to lifetime. So
these thinkers of yesterday talked of unchanging human
nature. You cannot change human nature, they said. They
relied upon the fabled promise of the rainbow, they had it
straight from the Creator's mouth, that while the earth still
remained, seedtime and harvest should endure.

The order of events seemed a sure, unfailing routine. And
in much the same way, our ancestors, until a couple of
dozen centuries ago, thought the world was flat. They
thought the sea they sailed upon flat without qualification,
and it required a considerable amount of mental exercise
for them to realize that the apparent plane of the ocean
surface was really curved and that the faster and farther
they sailed the more effectively they would realize how the
round earth was falling away from their first assumptions.
All their old landmarks would then vanish one after an-
other. Astounded navigators found unfamiliar constellations
in the heavens. Within two dozen centuries man has been
discovering that he lives not on a flat earth but upon a globe,
and within the last ten, that he is not the center of the uni-
verse but a denizen of a very second-rate planet. He has had
to readjust his general ideas about life to that, and to a cer-
tain extent he has adjusted them. To a certain extent only.

And similarly our historical imaginations, quite as much
as our geographical imaginations, live today in a vastly
enlarged system of perspectives. We know that the ever-
lasting hills are not everlasting, that all our working con-
ceptions of behavior and destiny are provisional and that
human nature and everything about it is being carried
along upon an irreversible process of change. Our historical

6 THE FATE OF MAN

I forget when it was I began to realize that the world as
it had been presented to me was not a trustworthy picture
of reality, that in effect I was being lied to about life. I began
doubting quite early in life. The religion they put before
me was queer, muddled stuff, metaphors about unfatherly
fathers and sacrificial sons, blood offerings and blood-drip-
ping sacrificial lambs (in suburban London!), an irrational
fall and a vindictive judgment, stuff that took refuge from
any intelligent questions behind a screen of awe, mystery
and menace, so that my reason did not so much reject it as
fail altogether to accept it. What they called morality seemed
planned to thrust me into some nasty secret corners and
leave me there. I had some bad times, fearing a God whom
I felt but did not dare to think a spy, a bully, a tyrant and
fundamentally insane, and it was only after terrific distresses
and terrors that I achieved disbelief. Fear lingered in my
mind long after definite faith had dissolved.

The sublunary world they imposed upon me was equally
difficult to accept. The history they taught me wound up at
1700, which was queer when one came to think about it.
But even then I must have read books about the French
Revolution and George Washington and the Roman Re-
public, and they had upset my simple faith in the inevita-
bility of our political order, the dear Queen and all the
rest of it. A sixpenny book by the late Henry George came
into my hands and set me thinking crudely, destructively,
but profitably about rent, wages and suchlike matters. Some
rumors about a science called geology reached me. I had
already observed for myself in the pictures in Wood's
Natural History that different species of animals had quite
needless resemblances to one another, if it was indeed true

INTRODUCTION 7

that they had all been made separately. Then about that
time my schoolmaster set me reading science textbooks to
earn Education Department grants for him, and suddenly
I woke up to the existence of a vast and growing world of
thought and knowledge outside my ordinary circle of ideas
altogether. My heavens opened, and the world as I had
seeivit hitherto became a flimsy veil upon the face of reality.

I have heard other people who have had similar experi-
ences to mine tell of the thirst for knowledge they experi-
enced. I suppose I had that thirst in good measure, but far
stronger was my anger at the paltry sham of an education
that had been fobbed off upon me; angry resentment also at
the dismal negligence of the social and religious organiza-
tions responsible for me, that had allowed me to be thrust
into the hopeless drudgery of a shop, ignorant, misinformed,
undernourished and physically under-developed, without
warning and without guidance, at the age of thirteen. To
sink or swim. I was too young to make allowances for the
people who were exploiting and stifling me. I did not realize
that they were quite charming people really, if a little too
self-satisfied and indolent. I thought they had conspired to
keep me down. It wasn't true that they had conspired to
keep me down. But I was down and they didn't bother.
They took my inferiority as part of the accepted order. They
just trod on me. But I did not discriminate about their re-
sponsibility. I hated them as only the young can hate, and
it gave me the energy to struggle, and I set about struggling,
for knowledge. I was bitterly determined to see my world
clearer and truer, before it was too late.

To this day I will confess I dislike the restriction and dis-
tortion of knowledge as I dislike nothing else on earth. In

8 THE FATE OF MAN

this modern world it is, I hold, second only to murder to
starve and cripple the mind of a child. Emasculation of the
mind is surely more horrible than any degrading bodily
mutilation. In our modern world we recoil from the delib-
erate manufacture of human dwarfs, harem attendants and
choristers, but the world still swarms with mental cripples,
who follow the laws of their own distortion and scarcely
suspect they are distorted.

I have indicated the limits of my world outlook in 1880.
By extraordinary good luck I caught up to something like
contemporary knowledge in the course of a few years. In
seven years, before I was twenty-one, I contrived never
mind how to secure four years of almost continuous study,
and three of these were at the Royal College of Science, and
one under the professorship of the great Huxley, Darwin's
friend; and by 1887 the world as I saw it had become some-
thing altogether greater, deeper and finer than the confused
picture I had of it in 1880. Mentally, we all travel at our
fastest, I suppose, between fourteen and twenty-one. Many
of my readers will know from their own experience what
I mean when I say that for me these years remain in my
memory as if all the time I was putting together an immense
jig-saw puzzle in a mood of inspiration. These were the
most exciting years in my life. I had been blind and I was
learning to see. The world opened out before me. By '88
I saw the world, not precisely as I see it today, but much
more as I see it today than as I saw it in 1880. There has
been a lot of expansion and supplementing since, but noth-
ing like a fundamental reconstruction.

Now how did we because I was one of a generation of
science students how did we see the world in '88? Time

INTRODUCTION 9

had opened out for us, and the Creation, the Fall of Man
and the Flood, those simple fundamentals of the Judaeo-
Christian mythology, had vanished. Forever. Instead I saw
a limitless universe throughout which the stars and nebulae
were scattering like dust, and I saw life ascending, as it
seemed, from nothingness towards the stars.

In the eighties the prevailing ideas about space and time,
matter and energy, were simpler than they are now. Space
and time just went on forever, we thought. We students
used to talk about the fourth and other dimensions, but
when I wrote a story for the students' magazine and identi-
fied time with the fourth dimension, I thought I was being
very original and paradoxical indeed. We also had very
definitely limited ideas about the amount of energy latent
in the universe, and it seemed to us that our world would
probably "freeze up" in a few million years. Still even that
gave us a long time ahead, and we thought humanity might
see and do tremendous things. We knew the broad outline
of the history of life in time; we knew that our ancestors
were apes, and it seemed possible that man would go on to
a power and wisdom beyond all precedent.

But our ideas of that progress we anticipated were re-
markably restricted. Our imaginations were relatively un-
stimulated. For example, our world, as we saw it then, knew
nothing of radio or to be exact it knew of radio transmis-
sion as a curious laboratory experiment, the Hertzian waves
-v-and its ideas about atoms and the statement of physical
processes, were naive in the extreme. We doubted if avia-
tion was possible, we doubted if electric fraction was possi-
ble, we associated submarines with the fantasies of Jules
Verne, and we considered his Around the World in Eighty

10 THE FATE OF MAN

Days an extravagant dream. Our interpretation of mental
actions was trivial and shallow almost beyond comparison
with what we have now.

As I compare the world as I see it now, with that world
I contemplated fifty years ago, I realize how greatly the pic-
ture has unfolded and how much understanding has intensi-
fied. So far as its scale and texture go, so far as space and
time, the atoms and the threads and substance of the picture
go, the world as I see it today is altogether more marvelous,
mysterious and profound.

It is not only that our analysis of the rhythms and inter-
play of the physical elements of the universe has been
elaborated and rephrased in far more effective modes. In the
foreground and middle distance also, concerning affairs
upon this planet and the more obvious and immediate ac-
tivities of life, our enlightenment has been immense. Thanks
largely to Freud and his disciples and successors, there has
been an immense advance in our self-knowledge. I would
put Freud side by side with Darwin as a significant figure in
human enlightenment. These two men are cardinal not
so much on account of the actual elucidations they produced
but 'because of the questions they asked and the method o
their questioning. Our knowledge first of our own motives
and impulses and then of mass-thought and mass-action, has
become beyond comparison more lucid and practical, thanks
primarily to the initiatives of Freud.

One immediate result of this rapid progressive enlarge-
ment and confirmation of our former outlook has been a
tremendous wave of optimistic assurance in the minds of
liberal-minded, freely thinking people. They have taken
progress in discovery, in intelligent social organization, in

INTRODUCTION 11

the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, as something
almost as inevitable as the precession of the Equinoxes. That
progress has had the air of something quite independent of
the daily lives and mass responses of everyday people. There
was nothing anyone need do about it. It came; it unfolded;
it increased. Progress! The men of science, the inventors,
clever people somewhere were doing it all for us and all
we had to do was to sit back and marvel and accept the
cornucopia. There are the facts before us, the novelties, the
triumphs, perpetually reinforced. In the world as I see it
today, the powers and possibilities of human effort appear
enormously greater than they did in 1888. And still they
increase. Still the prospect and the promise expand.

The case for optimism about physical wants is stronger
now than ever. So far as economic circumstances go, the
world could be organized to provide every living soul upon
it with abundant food, housing and leisure, and that with-
out either direct compulsion to toil or any irksome monot-
ony of employment. We have passed in a single lifetime
from a general neediness to a practicable plenty for all The
story is too familiar to need exhaustive recapitulation here.
Aviation and radio communication have abolished distance.
In 1888 the unity of the world as one community was a re-
mote aspiration; now it has become an imperative necessity.
Fifty years ago none of us dreamt of the freedom and full-
ness of life that is now a plain possibility for everyone. To
many hopeful people in die past few decades, an age of
power, freedom and abundance has seemed close at hand.
Eye has not seen nor ear heard, it is only now entering into
the human imagination to conceive, the wonder of the years
to come.

12 THE FATE OF MAN

And now suddenly we are confronted by a series of dis-
tresses and disasters, of a nature to convince the most hope-
ful of us that all this happy assurance was premature. We an-
ticipated too easily, too greedily and too uncritically. TTiese
new powers, inventions, contrivances and methods, are not
the unqualified enrichment of normal life that we had ex-
pected. They are hurting, injuring and frustrating us
increasingly- They are proving dangerous and devastating
in our eager but unprepared hands. We are only beginning
to realize that the cornucopia of innovation may perhaps
prove far more dangerous than benevolent.

What we may call the scientific world has recognized
this quite recently. There have been great stirrings of con-
science in various scientific organizations upon the question
of the misuse of science and invention, and how far the
man of science may be held responsible for that misuse.
The Associations for the Advancement of Science in Britain,
America and Australia have been moving under the initia-
tives of such men as Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Lord
Rutherford and Sir Richard Gregory. The British Associa-
tion has created a special Division, not merely a new sec-
tion but a sort of collateral to itself, for the study of the 1
social relations of science. The fate of this Division will be
of considerable interest from our point of view. I have been
privileged to attend some of its deliberations and two di-
vergent lines of tendency have been very evident. One is
plainly to organize and implement the common creative im-
pulse in the scientific mind so as to make it a vital factor
in public opinion; that was the original impulse which
evoked the Division; the other is to restrain any such de-
velopment of an authoritative and perhaps embarrassing

INTRODUCTION 13

criticism of the conduct o public affairs and to keep the
man of science modestly to his present subordination.

It would carry us too far afield to discuss here how far
the consciences of men of science may be able to get the
upper hand of a trained and experienced governing class,
so as to insist upon such collective ideals as they are able to
formulate, and how far a trained and experienced governing
class may maneuver this medley of distressed and protesting
intelligences into the position of a roster of mere "experts"
available if called upon by the authorities, and otherwise out
of consideration.

It is conceivable that the scientific worker is even now
walking into a net; that increasing areas of his inquiries and
experiments are falling under the restrictions of "official
^ecrets"; and that far beyond the more obvious realms of
physics and chemistry, fields of investigation that have no
direct bearing upon warfare are likely to come under con-
trol, as favoring subversive ideas undermining the military
morale of the community. In Nazi Germany this has hap-
pened already to psychological science, to mathematical
physics and ethnology matters quite outside armament and
strategy. An almost complete strangulation of the unham-
pered publication and exchanges of the free scientific period
is visibly within the range of contemporary possibility, and
the world of scientific workers, as we know them, even
with that "Division" to rally them, appears a feeble folk
to resist the influences making for that extinction.

No one has ever explored the bases of intellectual freedom
in the modern community, and they may prove to be far
more flimsy than the intellectual worker, flinging his mind
about in the apparent security of his study, imagines.

14 THE FATE OF MAN

It is not simply the forcible misuse of purely mechanical
inventions that is producing such frightening retrogressions
of those brave, free hopes that culminated in the later twen-
ties. Every fresh development of radio, of the film and mass
information generally, and all the new educational devices
to which we had looked for the rapid spread of enlighten-
ment and a common world understanding, are being sub-
ordinated more and more to government restriction and
the service of propaganda. They were to have been the
artillery of progress. They are rapidly being turned against
our mental freedoms with increasing effectiveness.

Plainly, it is high time we looked more closely into the
causes of these disconcerting frustrations of our recent large,
bright anticipations of a world of plenty and expansion.
What is the real position of Homo sapiens in relation to
his environment? Has he the mastery we assumed he had,
or did we make a profound miscalculation of his outlook?
Have we been indulging in hopeful assumptions rather
than facing the realities of his case? Upon that question the
subsequent summary concentrates.

PRELIMINARY STATEMENT

SINCE THE DAY WHEN Herbert Spencer launched the word
"Sociology" upon the world, the study of the general ques-
tion of what is happening to mankind has made great ad-
vances. Sociology or, to give it a more recent and better
name, human ecology has become a real science, analyz-
ing operating causes and forecasting events. Our awareness
of our circumstances is altogether more lucid than the
world outlook even of our fathers. We have, flowing into
the problem of human society, a continually more acute
analysis of its population movements, of its economic proc-
esses, of the relation of its activities to the actual resources
available* We no longer talk with quite the same pompous
ignorance as the history teachers of our youth, of the rise
and decay of Empires and of the march of civilization from
East to West or from West to East, it is much the same
and suchlike plausible caricatures of the current of events.
With the increase in our knowledge and understanding
quite new conceptions of the prospects and problems of
humanity unfold before us*

The infiltration of biological ideas into sociology and
human history, it has to be recognized, is a process still

only beginning. The enlightenment of the middle nine-
is

16 THE FATE OF MAN

teenth century through the destructive analysis of the Crea-
tion myth, went on in the face of vast resistances, and not
the least of these were in the schools. The new conceptions
threatened the very bases of belief oh which right conduct
seemed to rest. Men shrank from following out the plain
implications of the new discoveries. And so either they were
denied, irrationally and frantically, or they were minimized,
they were admitted, yes, but as obscure, remote matters,
that had little or no significance in the "broader issues" of
life. So that they could be taught in a sterilized form or
ignored altogether. There was a period of controversy, very
disastrous to the old dogmas, and then a phase of defensive
silences* Open fighting was abandoned and the established
beliefs dug themselves in.

It is still possible for bright youngsters at the universities
to enter upon the "advanced" study of history, philosophy
and economics, in the blackest ignorance of general biology.
A majority of them remain in that ignorance, with a deep-
ening scholastic hostility to this science, which sits like a
neglected creditor at their doors. They have established a
social prejudice against this dreaded line of thought and
body of knowledge in which they have no share. They suc-
ceed in putting it upon the all too snobbish and sensitive
young that somehow the biological reference is not quite
the thing. It isn't done. It isn't to be thought about. There
is an indecency in it. The young university philosopher,
historian or economist is in many cases not so much biolog-
ically ignorant as biology-proofed.

It is because of such mental gaps and barriers that it is
necessary to recapitulate here certain facts about life, which,
although they are matters of general knowledge today be-

PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 17

yond question and almost beyond cavil, might nevertheless,
so far as any effective realization of their bearing upon our
general social, political and religious behavior goes, be
totally unknown. Yet they bear upon the problems of the
present urgently. Contemporary political discussion remains
indeed mere maundering empiricism, a tissue of guesses,
ill-founded assertions and gossip, until they are brought
into court.

This contrast of established knowledge and its effective
application is a very remarkable one. Men can know a
thing and yet know it quite ineffectively if it contradicts
the general traditions and habits in which they live. It is
well to understand that at this stage in our analysis, because
it bears very directly upon the review of human possibilities
to which this summary is directed.

BIOLOGY INVADES HISTORY

ONE OF THE MOST striking differences between the outlook
of our grandparents and that of a modern intelligence to-
day is the modification of time values that has occurred.

By the measure of our knowledge their time-scale was
extremely shallow. They had scarcely any historical per-
spective at all. They looked back to a past of a few thousand
years and at the very beginning of time as they conceived
it, they saw human life very much as it is now: it was a
more or less balanced system of certain social types: rulers
and ruled, hunter and cultivator, priest and soldier. This
they regarded as the immemorial life of man. They saw the
life of city and cultivated land, desert and sea, throughout
all the interval, spreading perhaps, changing in a few par-
ticulars, enriched rather than altered by inventions and dis-
coveries, but essentially the same. Their range of observation
and comparison was too limited for them to realize that by
clearing forests, overstocking grasslands, destroying soil,
they were slowly impoverishing and devastating many of
the regions into which they spread. They did not connect
the rise and fall of empires with a factor of unforeseeing
waste in that normal life of theirs. They ascribed such
drifting of population and energy as they observed to other

18

BIOLOGY INVADES HISTORY 19

causes. These processes of primitive waste were too rela-
tively slow to be perceptible from lifetime to lifetime. So
these thinkers of yesterday talked of unchanging human
nature. You cannot change human nature, they said* They
relied upon the fabled promise of the rainbow, they had it
straight from the Creator's mouth, that while the earth still
remained, seedtime and harvest should endure.

The order of events seemed a sure, unfailing routine. And
in much the same way, our ancestors, until a couple of
dozen centuries ago, thought the world was flat. They
thought the sea they sailed upon flat without qualification,
and it required a considerable amount of mental exercise
for them to realize that the apparent plane of the ocean
surface was really curved and that the faster and farther
they sailed the more effectively they would realize how the
round earth was falling away from their first assumptions.
All their old landmarks would then vanish one after an-
other. Astounded navigators found unfamiliar constellations
in the heavens. Within two dozen centuries man has been
discovering that he lives not on a flat earth but upon a globe,
and within the last ten, that he is not the center of the uni-
verse but a denizen of a very second-rate planet. He has had
to readjust his general ideas about life to that, and to a cer-
tain extent he has adjusted them. To a certain extent only.

And similarly our historical imaginations, quite as much
as our geographical imaginations, live today in a vastly
enlarged system of perspectives. We know that the ever-
lasting hills are not everlasting, that all our working con-
ceptions of behavior and destiny are provisional and that
human nature and everything about it is being carried
along upon an irreversible process of change. Our historical

20 THE FATE OF MAN

ideas reach back now through vistas of millions of years,
we see humanity emerging from sub-human conditions,
from the life of relatively solitary apes, at distances in the
nature of a quarter of a million years, we know with in-
creasing precision of the onset of a social hunting life in
those distant ages, we are able to trace the beginnings of
agriculture in a period of two or three hundred centuries,
and by the new scale, the development of cities, language,
law, religious organization, and all the various adaptations
of humanity to the new conditions of a regular food sup-
ply, all that social system which seemed as eternal as the
heavens, appear now events of yesterday, devoid of any
finality whatsoever. That fixity of the normal human life
which our great-great-grandfathers assumed as a matter of
plain common sense, we discover was a ^transient dream.
As our perspectives open, it vanishes.

The rapid progress of social psychology, human ecology
and all the ill-defined activities of human and general biol-
ogy is opening our eyes, it is opening even the eyes of our
trained historians and our social teachers, to the real nature
of our everyday social life. It is brought home to us that the
human species for the last twenty or twenty-five thousand
years has been living in such a continuously accelerating
process of change as no other animal species has ever been
called upon to face. And it is also being forced upon our
reluctant attention that the species Homo sapiens is no
privileged exception to the general conditions that determine
the destinies of other living species. It prospers or suffers
under the same laws. These laws can be stated compactly,
and there is nowadays very little dispute about them, even
in matters of detail.

HOW SPECIES SURVIVE

WHAT IN GENERAL TERMS are the relations of a species to the
world about it?

.A species may be living in practical harmony with its
environment or it may be more or less out of balance with
its surroundings.

In the former case it may continue recognizably the same
species, living the same life, age after age. Any tendency
to excessive numbers may be corrected by a correlated in-
crease in the types that prey upon it, and there will be no
definite biological encouragement for such variations and
mutations as occur. Harmless mutations may indeed pro-
duce varieties and sub-species, and, as Henry Fairfield
Osborn long ago pointed out, there may be purely muta-
tional. efflorescences; the correlation of a species to its en-
vironment is never hard and exact; but only a minority of
mutations seem to be without some quality of advantage
or disadvantage. Abnormal individuals in a species in prac-
tical equilibrium will generally be eliminated, and the spe-
cies as a whole will pursue the even tenor of its way indefi-
nitely.

There are species that have been under no necessity to

adjust themselves to circumstances over vast periods of

21

22 THE FATE OF MAN

geological time. But they are exceptions to the general
ecological spectacle of species balancing themselves in a
changing world. Most existing species, when their affairs
are scrutinized as a whole, are discovered to be in a state
of imperfect adjustment to their circumstances, and to be
either undergoing adaptation to meet new requirements or
to be losing ground in the struggle if one may call any-
thing so essentially passive a struggle^-to survive. Over a
large part of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, adaptation,
the working adjustment of the species under stress, is
made, if it is made at all, by the selective frustration and
killing off of less well-adjusted individuals. Variations and
mutations it is not necessary to enter here into the contro-
versial question of their causes; suffice it that they occur
variations and mutations, indifferent, favorable and unfavor-
able, play a considerable part in this selective adjustment.
The adjustment is either sufficient or insufficient. In the
latter case, the species dwindles and disappears. In the
former, the species undergoes modification; it survives,
changed, as a new species or as several new species accord-
ing to the imperatives of its altered conditions.

All this again is practically common knowledge today.
Most educated people know about it even if they do not
think very much about it, or link it up with other systems
of ideas in their minds. It needs to be repeated plainly here
in view of that possibility of disregard.

The general history of life in the past is, as everybody
knows, one of failure and defeat rather than adaptation.
Great groups of living things have arisen, had their hey-
day, and then passed altogether from the scene, giving place
to more plastic and adaptable forms of life. Comparatively

HOW SPECIES SURVIVE 23

insignificant forms with novel accommodations arise to
take their place.

When we contemplate that greater past that science has
unfolded for us, we see great groups and orders of mighty
creatures dominating the earth, enormous reptiles, huge
mammals flourishing and then waning and passing away.
They have not kept pace with change; their exuberance has
been almost a defiance of change; and change has overcome
and obliterated them. The geological record can be pre-
sented, certain assumptions being granted, as on the whole
a great progression, but that does not alter the fact that it
is also a history of the ruthless extinction of whole species,
genera and orders of living things. There are tremendous
massacres in the geological record.

One of the greatest of these occurred at the close of the
Mesozoic period, when in the course of perhaps only a few
hundred thousand years, a vast reptilian fauna, ichthyosau-
rus, plesiosaurus, tyrannosaurus and so forth, an equally
wonderful flora, scores of genera of ammonites and so on
and so forth, were thrust out of existence. We know little
or nothing of the changes that made so many hitherto suc-
cessful forms of life impossible. We know surely only that
they occurred. A change from conditions of all-the-year-
round equable temperature to wide seasonal alternations of
heat and cold may have resulted from some planetary dis-
turbance. More recently there have been parallel massacres
of groups of the early mammals, and there can be no ques-
tion that today we are, from the geological point of view,
living in a phase of exceptional climatic instability, -in a
series of glacial and interglacial ages, and witnessing an-
other destruction of animal and plant species on an almost

24 THE FATE OF MAN

unparalleled scale. The list of species extinguished in the
past hundred years is a long one; the list of species threat-
ened with extinction today is still longer. No new species
arise to replace those exterminated. It is a swift, distressful
impoverishment of life that is now going on. And this time
the biologist notes a swifter and stranger agent of change
than any phase of the fossil past can show man, who will
leave nothing undisturbed from the ocean bottom to the
stratosphere, and who bids f air to extinguish himself in the
process.

This species man is, as we all know, one of a great series
of species which we can speak of roughly as cerebral ani-
mals. These are the mammals who have dominated the
earth since the beginning of the Tertiary period and which
display throughout a rapid development of the cerebral
cortex. This cerebral cortex was a novelty in the history of
life, and it brought with it a fresh, distinctive method of
individual adaptation to special circumstances. It quickened
the response of a species to changing conditions very greatly.
Learning from experience appears indeed but very rudimen-
tarily in cold-blooded vertebrata; it is only in the birds and
mammals, and particularly in the latter, that it becomes of
real importance in adaptation. Essentially the cerebrum is
an organ for the storage and application of memories. It
enables individuals to learn by experience. The history of
the mammals in particular is a history of memory develop-
ment. All through the Tertiary period, it is to be noted,
brains in every group of mammals increase in relative size
and complexity. With every increase, the power of learning
from experience and of supplementing direct impulse by
conditioned reflexes increases. A young fish or reptile comes

HOW SPECIES SURVIVE 25

into the world with a practically complete, almost unalter-
able set of instinctive responses. It survives or fails by its
inherited outfit. Apparently it can learn to a certain extent,
but it learns very little. A young mammal comes into life
far less conclusively equipped, a tabula rasa, prepared to
learn. It learns. And the ampler its cerebral equipment, the
more it learns to take care of itself. To begin with, it is
sillier and less certain than the cold-blooded type; it stands
in need of protection; in the end it is far better adapted to
meet the special conditions it faces.

Moreover, the young mammal and, to a rather different
extent and in a rather different fashion, the young bird do
not simply learn from individual experience. Generally
speaking there is also a protective relationship between the
parent and the new individual. By example and often by
direct intervention the young individual is taught. It heeds
and imitates.

As we ascend the scale of cerebral development the pos-
sibility of teaching increases. It becomes possible to domesti-
cate and train these higher-brain animals in just the measure
that their brains are developed. You can teach very little
to a fish or a reptile, but directly you come to the higher
cerebral mammals you are confronted by the new possibility
of establishing an artificial, taught, motive system to control,
supplement or altogether replace natural instinct. You must
catch them young. Then you can socialize them and get to
quite remarkable working understandings with them. The
shepherd's dog, the blind man's dog, the polo pony, the
polite, house-trained cat, are examples of the immense indi-
vidual adaptability which is achieved through the establish-
ment of a taught, secondary self in the cerebral cortex. None

26 THE FATE OF MAN

of these creatures are behaving in accordance with the pri-
mary tendencies they have inherited. They are behaving in
accordance with an adaptive mental superstructure imposed
upon their natural dispositions. It enables them to survive
not simply as tolerated but as contributing individuals in a
complex social organization which otherwise would have
had no alternative but their extermination. They would have
suffered the fate that is overtaking the unteachable Tasma-
nian Devil or the unteachable Tasmanian Wolf.

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY

AT THIS POINT AGAIN it may be well to take stock of the dis-
cussion we are unfolding. We have been restating, very
plainly and directly, established facts in general ecology, and
we are going on now to develop this restatement in relation
to the particular position and outlook of the human species.
There is no need to apologize for this biological resume,
elementary though it is. It is vitally necessary to our state-
ment. It is absolutely impossible to approach the urgent and
distressful problems of the present time with any hope of
lucid solution until this general background of knowledge
is definitely present in the mind.

From now on we shall encounter an increasing amount
and variety of resistance to our application of these almost
universally admitted facts. From this' point on, many read-
ers will be quite unaccustomed to seeing human social life
in the light of ecological science. There is a sort of barrier
in their minds. It is not because they do not know, but be-
cause they see the two sets of facts apart. They will experi-
ence a strong resistance to this invasion of this reserved
region of human affairs by these really quite incontrovertible
ideas, because in this reserved region their minds are already

27

28 THE FATE OF MAN

strongly occupied by idea systems that are incompatible

with it. ...

It has been pointed out how the species of brain-animals
cooperate with circumstances in teaching their offspring to
adapt themselves to the exactions o their environment. But
in th case of man, and to a quite exceptional extent, be-
cause of an immense development of speech and gesture,
the taught stuff in the cerebrum becomes of overpoweringly
greater importance than mere hard experience, and we find
the behavior system of the individual ' molded to social
co-operation and collective needs, not only by tradition and
other forms of education but by institutions and law. Man,
above everything else, is an educated animal, socially con-
trolled. He is no longer primarily or even mainly a creature
of instinct and brief individual experience. That phase in
evolution lies a million years behind him. His instincts
alone and without correction would fail him utterly as a
behavior control in his present circumstances.

There is a relatively enormous artificial supplement to
the natural man in all of us. We talk of our "selves" and of
being freemen, but much the greater part of our activities
today we perform as parts not of one simple, greater organ-
ism, human society, but, what is more complex, as parts of
a number of greater organisms profession, township, nation,
religion, club, class, and so forth, which are all woven to-
gether into what we call human society and our social re-
actions. What we do as purely spontaneous individuals is -
hardly more than a narrow choice between prescribed
things. The home we live in, the clothes we wear, the food
we eat, the way we go about the world, are all substantially
imposed upon us by forces exterior to our personalities.

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY 29

They are social products and more and more do they be-
come social products.

The socialization of human life, the relative increase of
the factor supplied by society, is still going on quite rapidly.
There was a time, for instance, not so many generations ago,
when most people built their own homes, made their own
clothes, got their own food, taught their own children. Now
the building trade, clothing trade, the provision shop, and
the public school see to all that.

This applies with even greater truth to our minds. A mere
fraction of our knowledge is self-taught. What we know
again is nine-tenths hearsay. We have heard, we have read.
The stuff in our heads was mainly put there by society. To
the biologist an ordinary ape is just a natural ape, but a
man is a natural man plus a great cerebral accumulation of
directive ideas, prejudices, antagonisms, tolerances and con-
ceptions of what he ought and ought not to do, which wrap
about him and fit him into the social body to which he be-
longs. From the biological point of view all this cerebro-
social accumulation of knowledge, beliefs and ideas, respon-
sibilities and dependency, is as much a natural adjustment
to needs and environment as a claw or a skull or a swim-
ming bladder; it is a thing of the same kind, though it dif-
fers enormously in the relative swiftness and breadth of its
adaptability to changing conditions. It is subject to the
same ecological laws.

The growth of this mental superstructure upon the primi-
tive ape-man of the later Tertiary period can now be traced
in its broad lines without very much difficulty. Any attempt
to make a general outline of human history falls almost
uncontrollably into the form of a story of developing com-

30 THE FATE OF MAN

munication, learning and co-operation between the primor-
dial ape-man family groups. The outline of history as one
whole is, and must be, a history of communication and so-
cialization. It is compelled to apprehend primary processes
that the older type of history, with its preoccupation with
separate communities, was equally compelled to ignore* It
begins necessarily with the origins of speech, gesture, draw-
ing, observances, and taboos.

With every such development, the association of human
animals in groups collectively more efficient in the appro-
priation of food supplies became easier. The family group
grew into the tribe and tribes grew larger. Their growing
awareness of the seasons is apparent in the archaeological
record; their growing ability to co-operate in the semi-
domestication of animals and the first agricultural tentatives
is now quite clearly traceable. These are no longer matters
to dispute about. With the development of agriculture and
the beginnings of settlement, man, the new sort of social-
ized man, appears as a rapid and immense biological suc-
cess. His growing communities spread swiftly, growing as
well as multiplying and spreading, and displaying every
symptom of an unprecedented surplus of biological energy.

A few millenia ago the life which our great-grandfathers
considered to be the normal and immemorial life of man-
kind was well under way. It had grown up, biologically
speaking, speaking by the standards of geological time, with
the rapidity of a puff-ball, and those who lived it were un-
aware that there had ever been any other way of human
living. Such was life. And it was still, although they did not
perceive it in the least, under a stress of accelerating change.

The changes in the conditions of human life during the

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY 31

last twenty or thirty thousand years have been mainly
brought about by the acceleration of invention through in-
creasing co-operation and the release of material and social
power. There have been no doubt climatic and geographical
changes, but their share has been relatively less important.
The essential story of history and pre-history is the story
of the adaptation of the social-educated superstructure of the
animal man to the novel problems with which his own en-
terprise and inventiveness have been continually confronting
him. Law, religion, education, are from the ecological point
of view, names we give to the cardinal aspects of this process
of adaptation. Each generation in these growing and spread-
ing societies was told a story of its relation to the community
into which it had to fit itself and given an account of the
acquiescences and co-operations expected from it. The im-
peratives of law, education, religion, all flowing into one
another and sustaining one another, were expressed, and in
these early stages of mental development could only be ex-
pressed, by anthropomorphic myths. Natural selection has
no care for scientific precision. There is no immediate sur-
vival value in truth. To this day the survival value of the
critical habit of mind is questionable. It sufficed for the
purposes of nature if the myths and the system of observ-
ance, the things that were too awful to do and the things
that it was fatal to leave undone, made for the survival of
the community as a whole. The adaptive superstructures, the
laws, rules and beliefs, that were favoring human survival,
varied in different regions, but they varied within the limits
set by the conditions of specific survival. A certain primary
resemblance of the tribal gods and of the tribal stories and
of the behavior systems of the differentiating social classes,

32 THE FATE OF MAN

waited upon the spread o the "normal" way of life about
the earth. Parallel circumstances evoked parallel adjust-
ments. Generally the pattern included a tribal ancestor god,
a priesthood taking care of the calendar and medicine, a
morality of propitiation and self-restraint.

Step by step, as human inter-communication increased,
communities grew larger. And as they grew larger they de-
veloped something, of which curiously enough we are only
beginning to grasp the profound importance today; they
developed a superfluity of young men.

From the point of view of the biologist Homo sapiens
was making an almost excessive success. He was repeating
the exuberance of the great Mesozoic reptiles or the early
Tertiary deinotheria. The species was not only holding its
own, it was spreading and multiplying by leaps and bounds.
And the front of its biological advance was this surplus of
young men. Young men, full of beans as people say, and
looking for trouble.

Hitherto historians have failed to recognize the great im-
portance of this trouble-making stratum. It is well to
underline it here. It is a primary social fact. I have been
reading recently the works of Mark Benney, Low Com-
pany and The Truth about English Prisons (Fact, March
1938), who is rapidly becoming a leading authority on crim-
inology, and he reminds tne very strikingly of how nonsen-
sical it is to talk of a criminal class as a different sort of hu-
man being. It is in its origins more and more of an age class.
Every sort of energetic rnale human being is a potential
criminal, if nothing else is found to occupy and interest
him. These expanding human societies in the past were
needing less and less energy per head to be sure of their

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY 33

food supply and security. Something had to be done to and
for these young men, and the easiest way of keeping them
out of mischief, keeping them disciplined in fact and the
numbers of them down, was war.

Primitive war was a necessity forced upon the human
community by biological success through the production of
a surplus of young males. It appeared with herding and
agriculture and it was naturally associated with them. In
Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, one
can still see humanity in a sort of equilibrium at that stage
of development. There you have a population of over half
a million, still living in small independent communities,
each with its own conceit of itself, its peculiar petty customs
and prejudices. These New Guinea peoples are by no means
a monotony of barbarism. They present indeed a great va-
riety of physical and mental types, and their social and
artistic possibilities are very considerable. Up to the present
they have solved their population pressure by spells of not
too destructive warfare. There is a little killing-off and then
things settle down again. Now, under the parental care of
the Canberra government, their warfare is to cease, and
what will happen to these peoples is very uncertain. They
may be subjected to economic exploitation far more tragic
than warfare.

You can write human history in a variety of ways, but
one way of writing it would be to consider how, age after
age, humanity has met the problem of What to do with out
sons. There was war and what was generally associate i
with war, conquest and colonization. Roman Britain, for
instance, was conquered by the surplus offspring of the
Saxon shore. In my native county, Kent, traces survived until

34 THE FATE OF MAN

a very recent period o the custom of gavelkind. The elder
sons were sent off marauding and the youngest kept the
home. You can re-write the history of all the great popula-
tion movements in terms of the pressure of the young male
surplus.

It should be particularly evident as an operating cause in
the history of the last two centuries, and it would be if his-
tory were properly told. Every community can be shown to
be either sending out the plethora of its population as emi-
grants and settlers, or reducing it by warfare, or else suffer-
ing from acute social trouble, such social trouble as the
words Russian Hooligans, Chinese Boxers, Moonlighters,
Nazis, Fascists, revolutionary terrorists, gangsters, will call
to mind. The young man surplus, if it is not consumed, is
the main source of rebels, revolutionaries and disturbances
of all kinds* Somehow that tension must find relief. The
comparative social stability of the nineteenth century was
largely due to emigration and the settlement of new lands.
Now there are no more new lands open to immigration.

Moreover this tension has been greatly intensified by the
huge increase of productive efficiency through invention
and the use of mechanical power, which has diminished
the number of young men who could look forward to a
fairly secure, properly rewarded, sufficiently interesting mar-
ried life.

Invention and discovery in production have intensified
this age-long human problem and contributed to the pres-
ent exceptional drift towards warfare and social convulsions.
People stand in the young man's way and he is ready to
get rid of them in any fashion suggested to him. That drift
towards a social killing-off, and the necessity of justifying

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY 35

it, explain the eagerness with which race difference, class
difference, any sort of difference o complexion, language or
usage, nationalism and imperialism, are exalted into com-
batant provocations today. You can waste a lot of time
arguing about this or that ism. The essential fact is the ac-
cumulating tension of unsatisfied youth, and these isms
are mere formulae of relief. 1

Warfare and social conflict have for long ages released
the plethoric human species towards the relief of a blood-
letting. So it has been through all the ages of recorded his-
tory. With the relatively puny means of destruction available
before the age of invention and innovation, it was no more
than an excretion of inconvenient energy. For some hun-
dreds of centuries humanity got along in this way. War be-
came part of the accepted human rhythm, just as the mas-
sacre' of the drones is part of the natural rhythm of the
honey bee. Laws, customs, morals, sentiments and thoughts
were adapted to it so as to make it natural and easy. If it
were not for the outbreak of invention and discovery during
the past century, man might have gone on drumming and
trumpeting his way through long ages yet to come, going
to his priest to bless his flags, facing the day of battle bravely,
and either dying on the field of honor, or surviving to raise
another generation for the same experience.

But that inventive urge in the species has suddenly, in
what is by the geological and biological scales a mere flash
of time, altered all that. It has made war something entirely
different and it has put quite a new face on the political
ideas, the working conceptions of right and wrong, of duty
and service that have hitherto kept the varied and fluctuat-

1 See Note 4A. A falling birth-rate does not affect this.

36 THE FATE OF MAN

ing patchwork of human communities going. It has strained
and distorted the problem of adaptive survival almost be-
yond recognition. That, concisely, is the clue to the human
situation today.

Let me try to give the gist of this vast change. It is a
change in human power and scope.

First as to the increase in socially available power. Before
the change, except for a little wind power or water power,
the only power available for human purposes was a little
animal power, horse, ox, elephant, camel, llama, or what
not, and man power. The gross total of power units that
sufficed to run everything that was going on in Great
Britain in a day in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, everything,
was probably much less than the total of units that is con-
sumed today in running the lighting and transport alone of
such a city as Manchester or Kansas City. And again all the
energy of marching, shooting, stabbing, hacking, running
to and fro at the battle of Agincourt was probably less than
the energy released by one single high explosive shell in a
modern bombardment.

Until this change in the total of available power occurred,
the great majority of mankind toiled habitually to get food,
clothing and shelter. They were under an obligation to do
so or want. A small minority contrived in various ways to
live by the toil of others and spend, and except for such
parasitism there was no way to leisure. Now a steadily
dwindling number of people, using power machinery and
modern contrivances, can produce the essentials of life in
excess of all our requirements. Never before in the history
of life has any animal had such a fantastic increase in its
ability to make or destroy.

HISTORY BECOMES ECOLOGY 37

That is the first aspect of the contemporary change. A
second is what is called the abolition of distance. Even more
fantastic in relation to past tradition is the increase of speed
from point to point. The maximum of speed at which an
Elizabethan man could travel was limited by a horse. He
could send an uncertain and difficult message a hundred
miles a day. He had beacon fires of course, but they do not
carry any explicit messages. 1 He could see for a few miles.
Now abruptly this creature can travel in comfort three hun-
dred miles an hour, he can see and talk to his fellow-man
on die other side of the earth, he can murder him at vast,
increasing distances, he knows what is happening all over
the world almost instantaneously. And his health improves
and his vitality is greater. On the average he lives almost
twice as long and twenty times as actively and variously
as his great-great-grandfather. Now that distance has been
abolished, he lives with increasing restlessness cheek by
jowl with all the rest of mankind. So far a biologist might
count him an unqualified success in the struggle for life
except for one disconcerting thing. He is ceasing to breed.
His numbers are now passing a maximum and seem fated
to decline, at least for some decades ahead. Woman for a
variety of reasons is betraying an increasing disinclination
to bear children. Man's conquest of nature may prove a
sterile conquest. '<

His reproduction is falling off and his behavior traditions
and controls, and more particularly the war tradition, are
producing the most devastating tragedies among his com-
munities. The effect of the increase of power has been to
exaggerate the impact of the war drive monstrously. One

* See Note 4&.

38 THE FATE OF MAN

may compare the human species today to a steamship that
has long sailed the seas with engines roughly adequate to
its needs, until some malign influence has suddenly gone
down into the engine-room and, without any consultation
with the ship's officers, amplified the power of the engines a
thousandfold. Now they are flying loose out of control,
lashing the ship to pieces, and threatening to sink it alto-
gether. The captain upon the bridge gives impotent orders;
the engineers dodge the pounding shafts and the escaping,
searching, scalding steam.

Because of the way in which science and invention have
brought us all into intimate contact and put high explosives
into our hands, war has become a process of destruction
that spares neither age nor sex, it is no longer a selective
elimination of the surplus young men, it is a colossal wast-
age of material resources, a rapid disintegration of the social
organization, robbed of all the glories and gallantries that
once adorned it. In the past it was a corrective and almost
tonic process. Now it has become a rapid wasting disease,
a galloping consumption of the human species.

UNION NOW?

Is IT POSSIBLE FOR man to recover control, or is this shatter-
ing return to destructive violence the beginning of the end
of the career of Homo sapiens? Let us hold firmly to the
broad conceptions of ecological science that have brought us
thus far. The human species is, as a whole, dangerously out
of harmony with these new conditions. Either its powers of
adaptation will be sufficient to readjust it to the new de-
mands, and it will go on to a new phase of survival, or,
like any other living species, it will be defeated, shattered
and ultimately wiped out. There are no other possibilities.

There is no time for any of the slower and more ancient
methods of adaptation. The readjustment needed must be
a mental readjustment. In that alone is there any hope for
mankind.

In view of what has gone before it is plain that that men-
tal readjustment must involve three main essentials. In
varying measure these essentials are already widely recog-
nized.

First and most obviously the idea and tradition of war
must be eliminated. For that, quite a- large number of
people seem to be more or less prepared. They desire it,
even if they have yet to discover the price that must be paid
for it. Secondly, and what is not nearly so widely conceded,

39

40 THE FATE OF MAN

the vast and violent wastage of natural resources in the hunt
for private profit that went on during the nineteenth cen-
tury, must be arrested and reversed by the establishment of
a collective economy for the whole world. And thirdly, in
view of the stress of those young people, the resultant world
organization must be of an active, progressive, imaginatively
exciting nature. That surplus energy of youth, male and
female, must be used up. It is the drive and essence of life;
it is life itself. It must in each generation be "getting on."
It must be doing things, making or re-making with an
effect of conquest and general participation. The earlier years
were preparation; the later, relieved of the high fever and
impatience of that full onset of vitality, are appreciation, de-
liberation and the continual broadening-out of the human
agenda.

These three propositions, peace, collectivism and incessant
new enterprise, are interdependent and practically insepa-
rable. One cannot be realized without the other two. In
stating these propositions we are not in any way "laying
down the law." The law is in the nature of things. We are
merely stating as precisely as possible the unconditional
terms that our race manifestly has to expect.

To what extent is contemporary thought and education
moving towards the abolition of war?

An increasing number of us are realizing that the age of
independent sovereign states and empires throughout the
world, free to make war and prepared to make war, each
separated from the other by barriers of language, religion,
historical delusions and those differences in habits of life
which are called national cultures, is coming to an end,
obviously, rapidly; and at present not one of us can say

UNION NOW? 41

with any confidence what sort of world order can replace
it. A world order we feel there must be, but as to how it is
to be attained, we are all at sixes and sevens.

The world of man has to become, has in a chaotic dis-
order of conflict already become, one community one
disorderly community. In the days of Oliver Goldsmith,
what happened in China, happened in China, and did not
matter a rap to anyone in England, If every time one fired
a gun in England, he remarked, a man died in China, no-
body would mind in the least. The shooting would go on.
Now what happens in China, happens everywhere in the
world; that is to say it is known and affects life everywhere.
The crude fact of the world-wide community is here now.
The open questions arise when we consider how this in-
evitable coming together of our communities can and will
be recognized and established as a world order.

We have indeed already seen one attempt to reconstitute
human affairs so as to eliminate this destructive process of
modern war, in the League of Nations experiment. That,
we realize now, was an extremely naive attempt to stop the
current of history and to preserve forever just those na-
tional separatisms and strangulating boundaries against
which the stars in their courses are fighting. Certain mini-
mum changes were to be made to "end war" while every-
thing else was to go on just as it had been going on before.
Sovereign states, organized essentially for defense and ag-
gression, were to form a League to end combat. Simply that.
The conception of an organized World Pax, after it had
played its part in the warfare of propaganda, after it had
been used to build up false expectations of a new start in
life for the German people, was taken over at Versailles

42 THE FATE OF MAN

and translated into the ideology of Foreign Offices and the
diplomatic services. These essential organs of the old regime
were instructed to supersede themselves and they were left
to work out the task, and quite naturally they did nothing
of the sort. The League Covenant completely disregarded
that perennial problem of the restless young men, and it
gave no attention to the absolute necessity of reconstructing
economic life upon a collective basis throughout the world.
These are matters about which diplomacy has never con-
cerned itself. They do not enter into diplomatic or political
education, which is at least the better part of a century
out of date.

At the end of less than a score of years the failure of the
League of Nations experiment is complete, and we will
spend no time on enlarging upon that fruitless interlude of
half-hearted idealism. Suffice it to say that for many excel-
lent minds it has blocked the way to a realistic treatment of
the human problem for two decades. We find now in 1939,
a rough reproduction of the world situation of 1914-18. We
find three aggressive military states threatening the whole
world, and we find a number of threatened states contem-
plating some sort of loosely organized resistance to that
aggression.

How loosely with what dangerous looseness that or-
ganization is still contemplated is illustrated by a book that
has recently been given quite serious attention in Britain
and America. This is Union Now by Clarence K. Streit He
proposes that right now there shall be a "federal" union
of fifteen now independent states which he describes as
democracies. They are the United States of America, the
British group, Finland, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzer-

UNION NOW? 43

land, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. It is not a League or a
war alliance he proposes but a permanent federation on the
American model, with a common foreign policy, common
money, common armed forces, common control of inter-
state and foreign trade and a common citizenship. He
sweeps aside such questions as the status of India, colonial
possessions, the various monarchist traditions involved, as
secondary questions. Soviet Russia he balances on the brim
of his project with a query on the whole an encouraging
query. Apparently the federated democracies are to have
great local economic autonomy within the limits of the fed-
eral constitution.

Before we look into Mr. Streit's proposals more closely,
it will be worth while to get this loose word "democracy"
defined. The special interest of his book here lies in the fact
that it has been well received by a considerable number of
considerable people. It is an intimation of how rapidly
opinion is moving towards the conception of a new world
order transcending existing boundaries. So far it is a book
to be welcomed. But it is also an indication of the extreme
vagueness still prevalent about the necessary material and
mental conditions of such a world order. Its pseudo-prac-
tical short-sightedness is almost as manifest as the boldness
of its intention.

I do not believe that a world order can come into exist-
ence without a preliminary mental cosmopolis. I may be
mistaken in that. Political federation, loose and confused at
first, may precede and impose the necessary mental adapta-
tions. That is too round-about and slow a process for the
limitations of my imagination. World democracy, I believe,
would get lost on the way.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?

SINCE AT ANY TIME now we may find ourselves fighting,
enduring and dying for "democracy; 5 it seems worth while
to ask for some clear definition of what democracy means,
so that we shall not only fight for it, but be prepared to see
that in the end we get it. When you question people closely
in the matter, you will encounter a considerable variety of
answers, but you will find as you sort them out and arrange
them that they do tend to converge and point in a common
direction. There is a vital intention beneath the endless mis-
uses and perversions of the word.

Towards what do these diverse statements converge?
What is the reality, implicit and potential, that gives its liv-
ing, present appeal to the word democracy?

Two words that will come out very frequently in the defi-
nitions that are given you are "freedom" and "liberty."
Frequent, but not quite so frequent, are such phrases as the
"right" of individuals and communities to "self-govern-
ment." A few people will make a vote the symbol of de-
mocracy. But all of them can be brought into agreement
that democracy means the subordination of the state to the
ends and welfare of the common individual Very prevalent
is an attitude of negation. Democracy, it is declared, is an

44

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 45

0/2#-movement. It demands the protection of the individual
life from the state. It is anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-Commu-
nist, anti-war since there is no liberty in a state o siege
it is the denial of the right of the state organization to in-
terfere in the life of the common individual except for the
common convenience and with the common consent.

All this is matter of general agreement, but in all these
phrases, there is an element of idealistic overstatement, and
as soon as we attempt to bring them into effective contact
with the realities of life, we find ourselves involved in some
of the standing controversies that have exercised humanity
since human thought and discussion began. We are re-
minded that there is no such thing as absolute freedom or
absolute servitude. Limitless freedom, anarchy, would be
a world of chaotic conduct, ruled only by impulse, a jungle
life. All freedom in any society is conditional; it is a com-
promise; it implies "rules of the game," that is to say, law.
Behind all actual social behavior there is the suggestion of
a defined give-and-take, a "social contract." The social con-
tract may vary between the extremes of a contract of blind
obedience on the one hand and a contract to undertake no
collective action whatever without a plebiscite, an entirely
impracticable subordination of the law to mass impulse, on
the other. Between these extremes and with a declared bias
for conscious, free, individual action whenever it is practi-
cable, this democracy falls.

Now the desire for conscious, free, individual action is
innate in the normal human being. But it can be inhibited
by fear of known or unknown consequences, by indolence
and following the drift, and by a complex of infantile dis-
positions to imitate and obey. The herd instinct is very

46 THE FATE OF MAN

strong in the immature human animal. It will follow a
leader or stampede like a cow, and find great relief from
perplexity in doing so. The preference of democracy for the
practical maximum of conscious, free, individual action re-
quires a justification beyond the mere faltering desire in our
hearts to "stand up, look heaven in the face and be a man."

For the normal man, unrestrained democracy is a very
exacting way of living indeed. It asks too much of his nat-
ural resources. In a thousand situations even a wise or able
man may find himself unable to decide upon the line of
action that is fairly the best for himself and also the best
for the general good, and in ten thousand he will find a
fatal delay in his decisions. For that reason, a detailed, com-
prehensive, agreed-upon, accessible and understandable sys-
tem of laws, which are really rules for behavior in predi-
gested situations, is a necessary preliminary condition for a
modern democracy. A taxi-cab tariff or the rule of the road
or a minimum wage is a convenient elementary instance of
the way in which conscious, free, individual action is set
aside to the general benefit in a modern, democratic com-
munity. We extend that principle nowadays to rates of in-
terest and inordinate profits, to the acquisition of land and
many forms of property and to an increasing number of
ordinary transactions. Our modern democratic community
would frustrate its own declared aims without a complete,
detailed, legal framework enforced by a judiciary and a
police acting strictly under the law. The man who in a
breath will say "I am a democrat" and also "I am a rebel"
is simply a fool.

The contrast between democracy and the forms of com-
munity with which it is generally contrasted lies essentially

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 47

in this reliance upon law. In a democracy a man does or
should know, or should be easily able to ascertain, exactly
"where he stands," what he must do, what he may do, what
cannot be done, and he should be able to say with the ut-
most confidence, "You be damned" to any illegal order or
request. The laws that restrain and protect him have received
his implicit or expressed consent, and he has a reasonable
right to attempt to alter them if he finds them uncongenial,
but until they are altered they must be respected by all,
small or great, in the community. The President or ruling
assembly is as much bound by the law as the meanest
citizen.

Oh the other hand the dictatorships and undemocratic
social organizations generally, subject a large part of the
common man's activities to uncovenanted restrictions, inter-
ference and compulsion. It is plainly contrary to the spirit
of democracy that a man should sell himself into slavery
or bind himself indefinitely to unquestioning obedience. The
care of democracy for freedom extends to the protection of
a man from his own desperate necessity. No democracy
would tolerate Esau's bargain. Most existing dictatorships,
indeed, claim a sort of legality based upon some forced
plebiscite, some snatched election. But your inquiries will
make it plain that the consent of the governed in a democ-
racy can never be a finally silenced and irrevocable consent.
It must be a continuing consent. It must be subject td sus-
tained revision and renewal. From the point of view of
democracy all absolutisms are illegal, and resistance to their
commands is as justifiable as resistance to any less general
hold-up or act of violence.

This fundamental legalism of democracy has been and

48 THE FATE OF MAN

is a deterrent to swift collective action, and the history of
human government is very largely a history of attempts to
reconcile the bickering gradualism of legal and deliberative
government under democratic conditions with the needs
of special emergencies. Before flood, fire, pestilence, earth-
quake, war, and especially in war, men have had to relin-
quish their liberty of individual action more or less com-
pletely to a higher command of some sort with unqualified
immediate powers. The original "dictators" of the Roman
system were essentially legal officials, and one of the primary
riddles of human society has been the resumption of power
by the community at the end of a period of crisis. A democ-
racy needs to be in a state of perpetual vigilance against the
specialist. From Osar to Stalin, democracy has been trapped
into one-man tyrannies by crises.

But historical analogies are always misleading, and mod-
ern crises become more and more elaborate affairs and less
and less controllable by single individuals. None o these
modern dictatorships has yet been tried out in a sustained
war. It is at least highly doubtful whether the vast commu-
nities of today, if they are able to develop a class of com-
petent public servants, with a co-operative morale and a
sense of public criticism, may not attain an efficiency and a
toughness far beyond that of a system subjected to the
freaks and inspirations of a single individual. But they must
work in the light. They must work with the distinctive
freedom and the conscious individual co-operation of a
team of football players, and they must be subjected to the
continual criticism of an understanding public opinion with
unlimited freedom of expression and with an ultimate, if
deferred, right of intervention.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 49

This conception of the superior flexibility and efficiency
of free teamwork, as against dictatorially planned work, is
very attractive to the democratically-minded, but it may
easily be exaggerated. For example, Tom Wintringham in
his English Captain lays great stress on the technical superi-
ority of free men, inspired by a common idea, over the con-
script soldiers of a dictatorship. He was in the fortunate
position of leading a battalion of English volunteers, ex-
ceptionally intelligent and enthusiastic, picked men who
wanted to fight, who were keen to fight, and unanimous at
least in their hostility to the Franco pronunciamento. Of
such individuals, unanimous for the services that engage
them, an enlightened democracy should no doubt consist.
But when one turns to the story Major Jose Martin Blasquez
tells in / Helped to Build an Army, of the internal struggles
and indiscipline of the defenders of the Republic, one real-
izes that practical freedom of initiative may achieve the
most disastrous confusion.

There is indeed no guarantee of either immediate or ulti-
mate victory in democracy. On that we must insist. There
is no inherent magic successfulness in democratic freedom.
Democratic freedom may be much more vulnerable than
slavery, less easy both to attain and maintain. It may be
that few or none of us realize yet the full price that may
have to be paid for it.

None the less it is only through the attainment of a real
world democracy that there is any hope for the ultimate
survival of our species.

In many of the replies one will receive to the demand
for a clear definition of democracy, one will get some refer-
ence to that magnificent outbreak of the common sense of

50 THE FATE OF MAN

mankind, the first French Revolution, That remains still a
cardinal event in the history of human liberation. It was
not the beginning of liberation but it was its most outstand-
ing assertion. The democracy of America, the radicalism of
Britain in its most vigorous phase, derived plainly from that
French initiative. And since in those days titles and priv-
ileges were the most conspicuous infringements of men's
liberties, democracy from the outset would have none of
them; it was equalitarian without qualification. It was re-
publican, it denied and repudiated any form of class rule
whatever and whenever it is still in health it remains re-
publican and equalitarian.

But conditions in eighteenth-century France were peculiar
in the fact that then the conspicuous offense against human
liberty was class privilege. For many people in those days
the possession of private property was a means of inde-
pendence, freedom of ownership seemed a reasonable provi-
sion for democratic liberty, and only a few realized that,
released from class tyranny, the free play of proprietorship
might create advantages and disadvantages as wide and
socially wasteful, as subject to "abuses," as the class privileges
of the older regime. Throughout the first revolutionary
period the spirit of democracy found itself puzzled, mocked
and frustrated by economic inequality. Men freed from the
tyranny of privileges found themselves oppressed by a tyr-
anny of advantages. The common man, theoretically free
and independent, discovered himself in the grip of an ex-
panding economic system that made free competitive em-
ployment only another form and to many it seems a
scarcely preferable form of serfdom. Political equality by
itself proved in practice to be no equality at all.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 51

Accordingly when we pursue our inquiries into the
meaning of democracy today, we find a definite cleavage
from this point onward in the replies to the question of
"What is democracy?" An increasing number will be forced
to agree that collective economic controls, "Industrial De-
mocracy," as Beatrice Webb first phrased it very happily,
in her study of co-operation (1891), constitute a necessary
completion of the democratic proposition. A dwindling mi-
nority clings to the private profit system as the logical
method of the sturdy individualism of the revolution. But
the general implication of modern democracy is that unre-
strained economic advantage can be an even graver in-
fringement of human liberty than privilege. Modern democ-
racy is not only legalism and equalitarianism; it is socialism.
It sets its face against all abuse of the advantages of owner-
ship.

Democracy is socialism, and also, by a natural extension
of its equalitarianism as the problem of world law becomes
urgent, it is cosmopolitan. Almost tacitly democracy has ac-
cepted and assimilated the necessity that law must be world
law and equally protective of every individual human being.

So far as cosmopolitanism goes, modern democracy re-
verts to far older revolts of human common sense against
racial, national and class distinctions. Since the rise of Bud-
dhism there has been hardly any broad religious initiative
that has not at least paid lip service to this idea which, in
Christianity for example, is incorporated in the formula of
an impartial divine fatherhood and an equal brotherhood
of man. In The Outline of History the association of cos-
mopolitanism with theocrasia and the appearance of the
syncretic universal religions is traced. There was a double

52 THE FATE OF MAN

impulse from below and from above; the desire of the ex-
panding empires to fuse local particularisms into a larger
order under the God-Emperor was in accordance with the
craving of normal common sense to escape from the irksome-
ness of obviously artificial estrangements. Dr. T. J. Haar-
hoff, quoting W. W. Tarn's Alexander and the Unity of
Mankind, declares that Alexander "was the pioneer of one
of the supreme revolutions in the world outlook, the first
man known to us who contemplated the brotherhood of
man or the unity of mankind." This is an exaggeration of
a significant fact. Cosmopolitanism, universal brotherhood,
has indeed been appearing and reappearing in human
thought for at least the past four and twenty centuries, like
sunshine trying to break through a cloudy sky.

Now the "democracy" that found its expression in the
first French Revolution, the American Revolution and the
liberal movement throughout the world, was not only in-
complete upon the economic side and had, later and with
difficulty, to become socialist in order to preserve its liber-
ating intention, but also it was very sketchy and indefinite
in the matter of education.

This was due to the fact that the ideology of the Great
Revolution was essentially middle-class in its origins. It
sprang from a social stratum already educated and so satis-
fied with the sufficiency of its general education and so ac-
customed to a supply of books and pamphlets, that it did
not realize that there was anything exceptional in the knowl-
edge and freedom of thought it enjoyed. It did not even
apprehend its immense and immediate obligations to the
Encyclopaedists in organizing its ideas. It took their contri-
bution for granted. It launched its generous proposition of

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 53

universal equality indeed, but not only did it fail to realize
the need to insure freedom from economic pressure, but
also it neglected to organize the education of the community
as one whole. The American Revolution, in this respect,
with, for example, its provision of State universities, seems
to have been ahead of the French. Nevertheless it took the
better part of a century for democracy to realize, even to a
limited extent, the third vital implication of its demand for
liberty, equality, and fraternity, which was the free and
necessary universal education of the democratic community
to a common level of understanding and co-operation. Com-
munities in which every mentally normal citizen can at
least read and write, have existed for less than a century.
Communities in which the common education rises much
above that level do not yet exist.

That freedom and equality are incomplete without freely
accessible knowledge and free and open discussion is a nec-
essary completion of the democratic idea, but it is one upon
which the inquirer into the meaning of democracy will get
the least assurance. If he asks leading questions, he will get
a general admission that universal education and sound,
ample information upon every matter of collective concern
are necessary elements in the democratic proposition, but
unless he himself introduces the matter he will hear very
little insistence upon this vital completion of the democratic
ideal.

He will indeed encounter a certain amount of impatience
if he stresses this matter. Ordinary people resent being told
that they are undereducated or wrongly educated. To the
common man and woman today, prepared though their
minds seem to be now for a socialist cosmopolis of a quite

54 THE FATE OF MAN

generous type, education still means just any old education,
and news is what a press run entirely for profit and political
and social ends, and (in the British system) a government-
controlled radio, choose to tell them. It is the education
they have grown up to, and so far they have not been awak-
ened to its insufficiency. They want to carry out these new
conceptions of life at that level To raise that level seems to
them irksome and uncalled for. 1

It is still possible therefore for the equalitarian impulse
to be effectively frustrated in practice by deliberate and
systematic miseducation and misinformation. The common
man and woman know now in general terms and pretty
definitely what they want, but they still do not know how
to state and demand what they want. Private enterprise is
able to defend its appropriations quite eff actively, because it
owns the press almost entirely, the news agencies and the
distributing trades, and so it can distort values and distract
the public from crucial issues in the boldest fashion. There
is no countervailing equipment of the public mind in the
common schools. These are essentially conservative institu-
tions, adapting the common man to the social order in
which he finds himself, preparing him for that state of life
to which he has been called, and giving him no reasonable
intimations of the great drama of change in which he has
to play his part. As we have shown, the whole mechanism
of modern life demands organized collective control. The
stars in their courses will not suffer the world scramble of
exploitation that wasted so much human possibility in the
nineteenth century to go on. Our species cannot afford it

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 55

under any conditions. But in face of the essential ignorance
of the modern "democratic" community, the enterprising
owner, the profiteer that is to say, can keep his grip upon
his advantages far more effectively than he can in the face
of a dictator with unqualified powers. He can resist social-
ization far more effectively.

Against the capitalist's obstructive power the willfulness
of the dictator is able to operate far more vigorously than
the will of the under-educated, ill-informed and suggestible
"democracies." So that in certain ways the dictatorships
have undoubtedly been able to get ahead of the "demo-
cratic" states. They have gone further on the way to social-
ization. While the industrial exploiter or the rich man
struggles to keep his grip on the recalcitrant worker below,
the dictator of the totalitarian state takes him firmly by the
collar. Wealth finds itself handled with an extraordinary
disrespect. Dictatorships imply collectivism. They are forced
to collectivism in the face of bargaining wealth and the un-
easy claims of their own supporters. They are forced to-
wards a comprehensive efficiency. The only effective response
to totalitarian collectivism on the part of a freedom-seeking
community is a scientifically planned and directed socialism.

From the economic point of view, the whole difference
now between the reality of dictatorship and the ideal of
democracy, when it is worked out to its practical comple-
tion, is the difference between socialization in the dark, with
all the progressive corruption, appropriation and inefficiency
that spring up in the dark, and socialization in the light of
an alert and implemented public opinion; between socializa-
tion by compulsion or socialization by enlightened consent.

56 THE FATE OF MAN

From the point of view of the individual the difference
is one between a deadening servitude and a continual par-
ticipating enlargement of responsible life. No existing in-
stitutions coming to us from the past can represent democ-
racy as it is thus conceived; it is a far bolder thrust towards
a new order than any of these adventurer systems that stand
in its path.

If now we fill in the gaps in the current conception of
democracy by insisting upon complete educational equali-
tarianism, if we dot the i's and cross the /s that are still
undotted and uncrossed, if we transcend any accepted con-
temporary rendering of the idea, then "democracy" does
indeed become a very magnificent conception of a new life
for man.

If democracy means economic justice and the attainment
of that universal sufficiency that science assures us is possible
today; if democracy means the intensest possible fullness of
knowledge for everyone who desires to know and the great-
est possible freedom of criticism and individual self-expres-
sion for anyone who desires to object; if democracy means
a community saturated with the conception of a common
social objective and with an educated will like the will of a
team of football players to co-operate willingly and under-
standingly upon that objective; if democracy means a com-
plete and unified police control throughout the world, to
repress the financial scramble and gangster violence which
constitute the closing phase of the sovereign state and private
ownership system; then we have in democracy a conception
of life for which every intelligent man and woman on earth
may well be prepared to live, fight or die, as circumstances
may require.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? 57

But that rounded-off and completed realization of democ-
racy is still only establishing itself against great resistances
in the human mind. It is not as yet established there. And
still less is it established as the guiding faith of any political
or social organization whatever.

WHERE IS DEMOCRACY?

'WHERE IN ALL THIS collection of governments Mr. Streit
would have us federate, is there one that satisfies this plain
bare statement of the growing and deepening significance
of the democratic idea?

France depends for its mental expression upon an alliance
of reactionary papers and for its foreign policy upon an
association of diplomatists and army chiefs, which has held
together throughout its dynastic and political fluctuations
in one consistent policy for the security and advancement of
La France. America tempers a wide tolerance of free speech
and personal criticism with a press-sustained persecution of
labor leaders, radicals, "reds" and "agitators*" generally. Its
press, if less centralized than the French and so less con-
certed, is equally commercial. The freedom of expression
of its university professors is pinched between the possibility
of dismissal for excessive outspokenness from above and the
attacks of the press-man from below. The American record
of successfully framed-up cases against troublesome workers'
leaders is a long and discreditable one, and one need only
glance reproachfully at the distressful history of color
prejudice, unincorporated townships and the exploitation

58

WHERE IS DEMOCRACY? 59

of penal labor in the more backward states. And yet these
two are the "democracies" par excellence.

Most of the European states invited to Mr. Streit's feder-
ation are not even democratic in profession. Sweden, Nor-
way, Denmark, Holland and the British Empire are mon-
archies; the monarch professes to act only on the advice of
his or her ministers, but as a matter of fact the court is a
center of social and administrative influence of an entirely
undemocratic sort. A crown is the symbol of graded priv-
ilege. In the place of Hcil Hitler or the Fascist salute, these
royalist peoples, at the sound of their particular Royal
Anthem, stand stiffly to attention with an air of ineffable
reverence. It is a quite parallel act of worship, and as com-
plete a repudiation of the personal responsibility of de-
mocracy.

The disintegrating British Empire is now, one has to
recognize, a system of government almost completely out
of popular control. Practically it has undergone a reactionary
revolution in the last decade, and a loose-knit combination
of court, church, army and wealth, intensely class-conscious,
intensely self-protective, has resumed control of affairs. It is
an oligarchy skillful in the assimilation of useful or formi-
dable individuals but without the slightest disposition to
amalgamate with anything else on earth. Its ruling motive
is the fear of dispossession. Decisions involving peace or
war are made without any pretense of consulting any sur-
viving popular will, and the whole capitalist press, the
cinema, the radio and indeed all possible means of in-
fluencing opinion, concentrate upon the assertion of the
rightness and inevitableness of these decisions. Dissent is
a muffled and ineffective squeaking, and any inconvenient

60 THE FATE OF MAN

facts are kept from the public by requests for suppression
that are in effect commands. There is a special Form D sent
round to the press which it is extremely unwise to defy.
Most of the acts of Mr. Chamberlain since September 1938
have been as irresponsible as those of any Dictator, equally
unscrupulous and far more shameful. He has indeed made
himself a Dictator by tact and betrayal instead of by violent
seizure. There is in the long run very little to choose between
a bully dictatorship and a "tact" dictatorship. The latter
may be less crushing but more insidious in its attack upon
human dignity.

These are the practical realities Mr. Streit has to face. The
will for federation in any of these governments is more than
doubtful even if presently they have their backs to the wall.
They will all fight for their separate sovereignty to the last.

No doubt it is true that, in spite of much human incon-
sistency, much confused thinking and many local abuses,
there is still a powerful disposition throughout all the
Atlantic and Scandinavian communities towards liberty,
equality and world brotherhood. It breaks out in literature,
discussion and conduct. It expresses itself plainly in books,
spontaneous press writing, plays and films. This is most
manifest in America and there is in consequence a growing
disposition of the British authorities to intercept and censor
the too outspoken American weekly press. An increasing
number of English readers subscribe to American periodicals
to learn what is being hushed up in their own country.

With every acceleration of communications this American
influence will increase. Moreover, there are plenty of Ameri-
can professors manifestly disposed to take the risk of out-
spokenness and say what they like. If at times they veil their

WHERE IS DEMOCRACY? 61

meaning a little from the possible hostility of the unintelli-
gent in a deliberate obscurity of technicality that sometimes
borders on jargon, that does not prevent their speculating
very boldly about economic, social and international proc-
esses, muck more boldly and freshly than their English
equivalents.

Again the bitter jests of such a French periodical as Le
Canard EncMine are saturated with the soundest democratic
scorn and derision. The desire of a considerable section of
enlightened Frenchmen to sustain and complete the mighty
impetus of the Declaration of the Rights of Man is genuine
and obstinate. They will not willingly suffer France to
desist from her traditional task of world enlightenment.
For some years, in the face of overwhelming financial and
political difficulties, there has been a gallant attempt to pro-
duce a modern encyclopaedia, which might repeat the pre-
paratory role of the original Encyclopaedists for the vaster
needs of today. 1 Neither Americans nor British, with their
vastly greater resources, have attempted anything so compre-
hensive and illuminating. It would be possible to quote
hundreds of instances, names, books, speeches, utterances
and acts, to show that all round and about the world in a
great multitude of still all-too-dispersed intelligences, democ-
racy lives and advances.

But these evidences of a considerable and growing will
for a reasonably complete democracy do not alter the fact
that the directive forces in control of this miscellany of
states Mr. Streit and his disciples would have us federate,
are scarcely more democratic in structure and method than
those running the frankly anti-democratic states.

1 See Note 7A, the Italian Encyclopedia.

62 THE FATE OF MAN

Indeed, to call the present world convulsion a war be-
tween the "allied democracies" o the world and "totalitarian
states," is putting all too fine a name upon it. The reality
will be a war of established governments and governing
systems claiming to represent "democracy" but quite un-
willing and unprepared to set themselves to realize the
modern democratic idea, against expansive desperado gov-
ernments that have shown themselves -contemptuous of
democratic pretensions and dangerous to the general peace.
It will be another war for the alteration or preservation of
frontiers.

It is almost impossible to hope that this complex of war-
fare towards which the world is drifting can assume any
other form than a confused alliance against these more
lawless military powers, whatever formal victories or defeats
ensue. It is incredible that there will not be a steady deteri-
oration in human morale through the stresses of the strug-
gle. If the so-called aggressor states are defeated, their
unfortunate common people will be saddled with the war
guilt of the governments that have enslaved and ruined
them. They will be made to "pay" again. Another insincere
attempt to organize "collective security" on the lines of the
League of Nations, another unstable League of victors, will
simply accumulate the necessary resentments for another
collapse into still more violent conflict. Fresh brigand ad-
venturers will appear, trading on the shame and despair of
the vanquished.

It is this that makes the approach of this second world-war
storm so black. Whichever side emerges at any particular
phase as victorious, is really a secondary issue. The practical
loss of freedom, the usurpation of controls, seems inevitable.

WHERE IS DEMOCRACY? 63

The possibility of an emergence of any sort of enhancement
of democracy from the threatened mUe seems very slight
indeed. Democracy is still too incomplete, unorganized and
unprepared to bring about any such happy ending. Ca-
tastrophe is still steadily outrunning education. We are at
present rapidly experiencing a repetition of 1914-1919 on
a vastly more disastrous scale.

WHAT MAN HAS TO LEARN

IF WE HOLD FIRMLY to that same systematic assembling of
universally acceptable statements which has brought us thus
far, it is not overwhelmingly difficult to state the nature of
the mental adaptation that is needed to arrest this present
drive towards biological disaster for Homo sapiens. If it has
become necessary for him to be re-educated as a conscious
world citizen, to be prepared to take his place in a collective
world fellowship, then plainly the realization of this neces-
sity is the framework upon which his social being must be
rebuilt. The scientific vision of life in the universe and no
other has to be his vision of the universe. Any other leads
ultimately to disaster. And since the existing educational
organization of the world does not provide anything like
that vision nor establish the necessary conceptions of right
conduct that arise out of it, it needs to be recast quite as
much and even more than the political framework needs
to be recast. This may involve, it will almost certainly in-
volve, such a Kulturfytmpf as the world has never seen
before. But since it is the only possible line of survival, that
effort has to be faced. Unless there is sufficient mental and
moral vigor in our race to achieve the educational readjust-
ment, then there seems to be nothing that can possibly arrest
the present dtgringolade of Homo sapiens.

64

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION

LET us BE AS full and explicit as possible about this reorgan-
ization of man's mental superstructure, this reconditioning
of his apparatus for adaptation, that we are stressing.

And here again there is nothing original and hardly any-
thing that is fairly controversial in what will be stated here.
The only originality lies in an adherence to one consistent
line of thought, to carrying the broad and practically indis-
putable statements of modern ecological science, unimpaired,
into the field of current human affairs and refusing to be
deflected or complicated by secondary and irrelevant con-
siderations.

It happens to have been my role throughout life to assem-
ble facts and interpretations of fact, bearing upon man's
power of controlling his future. From the days of that para-
doxical fantasy, The Time Machine (1894) onward, my
mind, partly no doubt by the accidents of life, but partly
also, I think, by a natural predisposition, has been directed
more and more definitely to the question of what is likely
to happen in the future. And looking back upon this half-
century of discussion and suggestion and tracing its devel-
opment phase by phase, a very remarkable change in the
whole tenor of human thought becomes manifest.

65

66 THE. FATE OF MAN

It is only now, indeed, as I bring all these things together
to review, that I realize how our attitude to past and future
has changed since the later-Victorian period. There has been
an almost complete reorientation, at once profound and
subtle, of our minds with regard to time.

Briefly: the intelligence of the nineties attached much
more importance to the past and much less to the proba-
bilities of the days to come, than do any contemporary
minds now. It was living in what appears now as an almost
static present. The past supplied a picturesque system of
justifications for the established state of affairs, but it was
the established state of affairs alone which had any quality
of reality. There was a widespread feeling that nothing
more of primary importance was ever likely to happen.
Life as we knew it was a leisurely game of consequences.
It is difficult now, even for those of us who were already
living in those days, to recall the entire absence of
urgency that prevailed. We were carried along by habit
and that false sense of security which the absence of funda-
mental crises engenders. To most of my generation in the
eighties and nineties, all the cardinal discoveries of science
seemed to have been made, all the great political systems
established for good, the world permanently apportioned
among the Powers. We had a sort of feeling that Queen
Victoria, under whose rule everybody up to high middle
age had been born, would go on living forever. The future
was something in another universe, in another dimension.
One could say or think anything one liked about it because
it did not seem to matter in the least.

This habit of mind lingered long after the beliefs on
which it had been established had decayed. It lingers still.

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 67

One factor in the steadily accelerated swing from tradi-
tionalism and legalism to futurism, that presently began, was
certainly the enlargement of our horizons by the realization
of evolution and geological time and the breaking of the
barriers set to our imaginations by the myth of the Creation
and the Fall. But at first there was how can one put it ?
an intellectual but not a practical release. It was still possible
in The Time Machine to imagine humanity on the verge of
extinction and differentiated into two decadent species, the
Eloi and the Morlocks, without the slightest reflection upon
everyday life. Quite a lot of people thought that idea was
very clever in its sphere, very clever indeed, and no one
minded in the least. It seemed to have no sort of relation
whatever to normal existence.

To a large extent, I shared that detachment. If I was
imaginatively futurist, I was for all practical purposes con-
temporaneous. The possible extinction of humanity appeared
to be something so remote that it never gave me a moment's
real- uneasiness in those days. The future was still no more
real than dreamland.

But all that has changed, and I have come through the
phases of that change. Now the questions: "What is going
to happen?" and "And then what will happen?" dominate
an increasing number of awakening minds among which I
am moving. We live in a planning world. Everything we
do is becoming preparatory and anticipatory. Today has
vanished almost completely in our enormous preoccupation
with tomorrow.

I suppose I have responded as much as anyone in my
generation to this mental rotation. There is no need there-
fore for me to apologize for using myself as the trace of the

68 THE FATE OF MAN

flow of thought during the past half century. I happen to
be the most convenient trace. If I were not so, then some-
body else should be writing this book instead of me.

To begin with I used the future as a field for purely
imaginative play. After The Time Machine I wrote some
more futuristic stories. But as one followed another I found
I was less and less interested in the artistic business of mak-
ing the tale plausible and more and more in the scientific
interest of making it probable. The turn of the century set
many of us forecasting in earnest. My natural bias or my
journalistic instinct, or maybe both in unison, moved me
to write Anticipations (1900), in which I threw the teller
of fantastic tales aside altogether and set myself speculating
about the coming years. I was moving with the times. The
book caught on; it was more successful than most novels;
it was one of the first of such books to sell well. I will not
say anything of its guesses, some happy, some wildly out.
But it left me with the persuasion that here was something
needing to be done and which could be done much more
thoroughly than I had done it. My sense of the importance
and reality of the future increased.

In 1902 I was reading a paper to the Royal Institution,
The Discovery of the Future, in which I was boldly assert-
ing the need to realize and accept a forward-looking system
of values. I presently found myself in correspondence with
various parallel groups abroad which, half in defiance and
half in burlesque, were proclaiming the Futurist doctrine.
Among them was Signer Marinetti, who came to London
reciting, in a tremendous voice, the most astounding Futurist
poetry. He resented with extreme bitterness the English
and American tourists in Italy with their red guide-books

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 69

like catalogues at a sale. He was, he said, prepared to destroy
all the historical monuments in the peninsula. He demanded,
loudly and violently, a living country and not a museum of
antiques.

The impulse spread, but still for a great number even of
progressive-minded people it retained a quality of unreality.
It was an exuberance for them, a lark, a fashion. This Futur-
ist stuff, they felt, could not last. In practice they still clung
to the established order for their permanent values. It was
the shock and stresses of the Great War that wrenched them
away finally from this assumption of permanent stability
towards a reluctant, imperfect recognition of the greater
importance of the anticipatory aspect of life. It was like the
internal change-over that must happen in a bar of iron when
it is magnetized. And many quite intelligent people were
not wrenched away. They kept up their resistances, and a
large body of the educated still resist as we shall see. But
the forward-looking section accumulated conviction; their
sense of reality continued to shift away more and more
decisively from the thing that is to the thing that is to be.
The Discovery of the Future became by degrees a matter-of-
fact statement for me instead of a daring thesis. I believed
in it as time went on much more than I had done when
first I launched it.

As the war unfolded before me, my mind was increasingly
obsessed by the problem of how the war would end and
what would come after the war. Imaginative people were
guessing and inferring and making plans. The word "plan"
became more and more frequent; at length no newspaper
was complete without it. A Ministry of Foresight was sug-
gested. We busied ourselves in making the New Map of

70 THE FATE OF MAN

Europe, the New Map of the World. The idea of a "League
of Nations" emerged amidst this ferment of anticipatory
projects. An interesting phase in all this forward-looking
peering was the War Aims controversy, I happened to be
working in Northcliffe's Ministry of Propaganda in Enemy
Countries. 1 I was in particular directing the propaganda in
Germany, and, in co-operation with Dr. J. W. Headlam-
Morley, I induced our Crewe House colleagues to draw up
a memorandum upon the allied war aims and submit it to
the Foreign Office for endorsement. "This," we said, "is
what we suppose we are fighting for, and if we can get
this we shall be satisfied and the war will be at an end. Is
that so? We cannot go on with our work properly unless
we know its objective." The War Office was profoundly
shocked. Whatever else in the world had been affected by
the rotation of the human mind towards the future, the
Foreign Office has remained immune. There, at any rate,
war was what it always had been. You fought your way to
your enemy's capital and you then "dictated terms." The
objective of a war was victory. To reveal your terms before-
hand was not done. So the Foreign Office never committed
itself to a binding endorsement of our War Aims Memo-
randum, and it never warned us of various secret under-
standings that affected it. It remained in the self-satisfying
pose of a superior body tolerating us and using us according
to the best diplomatic traditions. And at length at Versailles
the terms were dictated.

Until the German capitulation we went on with our
development of the League of Nations movement, commit-
ting ourselves to very definite promises to the German

a See Secrets of Crewe House by Sir Campbell Stuart.

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 71

people, in the hope that our engagements would be hon-
ored at the Peace. They were not honored. We had taken
the utmost pains in our propaganda to distinguish between
the German people and the Hohenzollern government, and
to hold out hopes of a speedy return to the fellowship of
nations and a reasonable prospect of recuperation to a
chastened and republican Germany. The victorious Foreign
Offices treated all that as new-fangled rubbish. The Quai
d'Orsay in particular seemed obsessed with a dream of oblit-
erating Germany, of dividing it up so that it would never
reassemble itself. They continued to kick Germany about
until Germany became frantic with shame and hate, until
Germany passed from reason to screaming fury. Its scream-
ing fury found its incarnation at last in Hitler. He did not
hesitate at the thought of war. He demanded war. He did
not hesitate at the possibility of a subsequent social revolu-
tion. The victors of Versailles found Red Revolution even
more terrifying than flaming war, and he played upon that
terror. They passed from arrogance to propitiatory terror.
This madman, they felt, might do anything. History became
an attempt to humor and appease a lunatic who after all
and that was the worst of it for them was not always quite
so mad as he seemed.

All that is now quite familiar to everyone. What concerns
us more directly here are those meetings and movements
and discussions that occurred when the idea of the League
of Nations was being shaped. These deliberations brought
home to me the confused divergence of historical preoccu-
pations among those taking part in them. Their minds were
full of broken scraps of history, irrational political prejudices,
impossible analogies. Everyone saw the idea from a different

72 THE FATE OF MAN

angle and seemed prepared to realize it by the hastiest of
compromises. The Outline of History was the direct out-
come of the experience I gathered in these discussions. At
fyrst, in conjunction with L. S. Woolf 1 and one or two
others, I tried to organize a Research Committee, which
would set itself to think out the full significance and possi-
bilities of this great idea. We made William Archer, who
was badly out of a job just then, the salaried secretary of
this body. With much internal friction we compiled The
Idea of a League of Nations, Prolegomena to the Study of
World Organization, and The Way to the League of Na-
tions: A Brief Sketch of the Practical Steps Needed for the
Formation of a League. These booklets are still available
for the collector. Then President Wilson came to Europe
and we were swept aside, because he had his own ideas, and
very crude ideas they were, of a League that would make
the world safe for democracy. But the difficulty of producing
these two reports opened my eyes to the enormous obstacles
in the way of all volunteered co-operation. It seemed impos-
sible to hold a team together. They differed upon endless
points and they would not come together to hammer diem
out. They were all too intent upon what they considered
more immediately important things. Our chief financial
supporter deserted us to go off wool-gathering upon his own
lines. 2 He could not see what need there was for all this
highbrow research. But we were all going off upon our own
lines. We had already disintegrated before we were disre-
garded.
At a conference with some representative Americans at

1 Author of an excellent book, International Government (1916).
fl See Note 9A expanding this.

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 73

the Reform Club during the war, I pointed out the urgent
need for a general history of mankind which would con-
solidate people's ideas about the establishment of some sort
of World Pax. Everyone thought it was a good idea. But
here again was something which was nobody's business in
particular. There was no time to go about collecting, per-
suading and editing the academically right people. One
might as well have asked Lord Acton to write something.
An Outline of History had to be done soon, even if it had
to be flung together and, getting help wherever I could
find it, I flung one together.

I did it as well as I could, I worked enormously, and the
strenuous hostile criticism to which it has since been sub-
jected has revealed hardly any serious errors of statement.
But a lot o it was headlong writing. It seemed to me at the
time that if I and a few people could show that there was
a shape to history, then it would be easy, since there is no
copyright in the past, for the professional historians to rectify
any serious flaws and do it better. They did nothing of the
sort, and, failing that better performance, The Outline of
History was launched upon a world conspicuously in need
of just that assemblage of information. It had a fantastic
success. Millions of copies have been sold and it has been
translated into practically every important language in the
world except Italian. Fascist Italy could not tolerate the
candid criticism of the Roman Empire.

I was probably rather excited by this astonishing boom.
I do not know about that because I was not watching myself
very closely. But I think that even at the time I did realize
that this immense sale was no tribute to my authorship. It
was something much more significant. It was the revelation

74 THE FATE OF MAN

of a world-wide hunger for adequately summarized knowl-
edge on the part of multitudes whom the schools had sent
empty away.

It seemed to me that this aching void probably extended
far beyond the field of history. I knew that the general public
throughout the world was being kept in the blackest ig-
norance of modern biological knowledge, evolutionary
thought, modern ideas about individuality and modern psy-
chology. I have already told in the Introduction how I
realized that in my own case. With the assistance of Dr.
Julian Huxley and my son, G. P. Wells, I produced a far
more competent companion volume to The Outline of His-
tory, The Science of Life. It is fuller and more searching
and better done than its predecessor, but its success was by
no means astronomical.

Then I turned to the most difficult and original of all these
encyclopaedic essays, The Wor\, Wealth and Happiness of
Mankind. This was an attempt to rescue social, economic
and monetary "science" from the medieval scholasticism,
the theorizing unworldliness, in which it still wanders. It
was also an attempt to get behind the arbitrary assumptions
upon which the Marxist doctrine of a necessary class war
is based. Instead of jumping into the matter in the accepted
academic style from some crudely plausible assumption, I
approached these questions as a special branch of human
ecology, and opened the matter out from a realistic survey
of human life as a going concern. I began with a survey of
the substances and power in the service of man, and thence
I pursued a series of interrogations, How? and Why? up to
government and education.

It was a laborious task; I chose some unsuitable collab-

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 75

orators from whom I had to disentangle the enterprise with
considerable expense and difficulty; but in the end I man-
aged to get every section of it "vetted" by authorities of the
first rank. It is sound and tested matter.

In the end the book failed to earn the attention I think it
deserved. The title may have been unpromising to the
ordinary reader, the manner of its marketing unsuitable. It
might have had better fortune as An Outline of Social and
Economic Knowledge. I am convinced there is as great a
public ready for a summary of facts and ideas upon social,
political and monetary matters as there is for historical and
biological digests. The book did not get to them. The world
of economists and so forth ignored it completely but then
it is their practice also to ignore one another completely, to
ignore almost everything completely. I find a sort of recog-
nition of it in Barbara Wootton's brilliant Lament for
Economics (1938), for which I am discouraged enough to
be grateful. She is not biologically trained, she is probably
quite ignorant of general ecology, but her realization that
economics has still to become a science and can only become
a science by admitting the descriptive treatment and exami-
nation of actual things and processes, is perfectly clear.

One other book I must mention here. The Salvaging of
Civilization was written originally to be delivered as lectures
in America, a project frustrated by a bout of influenza.
Therein, borrowing a phrase from Dr. John Beattie Crozier, 1
I launched the idea of a "Bible" for civilization. In this idea
of a "Bible" for the new social and political order, it is plain
that Dr. Crozier and myself are groping our way and get-
ting very near to a full realization of the scale and nature

1 See Note 9s for his dates and two chief works.

76 THE FATE OF MAN

of the mental readjustment incumbent upon the world. This
new "Bible" of ours is the .World Encyclopaedia, to which
I am coming, in embryo. I will not recapitulate the various
other papers, pamphlets, books, with which I documented
my successive mental readjustments, because they are ceas-
ing to have anything more than a minor, personal signifi-
cance. I was traveling along a road that a number of my
contemporaries were following.

Step by step the more responsive elements in my genera-
tion were being forced towards a complete recognition of
the need for a realistic preparation for the future, if our
existence henceforth was to be anything better than a me-
chanical response to the blows of adverse fate that were
beating upon us now, faster and faster. We were asking
"What shall we do?" and more realistically "What have
we to do?" and it was plain that the answers to these ques-
tions needed setting down as the necessary articles of asso-
ciation for a world-wide revolutionary effort. There may
have been a slight slackening of this mental fermentation
during the phase of the Fatuous Twenties, but it was revived
with the mounting sense of urgency that came with the
Frightened Thirties. Crisis appeared following crisis, each
more menacing than the last it was like the Pacific surf
coming in before a rising gale and what had we prepared
for these crises ?

By the early thirties I was one of those who were becom-
ing fully aware that the systematic reconditioning of our
mental life was not a secondary but a primary need for all
mankind. It has beyond all question become now the most
urgent and important thing in the world.

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 77

And also I was realizing the unsatisfactoriness of such
detached, uncoordinated work as writers of my type were
doing. A number of us were all saying very much the same
sort of thing, but without much co-ordination or anything
mutual in the way of consequences. We could plead that
we were pioneering and exploring, but that is merely a
provisional plea. There comes a time to have done with
sketches and samples. There is a quantitative element in real
affairs. Doing something does not amount to very much
unless you do enough.

The achievement of the French Encyclopaedists has always
appealed very strongly to my imagination. Diderot and his
associates had scented the onset of change; they had set
themselves, in the measure of their times, to prepare and
equip the ideology of the new world they anticipated. They
worked against great difficulties and within hampering lim-
itations, but they did produce a new, inspiring conception
of a world renewed. They gave a definite form and direction
to the confused and powerful liberal impulses of their time.
Their assembled thought materialized in the American and
French revolutions and in a great heartening of the creative
spirit of man throughout the whole world. They lived in
an age of comparatively small things. The public capable of
understanding and transmitting their ideas was a limited
one. But it became very clear to me that what was needed
in the face of the oncoming challenges of our time was
essentially a new Encyclopaedism commensurate with the
relative vastness of our new occasions.

I set myself to the development of this idea of a modern
Encyclopaedism which should assemble facts and suggestions

78 THE FATE OF MAN

with the same insistence upon scientific reality and the same
exclusion of irrelevances that has controlled the establish-
ment o the world outlook I have put before the reader.

In a small book, World Brain (1938), the reader will
find the substance of my proposals stated more fully
and explicitly than is convenient here. I would be glad
if the reader could find time to get and read it. I have made
a sort of campaign for this new Encyclopaedism and I con-
tinue to work for it to the best of my ability. World Brain
is a book, quite bold and uncompromising in substance, but
still with a distinctly propitiatory manner. It makes clear
and definite proposals for a world-wide reconstruction of
what we call higher education. What I call the permanent
World Encyclopaedia is projected as a permanent institu-
tion, a mighty super-university, holding together, utilizing
and dominating all the teaching and research organizations
at present in existence. This is shown to be not only a plaus-
ible and practicable idea, but an idea already finding a
material embodiment in part and detail, through the com-
mon-sense needs of the scientific and technical world. A
permanent World Encyclopaedia, as I show in that book, is
indeed crystallizing into existence, but at a pace altogether
too slow for the urgency of the human situation. Bound up
with this in the same book is a frank survey of what the
citizen of a modern democratic world should know that is
to say, a scheme for an adequate modern education. This
survey constituted my address as President of the Education
Section of the British Association at Nottingham in 1937.
It is much more provocative in its manner than the Royal
Institution lecture of which it forms the complement. It

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 79

completely excluded both the Bible mythology and national
and imperial history from the educational scheme.

Throughout 1937 I was doing what I could to promote
this new Encyclopaedism I had in mind, but with very litde
effect, and in the autumn I went to America and lectured,
as World Brain relates. There is no need to recapitulate that
American discourse here, but what is very apparent to me
as I re-read the book, is the sacrifice of intensity in the effort
to make it interesting and attractive. I am trying out ways
and means in a very discursive spirit. I attempt some dis-
arming jests. I write as though there was still quite sufficient
time in hand to bring about the new mental orientation.
I still had that feeling. Taking myself as a fair sample of the
more progressive thought of my time, it is plain that up to
the publication of World Brain in the spring of 1938 we
were still not fully aware of the nearness of a culminating
crisis in human affairs.

That forced itself upon our attention in spite of ourselves.
We were compelled by the rush of circumstances to realize
not only the unqualified soundness, but also, what is by no
means the same thing, the urgent and fundamental im-
portance of our intellectual convictions.

In the summer I was invited to be the guest of the Austral-
ian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of
Science at Canberra, and this involved giving an hour's
discourse. I was becoming more and more impatient with
the failure of the new encyclopaedia idea to secure any ener-
getic support, and also I was growing more and more im-
patient with my own personal ineffectiveness in the matter.
I determined to use this invitation to assert still more plainly

80 THE FATE OF MAN

and clearly to myself among other hearers the case for a
new encyclopaedia and a radical revision of the world's edu-
cational organization. In Canberra I gave this address the
tide of The Role of English in the Development of the World
Mind, for reasons I have set out in a note at the end of this
book. 1 1 repeated this lecture with some slight modifications
as a public lecture in Sydney Town Hall, under the title of
The Human OutlooJ^. Substantially this book is an expan-
sion of that address. Its line of thought is the same; its
conclusions are the same. It is fuller, much more explicit
and more closely reasoned, and its application to current
aff airs is closer and, to rny mind, inescapable.

In addition I volunteered to read another paper to the
Education Section at Canberra. I called it A 'Provocative
Paper on the Poison called History. This also was made
into a very largely attended public lecture, at which debate
would have been impossible. It was an hour's show. As I
wanted to bring whatever opposition there might be to my
thesis into the light of clear statement, I suggested that the
Education Section should provide time for its discussion.

The reception of these lectures and addresses was very
typical of the transitional state of mind in which we are all
living, even the most enlightened of us. They were, you
must take my word for it, vividly successful. They were de-
livered in a setting of compliments and applause. I had
been stimulating, amazingly stimulating. I had said things
that had long needed saying. I had given them all food for
thought of the most invigorating kind. Distinguished men of
science came to thank me earnestly for the plainness of my
statements. And so on.

3 For the advantages of English see Note 9c.

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 81

And then everything went on just as it had been going
on before. The stimulant seemed to evaporate at once and
the food was certainly not assimilated.

The Right Honorable William Hughes, that distinguished
Australian statesman, had very kindly consented to preside
over my Town Hall lecture and at the end of it he ex-
pressed his appreciation. "God save us all," he said, and
then, advancing to the front of the platform, he led the
audience with the singing of "God Save the King." Every-
body stiffened up to attention. I had been stating as lucidly
as I could the reasons for believing that the human species
was already staggering past the zenith of its ascendancy
and on its way through a succession of disasters to extinc-
tion. And then we shook off the disagreeable vision, and
lifted up our voices in simple loyalty to things as they are.

The discussion of that "provocative paper" by the Educa-
tion Section was still more remarkable. I had denounced the
teaching of the Judaeo-Christian mythology as historical
fact, in the most emphatic terms. Not a single Christian
teacher appeared to reply to that challenge. Most of them,
including the masters in one or two progressive schools who
had been most anxious to turn my publicity value to ac-
count, contrived to have a parallel conference with another
Section. In place of a discussion upon the crucial points I
had sharpened, we had a series of brief, disconnected ad-
dresses by various educational officials, public characters
and thoughtful people, about education in general, speaking
in an elevated and discursive spirit, making many admirable
but irrelevant philosophical remarks and including much
autobiographical material. The avoidance of the essential
issue was complete. And it was quite deliberate. The dis-

82 THE FATE OF MAN

cussion was over and nothing had come of it and things
were still very agreeably as they always had been. Tea was
ready.

Now these were not consciously backward people. They
knew indeed that they were the elite of Australasian prog-
ress. These Associations for the Advancement of Science
throughout the world, the British, the American and the
Australasian, are essentially assemblies of well-informed and
liberal and progressive minds. But the real world of our
Conference was still this wholly present world in which
there are parents to consider, promotion to consider, dis-
missals, retirements, a world of knighthoods and honors.
I went away pondering these things. Presently let me con-
fess it, lest I seem to claim to be anything better than a sam-
ple of a generation I found myself discussing rather keenly
the terms upon which I would lecture in Sydney.

Plainly we are not moving fast enough. We are still bal-
ancing in this strange phase of indecision between the
actual present and the inevitable future. Even what we may
call the more advanced intelligences vacillate and fail to
sustain their constructive faith. The established, habitual
present remains their real world. They may be profoundly
disturbed intellectually. They may be greatly unsettled
and alarmed by the ever-increasing uncertainty of life, but
still, in the exact sense of the word "realize," they fail to
realize the urgent, implacable future. As the legendary gen-
deman who sat over his drink in the bar of the sinking
Titanic remarked: "Well, anyhow, the damn thing hasn't
gone down yet."

They are all continually relapsing towards acceptance of
the prevalent contemporaneous outlook because that is what

SAMPLE OF A GENERATION 83

is most natural in the normal human make-up. At any sign
of respite they yield to it. Alertness to the future, we have
to realize, is a novel and artificial thing in life. It has to be
constantly refreshed and sustained. Minds must be trained
and accustomed to it; it is a matter of social atmosphere
much more than individual intelligence. They have to be
held up to it by something stronger and more permanent
than themselves.

It is only in such an educational organization as I have
been deducing from our present needs and, I hope, fore-
casting here, in such a permanent organization of knowl-
edge, systematically assembled, continually extended and re-
newed and made freely and easily accessible to everyone,
that there is the slightest hope of our species meeting the
serried challenges of destiny that advance upon it. It is im-
possible to be steadily futuristic, solo, without a sustaining
social organization which will give as assured and habitual
a quality to the forward orientation of the everyday life as
is now possessed by the unprogressive world of today.

And that organization fails to materialize.

I am impatient and at the same time I do not know how
to accelerate matters. I do not think this is simply a case of
the distress of an old man in a hurry. There is every justifi-
cation for hurry in the world about us. I think that however
young and hopeful I might be, I should still be intensely
impatient to see this movement for human re-education
quickened and implemented.

This reconditioning and reorientation of the human mind
has to be undertaken not merely against the innate resist-
ances to changing conditions in everyone's make-up. These
innate resistances are organized very powerfully and effec-

84 THE FATE OF MAN

tively, and the nature of their organization is one we have
now to examine. And also we are working against time. It
is this time factor that casts the darkest shadow upon the
possibility of a single, clear-headed, creative, happily inter-
ested, war-free human community emerging from the re-
turning chaos of the present to dominate our planet through
long ages still to come.

Years ago I threw out a sentence that caught the attention
of that very great and lucid historian, James Harvey Rob-
inson. He picked it up and repeated and commended it and
gave it a wide publicity. The outlook for mankind, I had
written I think in The -Salvaging of Civilization \$ "a
race between education and catastrophe."

Today catastrophe is well on its way, it is losing no time
at all, but education seems still unable to get started, has
indeed not even readjusted itself to start. The race may,
after all, prove a walk-over for disaster.

10

ESTIMATING HOPE

HERE A PERSONAL FACTOR comes in, which, I think, should
be explained to the reader.

. We are now in a field of thought from which it is im-
possible to banish a temperamental estimate of values. I
find a certain defeatism has invaded my mind in the course
of the past year. I anticipate very little happiness in the
residue of my life. I feel that the odds are very heavily
against any such educational revolution being even attempted
in my lifetime there will be no Pisgah glimpse of the
promised world for me and that in all probability my last
years will be passed in a very ugly and distressful phase of
human history. In many quarters I am unlikely to be a
persona grata, A spell of ill-health involving bodily discom-
fort and a considerable ebb of mental resilience is con-
tributing to this depression. These are my circumstances.
That matter of health is comparatively a minor issue. But
quite apart from any bodily depression, the spectacle of evil
in the world during the past half-dozen years the wanton
destruction of homes, the ruthless hotinding of decent folk
into exile, the bombings of open cities, the cold-blooded
massacres and mutilations of children and defenseless gentle
people, the rapes and filthy humiliations and, above all, the
.' ; ' '" ' :- ' ' 85 ' ' ' ' -.. . ' . .'. . .

86 THE FATE OF MAN

return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment
and fear to a world from which such things had seemed
wellnigh banished has come near to breaking my spirit
altogether.

Said an old friend of mine the other day: "If only we
could get away from events for a spell! If only we could get
together as we used to get together and laugh!"

Children still laugh. Laughter is born again in each gen-
eration. What is past is over and done with for those who
did not share in it. Life begins again incessantly. The
sequence of birth and death is a continuing amnesty, but
for my generation there have been things so unforgettable
and disappointments so bitter that for us laughter has be-
come almost a brutality. The dead past is dead but not for
us. We have been too near it and we are splashed with
blood. 1

It is well to remind the reader that though all that follows
is written as. objectively and truly as I can, it is overshadowed
by these misadventures of my generation and mental type.
The younger the reader is the more he or she should be
able to discount the discouragement of our shadows.

And a consideration he must bear in mind in weighing
what I am putting before him is the probability that there
is a kind of egotistical intolerance in every definitely elderly
mind. That is almost inevitable. Through a long life a com-
plex system of ideas is built up upon a framework of con-
cepts and associations determined by early circumstances.
One qualifies, modifies, extends, superimposes significance
upon this primary structure, but after a time it becomes
irreplaceable. It may not be the best possible foundation, but

1 See Note 10A for a schoolgirl's reaction to A.B..P.

ESTIMATING HOPE 87

the more it has to carry, the less it can be changed. It is like
a business that has grown up in reasonably convenient
premises, they might be better laid out perhaps, but there
is no possibility now of completely revising the lay-out. The
going concern must carry on. But it becomes more and more
difficult to rephrase one's ideas or to recognize them when
they are rephrased. So that I may be much less alone and
outstanding than I am disposed to think.

The nearer my beliefs are to reality the more probable
it is that similar minds may be traveling along parallel, if
not identical, lines of thought to practically the same con-
clusions, approached perhaps from a different starting-point
and so differently phrased. I suspect and indeed I hope
that I do not allow fully for that.

For example, there is the peculiar dialect of so many
minds in the war generation who resorted to communism
and the Communist Party to express their recoil from the
existing state of affairs. It was the handiest formula for any
sort of organized dissent. Many of them not all, alas!
are emerging to a broader conception of what can be done
with life, but they still speak with a strong Marxist accent.
Some few, and my friend J. B. S. Haldane is among their
number, seem to be resolved like Lenin (but without the
justification of his circumstances) to read a wisdom and
profundity into the sage of Highgate which was certainly not
there. His Haldane Memorial Lecture (Birkbeck College,
May 24th, 1938), was, to my mind, a brilliant yet obstinately
perverse overvaluation of the role of Marx (and Engels) in
human thought, which may well have made the worthy
uncle whom he was commemorating turn in his grave. Lord
Haldane also professed the Hegelian faith and that was his

88 THE FATE OF MAN

nephew's justification. This lecture made the most of Marx,
I insist, and more also. And then more.

Now I have always had a peculiar contempt and dislike
for the mind and character of Karl Marx, a contempt and
dislike that have deepened with the years. I have given it
the liveliest expression I could contrive in "The Shaving of
Karl Marx" in Russia in the Shadows and in the "Psycho-
analysis of Karl Marx" in The World of William Clissold.
My only regret for these brief essays is that I could not
infuse more sting and challenge into them. I have watched
the tradition of Marxian bad manners and Marxian dog-
matism wrapping like a blanket of fog round the minds of
two crucial generations. They seemed to me to be lost in
the fog. It was difficult for me to think they could be ad-
vancing under that fog.

Yet when, for example, I turn over such a book as The
Social Function of Science by that very considerable writer,
Professor J. D. Bernal, F.R.S., I get at times, in spite of his
very distinct Marxist twang, a curious sense of parallelism
and co-operation. And much that J. B. S. Haldane said in
his lecture, I find as I read it over again, I could subscribe
to, except that I reject the Marxist attribution.

I am reminded of the story of an Englishman who had
a more or less rudimentary cultural conversation with a
Japanese gentleman. The latter broke into an oration, a gab-
ble, a flow of unfamiliar sounds which sounded like no
known human speech. Then something clicked over in the
hearer's mind. He made some rapid transpositions and light
broke upon him. He was hearing one of the most familiar
of Shakespeare's speeches in English! English of a different
tint.

ESTIMATING HOPE 89

I have been asserting, in a phraseology that no doubt owes
much more than I realize to the phrases and assumptions of
the liberal, protestant, progressive world of half a century
ago, a view of the human outlook, that seems to me to be
irresistibly convincing if one accepts a known series of facts.
The truer and more inevitable that view is, the more prob-
able it is that intelligent men, starting from all sorts of
different standpoints, will converge upon the same conclu-
sions. In English of a different tint. Indeed, it will be the
completest disproof of my contentions, if there is not that
convergence, if my conclusions do not reappear independ-
ently, crop up from a variety of starting-points and yet work
out towards practically the same pattern. If the compelling
facts do, as I assert, lie plainly on the face of things, 'that
must be so. But probably, because I have a phraseology of my
own, I shall be among those least able to recognize it.

And another thing that anyone who has spent most of
his mental energy in trying to give the fullest and most em-
phatic expression to the truth as he perceives it, may easily
underrate, is the tacit insubordination of many of the sup-
pressed and formally silenced minds who are apparently
disciplined against us. It is well to recall that all that out-
break of liberal questioning, the Protestant Reformation,
which did so much to prepare the way for the French
Revolution, was due almost entirely to the mental insurrec-
tion of friars or priests. They had had to take their creeds
seriously, and they had brooded over their dogmas until
they found them unbearable. There was no effective attack
from without upon Church teaching throughout the whole
Reformation period. There were close at hand in the alien
disbeliefs of Jew and Moslem, a tacit denial of the Catholic

90 THE FATE OF MAN

faith, but these provoked no reforming zeal. All that came
from within. And conversely the Jesuit Counter Reforma-
tion was the work of a group of romantic-minded laymen
led by a court-bred gallant who had been wounded and
crossed in love. The seven founders of the Society of Jesus
were with one exception laymen. They were excited out-
siders. They believed crudely and without qualification. They
had had none of that intimate instruction of the mind from
which questionings arise. They were, so to speak, the Nazis
of Roman Catholicism.

But that is a passing comment. The more relevant point
is the indisputable, obstinate tendency of common sense to
assert itself in minds deliberately trained in any elaborate
system of intolerance and error. Fanatics are madmen who
find a masochist pleasure in strangling their own doubts,
there is no dealing with them; but wherever there is dis-
cussion and mental training there lurks in every organized
dogmatism a class of potential rebels. Hidden allies and
half-hearted antagonists may be waiting to come over to a
movement for the radical reconstruction of human ideology
as it gathers strength. They are, so to speak, among the
undisclosed reserves of progress.

Moreover, in further mitigation of my defeatist mood, it
has to be borne in mind that while there is still life in a
species no biological defeat is complete. Men and women
of my type of mind and my generation, however the odds
work against us, have no alternative to a stoical persistence
in our convictions until our courses are run. We may have
to admit regretfully a loss of buoyancy and of the ability
for flexible mental co-operations. That is our private affair.
In that we are just as much war casualties as those who may

ESTIMATING HOPE 91

have suffered physical disablement in battle but are not yet
completely incapacitated. Our injuries narrow down the
scope of our service, but they furnish no justification for
abandoning a loyal participation in the struggle. Our cause
may still be winning.

Finally, as to the urgency of all this, let it be remembered
that nothing is more difficult than estimating possibilities in
time, and that timing here is a factor of primary importance.
Disaster seems to me to be advancing upon us, but it may
be that I am overlooking or underestimating the possibility
of some intercalary slowing-down in the pace of change.
I may be failing to perceive possible delaying forces. Some
unexpected development of anti-aircraft technique might,
for example, greatly minimize the destructiveness of air
raids and the possibility of surprise wars. 1 The world may
be held back from disaster for a time by the very weight and
strain of its own armaments. It may be false to assume that
sooner or later guns will go off of their own accord. Guns
can rust and explosives disintegrate. A balance of power
may be possible for longer years than I suppose, heavy and
burthensome years perhaps, but still not years of complete
catastrophic collapse.

In that pause, many people will be thinking hard, and
the human intelligence may find methods of discussion and
organization unknown to us. I find myself unable to imagine
any such respite, and so I cannot bring it honestly into my
account-rendered of the world, but there may be such a
possibility. That gives no excuse for slackening, but it does
justify a certain hopefulness.

With that I think I can finish with myself as a typical

1 See Note 10s for such a possibility.

92 THE FATE OF MAN

sample in evidence in this survey of the reaction of Homo
sapiens to his present dangers. These ego-centered passages
are not really so egotistical as they will seem to be to the
antagonistic reader. It is auto-vivisection. I was by far the
best and handiest rabbit for this demonstration.

Allowing for my own loss of individual hopefulness and
that probable narrowing down of co-operative tolerance in
my mind, the conclusions I am presenting to you remain
nevertheless sound, grimly sound. The prospect for our
species is just as stern and implacable, charged just as much
with bracing uncertainty. The issue upon which I am in
doubt is not whether I am right or wrong about the facts
I have assembled; it is simply whether you of the new
generation can be sufficiently braced in time. There, maybe,
I do you an injustice. That is what I am saying.

What I have admitted in qualification of my own ebb of
confidence, is no justification whatever for mere optimistic
trumpetings "I believe in the ultimate triumph of civiliza-
tion" and so forth. We have heard so much of that kind
of hysteria. Without personal and organized devotion it
means less than nothing. It is desertion under cover of a
declaration of faith.

There are always plenty of well-meaning people in the
world ready to relax at the slightest encouragement, and
the surest preparation for disaster is the enervation of senti-
mental overconfidence. Face your adversary at his worst and
most menacing, and then you will know best how to set
about him. Rational adaptation, I admit, may be achieved
ultimately, but only heroically, at a great cost. The odds
are against it, rest assured, if not perhaps so heavily against
it a$ nowadays they seem to be, to me.

11

SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES

WE ARE NOW IN a position to reconsider the nature of the
various established systems that block the way to the read-
justment of the human species as one single, continually
progressive and creative world community, and to make a
rough estimate of the way in which they are operating at the
present time. We arrive with minds cleansed and refreshed
by our survey of the biological situation, at the political,
social and religious realities of today.

Legally the world's affairs are in the control of a mis-
cellany of sovereign states, and each embodies itself in a
government of politicians and officials, deeply concerned
in maintaining the bargaining autonomy of the particular
regime which gives them their importance, and prepared
to offer a spirited resistance to any invasion, conquest or
amalgamation of brave little (or big or old) Ruritania, or
whatever state it is. That is how the political map of the
world presents things to us. But very few of these legal
governments are real cultural entities. It is only one or two
sovereignties that embody a complete cultural system of
their own. For all practical purposes the British Empire is
such a system, with a curiously loose yet persistent will and
tradition, sustained by a very distinctive literature of bi-

93

94 THE FATE OF MAN

ographies, memoirs, collected letters and speeches and the
like, and a quite definite religion or religious substitutes
the Anglican compromise between Protestant and Catholic
Christianity. Still more complete is the Nazi Germany of
today, which indeed is now strenuously self-sufficient even
to the extent of a distinctive science, art, literature, history,
clothing, dietary of its own. But most of the other states
play their game of international competition over a sort of
map which does not necessarily correspond to their spheres
of sovereignty. They are like estates, farms and fields spread-
ing over a substratum of soils and geological formations.

It is to these underlying foundation realities of the world
situation that we must first direct our attention.

As the facts assembled in The Outline of History showed
very clearly, the expansion in size of the early empires
(saving only Egypt with its Nile) was dependent upon two
advances in communication, writing and road-making.
These expanding empires of the second and first millennia
B.C. put a great strain upon the tribal and petty national
religions (which in those days included the science and
morality) of the smaller states they incorporated. A work-
ing compromise was found in a sort of fusion of the ab-
sorbing and absorbed cultures. A rejuvenated religion was
produced by a mutual modification of ceremony and myth.
The corresponding gods of these syncretic religions adopted
each other's names as aliases, or they became different
"aspects" of a consolidated deity (theocrasia). A general
similarity in these more primordial tribal cults greatly facili-
tated this syncretic process.

About these primordial religions we now have a consid-
erable body of assured knowledge. And this is not we

SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES 95

must underline here knowledge in dispute. It is not a col-
lection of theories we are bringing into court; it is an
assemblage of facts. What we have to cite here is no more
questionable than the facts of evolution and ecology that
have been assembled in the earlier sections of this book. It
is indeed knowledge that is not made accessible to every-
one; that is the default of our educational systems; it is
steadfastly ignored by many people who find it inconvenient
and distasteful; but that does not affect its truth.

We know that these early religions were systems of fear
and propitiation, that they centered upon the primary im-
portance of a seasonal blood sacrifice, and that that sacrifice
was the function of a priesthood, which was also in charge
of the calendar and of whatever medical knowledge existed.
From The Golden Bough of Sir James George Frazer, O.M.,
and from Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, by F.
Legge (published by the Cambridge University Press), the
unbiased reader can realize for himself how this cannibal
blood sacrifice has been refined at last into the Mystery of
the Mass, which will indeed have very little mystery left
for him if he faces the facts these writers, with no unneces-
sary emphasis nor any partisan purpose, put plainly before
him. 1

These investigations into the beginnings of religion have
accumulated steadily throughout the past half-century. It is
only by great efforts of censorship, by sectarian education
of an elaborately protected sort and the like, that ignorance
about them is maintained.

These seasonal blood-sacrifice religions had a wide range
of local variation, their theogonies differed widely in some

96 THE FATE OF MAN

of them, mystical, secret mother-nature goddesses lurked
behind the great father god; in others, the totem animal
prevailed but in all their forms they sustained the fear-
begotten idea of blood salvation. Two dozen centuries ago
they were already suffering through the pressure not only
of syncretic necessity but from the increasing skepticism of
the awakening human intelligence. They still cumbered the
earth with a multitude of temples and priesthoods, for where
there is an endowment you can always find someone to be
a priest, but they were producing complex developments of
their theological explanations.

Ptolemaic Alexandria was a hot-bed of religious elabora-
tion. At the Serapeum, before the middle of the third cen-
tury B.C., it had produced a trinity with a sacrificial son,
who is slain and ascends to the Father and becomes the
Father. There were a regular and secular clergy, monks
with tonsures, a choral Easter ceremony; and the worship
of the goddess Isis bearing the infant Horus in her arms
anticipated the Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary down
even to minor details. The hymn "Sun of my Soul, thou
Saviour dear/' addressed originally to the hawk-sun-god
Horus, has become a Christian hymn. In the- temples one
saw collections of ex-votos hung up in gratitude for mirac-
ulous cures and escapes, and the ceremonial purchase and
burning of votive candles was encouraged. The hope of a
glorious immortality which was little stressed in the earlier
religions outside Egypt was a central fact in this religious
scheme, and so, too, was an insistence upon the material
resurrection of the (in Egypt usually pickled) body. All this
was going on nearly three centuries before there was a
Christian in the world.

SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES 97

But very few Christians know these facts. They are all to
be found fully documented in Legge (op. cit.).

We must turn now to a second factor in the basis of 'the
cultural life of Europe and the Europeanized world, the
Sacred Book.

While religious cults were limited in their range and
appealed at most to a few thousand votaries, it was possible
to sustain 'them by direct teaching and initiation, but as
greater empires grew with the development of writing and
land and sea communications, there appeared a new demand
and also a new facility for mental organization. This was
the written word. Spreading over the old sacrificial pagan-
ism, there presently appeared what one may distinguish as
Book religions. Every great religion in the world today,
whether it does or does not preserve the tradition of the
cannibalistic blood sacrifice, is a Book religion.

The first of the Sacred Books to affect the Western world
was the collection of Hebrew writings constituting the core
of what is now called the Old Testament. It came into
existence as a natural result of the series of misfortunes that
happened to the various communities speaking the closely
related Semitic languages which had dominated the Western
world a thousand years before the Christian era. These
were the Babylonian, Phoenician and Carthaginian states,
the Jews who had been deported to Babylon and then
returned to Palestine, and a variety of trading colonies and
settlements in association with these Semitic-speaking cen-
ters. In the course of a few centuries these highly civilized
and intelligent trading empires and cities, in common with
various other old-world communities, collapsed under a
series of barbarian raids and conquests coming from the

98 THE FATE OF MAN

North. Most of these Northern barbarians spoke languages
of the Aryan group. Between the Homeric Age and the
third century B.C. they had, as the Persians, the Greeks and
Macedonians, the Romans and Gauls, become masters of
the larger part of the Mediterranean world, leaving the less
warlike, Semitic-speaking peoples, inter alia, subdued and
scattered and defeated but still trading, sustaining a financial
network, navigating the seas and going to and fro in the
world. They remained in possession of these roles because
they knew more about them. The conquerors, as they be-
came civilized, availed themselves, with a certain suspicion
and resentment, of these superior gifts and facilities of the
defeated. The Semitic business methods were ready-made
for the new kings and aristocrats and warriors. They learnt
to use them slowly and left them largely in Semitic hands.

During the course of these conquests there was naturally
a great intermingling of blood. The subjugated Semitic and
pre-Semitic peoples were certainly in the majority in the
Latin, Greek, Persian 'and Macedonian empires; history
records no general ban upon intermarriage, and we can
hardly doubt that the actual blood of the ruling Aryan-
speaker was the smaller factor in that continually stirred-up
mixture which is now the European and Europeanized
world of today, 1

But traditions were less easily assimilated. Throughout
that millennium which culminated in the Roman Empire,
in all the ports and cities there must have been groups of
households and business organizations struggling to main-
tain a level of refinement and behavior higher than that of
their rulers, and eager also to preserve their business cor-

1 See Note 11s on the racial unity of mankind.

SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES 99

respondence and a sympathetic understanding with their
kindred throughout this new world that had annihilated
and discredited their separate religious systems. They needed
a Book to unify them, they were ripe for a Book, and the
Book was ready for them.

It was in Babylon and Judaea and in the towns of these
regions that those Jewish sacred writings first appeared.
They contained two overlapping versions of the old Baby-
lonian cosmogony, together with the myths of the Creation,
the Serpent-Enemy, the Fall, the Flood and the Tower of
Babel. They also contained the story of a Promise and of a
Chosen People who were destined to recover all and more
than their ancient ascendancy. But at a price. These Chosen
People had to keep themselves aloof from the Gentile world.
They must preserve their precious distinctive habits and
usages intact. They must remain aloof and enduring, until
a promised Messiah came to lead Israel to its final triumph
over the rest of mankind.

The appeal of these Scriptures to. the needs and imagina-
tions of these scattered peoples on the defensive must have
been irresistible. In a century or so Carthaginians, Phoeni-
cians, Babylonians disappear from history, and all over the
world of their former activities the Jewish communities
appear, centering upon the schools of Babylon and Jeru-
salem with a consolidating literature and a religion. In this
stage they proselytized freely. Probably the proselytizing
was chiefly among kindred and sympathetic Semitic-speak-
ers, but there were also Tartar and other tribes which were
won over. The blood-sacrifice tradition was sustained by
the priests in the Temple until the fall of Jerusalem to
Vespasian in 70 A.D. Then the sacrifices ceased and the Sacred

100 THE FATE OF MAN

Book with its semi-authoritative accretions became the link
of Jewry throughout the world. . . .

So -the first of the great Book religions on which our
civilization rests arose. Hard upon its diffusion followed
Christianity, its unidentical twin.

Christianity began as a Jewish sect, as the Books of the
New Testament tell very simply and clearly; it was still
entirely Jewish after the Crucifixion; and it was only
through the initiative of Saint Paul that the ranks of the
elect were opened to the uncircumcised. After the Four
Gospels, the New Testament is largely occupied with Paul's
reconstruction of the Nazarene cult. It is all very plain to
anyone who reads these books without theological prepos-
sessions. His brilliant intelligence seized upon the idea of
presenting Jesus as the sacrificial king of the blood-sacrifice
tradition. Jesus, he declared, was the Lamb by whose blood
we were saved though as a matter of fact crucifixion is
hardly a more bloody death than hanging. He had died,
said Saint Paul, not only for the Jews but for all men who
would accept his sacrifice. This, for the stricter Jews, was
an intolerable relaxation of their divine bargain. But some,
less profoundly convinced of the Messianic hope, realized
the attractive quality of the Pauline teaching.

The medium of diffusion for Christianity remained for
a time the scattered Jewish communities. Throughout the
first and second centuries Judaism and its offshoot, Christi-
anity, the latter becoming more and more Gentile and anti-
Jewish, spread and bickered side by side throughout the
whole extent of the Roman Empire. The pagan world,
although it was also in a state of great social and religious
unrest the two things seem to be inseparable had no com-

SURVEY OF EXISTING FORCES 101

parable nexus for the production of alternative sacred
writings that could stand up against the dissemination of
these Judaeo-Christian legends and mythology. So that these
latter provided the written factor in the foundations of
civilization throughout the entire Western world.

Later, another Book religion, Islam, swept for a time
across the Mediterranean scene, with very considerable re-
actions upon medieval science and thought. But that influ-
ence, and the effects of a vast multitude, myriads indeed, of
less distinguished "Sacred Book" cults, are outside our
present discussion.

It is necessary to recall these well-known though per-
sistently neglected facts -here because they establish a gen-
eral statement that what we may call roughly Western
culture the mental adaptation of mankind to social and
political life, from -the Pacific coast westward across the
Atlantic to farthest eastern Russia, up to as late as the second
Russian Revolution in 1917 was based upon an interrelated
system of Bible-centered Book religions which had either
obliterated or assimilated the more ancient blood-sacrifice
cults.

Let us now review the chief forms these foundation re-
ligions take in our world today.

12

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE

FIRSTLY, BECAUSE OF ITS illuminating quality, we must con-
sider the progressive segregation of the Jewish community.
It has diverted, wasted and sterilized an amount of ability
and moral energy that mankind at large can ill spare* In
the previous section we have shown how naturally it arose
out of the state of world affairs of the centuries before and
after the Christian era, and how the realistic genius of Saint
Paul sought an escape from its perilous limitations. From
the very beginning, there must have been men of vision
among the Jews who realized and rebelled against the moral
isolation to which they were being condemned, there must
have been a continual seeping-away of individuals to the
larger opportunities of the outer world, but the uncom-
promising tradition carried by the old Bible and the associ-
ated writings which grew into the Talmud has been suffi-
cient to hold together a core of inassimilable and aggressive
'orthodoxy to this day clinging obstinately to every detail of
ritual, behavior and avoidance that emphasized the central
legend of a Chosen People.
It is this orthodox remnant and its behavior and influence,

the repercussions it evokes and the dangers to which it has

102

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 103

exposed the whole Jewish community, which constitute the
Jewish problem. There would be no distinctive Jewish ques-
tion at all were it not for this remnant and its activities.

The whole question turns upon the Chosen People idea,
which this remnant cherishes and sustains, which it is the
"mission" of this remnant to cherish and sustain. It is essen-
tially a bad tradition, and the fact that for two thousand
years the Jews on the whole have been very roughly treated
by the rest of mankind does not make it any the less bad.
Almost every community with which the orthodox Jews
have come into contact has sooner or later developed and
acted upon that conspiracy idea. A careful reading of the
Bible does nothing to correct it.

Every sort of man is disposed to get together with his
own sort of people and prefer them to strangers. That is
the natural disposition of our species, fair play to the out-
sider is one of the last and least assured triumphs of civiliza-
tion, but the indictment against the Jewish community is
'that their religion of a Chosen People takes this universal
human vice, justifies it and stimulates it to the form of a
persistent organized attitude of self-exclusion from the com-
mon fellowship of the world.

Everywhere the same reaction occurs and everywhere the
Jew expresses his astonishment. Not only Christians but
Turks have resorted to pogroms. In contact with the Arab,
the Koran-taught Arab from the desert, who shares the
Jew's cosmogony, who practices similar dietetic taboos, who
is equally free from Trinitarian theology and sacrificial
bloodshed, and has indeed a much stronger claim to be
called Semitic, the angry reaction to the theory and practice
of a Chosen People, to the practice much more than the

104 THE FATE OF MAN

theory, is just as violent as it is in any other part of the
world.

It is this Chosen People tradition and still more the habit
o mind which betrays itself in those who have come under
its influence, which is the ever-recurrent cause of the trouble.
It seems to me beside the mark to look for any other. 1

Estimates of the number of Jews in the world vary be-
tween fourteen and sixteen million. The latter figure is given
by Louis Golding in The Jewish Problem and by Lewis
Browne in the careful and scholarly work he has entitled
so flippantly, How Odd of God. ("How odd of God to
choose the Jews!" W. N. Ewer.) This is not a very great
total. They have and always have had abundant and well-
cared-for families. Probably outside the range of definitely
associated Jews, there has always been a much larger world
of sympathetic kin, sharing and affected by the feelings of
the stricter core, capable of co-operating with it and re-
sponding to modifications of the central idea, but gradually
slipping away beyond recall.

As we have noted in 11 (and see also Note HB) most
of us probably have a more or less considerable proportion of
"Jewish" blood in our veins, using "Jewish" *& the larger
sense. But orthodox Judaism has always been a narrower
and intenser strain. It has passed through phases of leakage
and recovery. The Protestant Reformation was a phase of
leakage. Browne doubts whether there were half a million
Jews in Europe in 1600, "fewer than were to be found in
Castile alone four hundred years earlier."

Of the sixteen million Jews today, Browne estimates that
there cannot be more than four million who are strict ad-

1 See Note 12A for a further discussion of this point

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 105

herents to and observers of the Law and that perhaps an-
other six million are what he calls semi-observant; they are
lax about food and drink and the Sabbath, but when it
comes to celebrating marriages, funerals, taking an oath
and so forth they follow the ancient formulae, they attend
the main annual feasts, they pay their pew rents and do
their full duty by the Jewish charities. They are very much
like the Anglicans who don't go to Church very much but
would never dream of being married in a registry office.
Then comes another three million who have become entirely
indifferent to the Law. They do not attack it, but they put
it aside. Yet they cling as nationalists to the solidarity it has
preserved through the ages. They are Reform Jews or Radi-
cal Nationalists, like the law-disregarding young Jews of
Palestine. Mr. Browne is himself a Reform Rabbi and he
can write incidentally:

"There are certain writers who become tremulously nos-
talgic and tender when describing the life of those pietist
Jews. Ensconced in laurel-embowered English cottages, or
seated in cafes on Montparnasse, such writers will wax
ecstatic as they discourse on the effulgent 'mysticism' en-
haloing the ghetto hovels. But that, I fear, is because they
have never entered those hovels. Had they done so they
would in all likelihood realize unless sentimentality had too
thickly blurred their sight that life in them is not bathed
in the lambent light of unearthly wisdom: that instead it is
dark and scabrous with superstition."

The remaining three of these sixteen million Jews are
rapidly ceasing to be Jews at all, and he notes with a sort of
calm amazement that "a cult which has lasted for centuries
could be shattered in a decade." The younger generation

106 THE FATE OF MAN

has been given equality in the U.S.S.R,, excellent schools
and a new and exciting creed. Nominally they remain Jews,
and their language, Yiddish, is one of the national languages
recognized by the Union. But Hebrew has vanished the
Law, the Promise and Jehovah!

And at this point Browne and I part company. Judaism
may vanish in Russia under communism, he has to admit,
but it will live on elsewhere not by virtue of its own quality
but because of Gentile intolerance. He argues that Gentile
intolerance makes the Jews and keeps them together. I argue
that the Jews make themselves and that Gentile intolerance
is a response to the cult of the Chosen People. To get down
to ultimate things, we are in substantial agreement, I find,
in that we desire a world, enlightened, scientifically admin-
istered, free, a world-wide new civilization open to everyone,
where there will be neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free.
Nevertheless we differ diametrically in our interpretation of
the root cause of the Jewish problem, and as a consequence
upon the question where the tentative for denationalization
should begin. Thirteen million Jews at least still make
the implacable Gentile the justification for their own per-
sistence. They still hold to that hard core of national sep-
aratism in spite of the steady evaporation of every traditional
religious justification. Yet they have a world-wide organ-
ization for calling off that attitude and the Gentiles have
no corresponding representative network to speak for them
to the same extent. The Holy See has recently condemned
racialism very clearly and definitely. So has the White
House. . . .

But let me go on with what I believe is the truer version
of the Jewish story, and the reader, with a glance at the

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 107

notes at the end whenever he needs confirmation, must
judge between me and the defenders of persistent Jewish
nationalism. 1

The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is
spreading about the entire world today. In the past the Jews
have been subjected to much resentful treatment and much
atrocious cruelty and injustice, now here, now there, but
there has never been such a world-wide I will not use the
word anti-Semitism because of the Arab I will say anti-
Judaism. Now, because of the physical unification of the
world, the resentment against the theory and practice of a
Chosen People is much quicker and more contagious than
it used to be; it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous.
The idea is becoming everywhere more and more intolerable
than it has ever been before.

The cultivated, exaggerated, national egotism of the
Chosen People has never been so conspicuous as it has been
in the present century and particularly since the War. As
their ritualism has weakened their nationalism has increased.
I recall a conference that took place in '19 or '20 in a room
in the House of Commons. A number of French writers
had deputed Madame Madeleine Marx to discuss with vari-
ous English men and women of letters the possibilities of
concerted action and possibly organization in the cause of
world peace and world understanding. In those days Israel
Zangwill had adopted the role of Champion of the down-
trodden and suffering Jewish race, and more particularly of
that section of it which was to be found in the wealthier
mansions of West Kensington and Tyburnia, en route from
the East End to the House of Lords. He sustained its racial

1 See Note 12s for that fuller discussion.

108 THE FATE OF MAN

pride, if indeed that needed sustaining. He insisted upon
Israel's distinction and its inappeasable hunger for restora-
tion to the land of the protracted Promise. He told them
of the Dreamers of the Ghetto. He reminded them of their
origins with humor and emotion. He helped them to feel
"different/ 9 as the American car salesmen say, and mystically
better. They were, he persuaded them, not really having the
good time they seemed to be having; behind the brave face
they put upon things they were weeping by the waters of
Babylon. The true voice of Israel was to be heard not in
the West End of London -but when it went off for a trip to
Palestine and, following the customary routine, wailed at
the Wailing Wall. Always he spoke of "My people."

He brought his championship to our deliberations. We
various British authors had had our trivial shares in the
"war to end war," and we were very willing to fall in with
any proposals that would help to rationalize the heated and
punitive atmosphere of the Versailles peace. We felt that a
peace that would indeed end war was slipping away from us.
But we found this conference dominated by the communist
dogmatism of Madame Marx, against which Bernard Shaw
protested, and Zangwill's preoccupation with his "people."
He laid down the conditions that would satisfy their needs;
he insisted on what would satisfy them, what would make
them willing to help us, and the difficulties an offended
Jewry could create for us. So far as I could grasp his drift
he was dealing with us as the British Empire. We were not
the British Empire, but it was vain to protest. Zangwill was
a very resolute character and that was the drama he had
in mind. Just as in our private disputes he would insist on
treating me as a devout Christian. Then he could say: "But

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 109

your Saviour was a Jew!" Useless to plead that I was not a
Christian, and that there might be considerable prepotency
in the Holy Ghost. Zangwill was being the captive nation
making his terms with the oppressor. It is the drama so many
people still have in mind when discussing this question.

In those days we in the victorious allied countries were
all ready to believe that the world was really recovering from
the War and entering upon a phase of comparative freedom
and hope. We did our best not to think too much about the
state of affairs in Germany. Everybody was talking of re-
construction and rationalization, and it was possible to deal
jestingly with things that have now become intolerably grim.

The Zionist movement was the crowning expression of
what I, in fiat contradiction to Mr. Browne, hold to be the
obdurate insistence of orthodox and semi-orthodox Jewry
upon their peculiarity. In the years immediately following
the war, there was a lull even in the normal persecutions in
Eastern Europe to which the orthodox were subjected. They
suffered indeed during the civil disorders that preceded the
consolidation of the Bolshevik government; Whites, Reds
and Greens were alike guilty of pogroms of varying degrees
of virulence, and there was in consequence a certain exodus
westward, but as the new law and order were established
in Russia these outrages ceased and the process of rapid
assimilation, to which reference has already been made,
began. But already the champions of Judaism were adver-
tising to the whole world how implacably they insisted upon
their eternal essential foreignness. They had demanded a
national home, so that elsewhere they could be forever
foreigners. They might within limits accept the advantages
of citizenship of the country they lived in, but essentially

110 THE FATE OF MAN

they would not belong. They would vote, hold office, rule,
but always with Zion in their hearts. They ignored the
manifest fact that the day of small sovereign states is draw-
ing to an end, and that in a world of ever-growing violence,
to plant themselves massively in any particular area was to
invite a wholesale disaster.

Today when the whole world is being subtly pervaded
with anti-Jewish feeling, and when the restraints upon the
predatory and persecuting impulses in the human animal
are being rapidly weakened, these implacable nationalists are
still conspicuously seeking suitable regions where they can
go on being a people by themselves, where, pursuing an
ancient and irrational ritual so far as it suits them, they can
sustain a solidarity foreign and uncongenial to all the people
about them.

No country wants them on such conditions. Why should
any country want these inassimilable aliens bent on pre-
serving their distinctness? Palestine is an object lesson. Until
they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen
People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify.
No one can help them while even a die-hard minority a
minority that the general body of them does not disavow,
a nucleus about which habit and association and sentiment
gather very readily and to which it is easy f or lost sheep to
return- prefers these exasperating pretensions of a special
right and claim to becoming frankly and of their own
accord common citizens of the world.

These are the elementary facts of the quandary to which
the Chosen People have come, the more relentless dragging
the doubters and half-hearted with them. They are facts
that have to be stated, even though matters are now coming

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 111

to a complexion which gives a flavor of ruthlessness to their
bare statement.

Because this obdurate separatism which, after all, except
for the growing trouble in Palestine, has been hitherto more
of an irritant than a downright evil, is now conspicuous and
challenging just at a phase in human affairs when it is be-
coming extremely dangerous to be in any manner alien and
provocative.

In the last two paragraphs of 4, the essential facts of the
present rapid dislocation of social order have been stated.
Social disintegration is now a world-wide reality, it is a
convulsive breaking-down everywhere of long-established
systems of law and order, an almost cataclysmal dissolution.
It is a process far vaster than this Jewish question we are
discussing and it arises from causes that have no special
connection with that trouble. But it catches up the Jewish
question in its swirling eddies and spins it about so that its
fluctuations become indicative of the character of the entire
process.

The Jewish question is already something very different
from what it was a score of years ago when Zangwill cham-
pioned and threw that glamor of racial romance and Mac-
cabean heroism about the ancient ways. Those were tolerant
days. At that time it was easy for people to fall away from
the old observances if they chose and become Christians or
unconforming skeptics. Now, and it is the most ominous
aspect of the new phase, in many parts of the world the
doors of escape from orthodox Jewry are being closed. These
doors are not being closed from the inside; there i no way
of closing them from the inside. They are being closed from
the outside. Those who are disposed to apostasy are being

112 THE FATE OF MAN

turned back by the outer world. Nothing of this sort was
happening twenty years ago. A number of people, and some
of them are very sinister people indeed, are beginning to
say, "You insisted upon being Jews. Jews you shall be."

The operating causes in those wide alternations between
social confidence, a sense of stability and a prevailing law-
fulness and intolerance, and phases of insecurity, fear, dis-
honesty and general unrighteousness, which have manifestly
occurred in the human story, have still to receive anything
but the most casual attention from the historian. Those
happier periods, when the social machine was running
smoothly, when men were able to move about freely
and almost fearlessly, work with a sense of fair reward,
when there was something definite and reasonably sat-
isfactory and hopeful for most of the young men to do,
have been by far the less frequent and the least secure.
Order and peace have been precarious always in the growing
human societies of the last four or five thousand years. There
have been constantly recurrent phases of mutual pressure,
expansion and that dislocation without which readjustment
is impossible. Then doubt and suspicion invade men's minds.
They lose that feeling that they are being properly taken care
of; there is no confidence that services will be rewarded or
debts paid; mutual trust gives way to suspicion. Social be-
havior deteriorates. The strong and cunning no longer feel
that the weak will be protected. The suspicious look for
scapegoats to blame, for evil doers who have offended the
gods, for conspirators. Particularly for conspirators, 1

We do know and we have already stated in general terms
the forces that have produced the particular phase of

1 See Note 12c for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 113

violent social disintegration that is going on today. They
are world-wide and unprecedented. Socially they are more
destructive than anything our species has ever faced before.
The disintegrating changes in the social order of the past
were probably due to much more localized and quite differ-
ent influences: to unrecorded fluctuations in the relative
welfare of classes, to the social shifting due to new economic
processes, to the infiltration of foreign ideas and prac-
tices, to foreign pressure, to epidemics no history can
be complete without a proper study of the social sequelae of
plague, the Black Death and the like to sustained bad
weather, drought for example, over a number of years, to a
stimulating and disorganizing influx of gold such as hap-
pened after the discovery of America. These and a thousand
other disturbing forces have been enough to tilt the always
unstable and insecure social balance back to general distrust
and convulsive, self-protective dishonesty. The adaptive cul-
ture fails. Things go to pieces, Man reverts to his more
natural state of a fear-and-desire-driven beast.

In the history of any social system such periods of disor-
ganization display almost parallel phenomena of demoral-
ized mass action. The strong are looking for the weak not
only individually but collectively in order to gratify their
craving for power, the crowd is seeking the furtive enemies
of the state, the fearful are looking for the strange wicked-
ness and secret mischiefs that have brought about the dis-
comforts o the time. In such an atmosphere any marked
kind of people are liable to set upon, are liable to be ringed
about for victimization and punitive plunder.

Such a convergence of hostility has by no means been
confined to the Jews. The Albigenses, for example, in the

114 THE FATE OF MAN

south of France, had no very special relationship to the
Jewish community. They were a Christian sect with certain
heretical ideas derived by way of Bulgaria from the Gnostics
and Manichseans. They were charged, by their exterminators,
to whom we owe most of the knowledge we have of their
beliefs, with abnormal sexual practices. What is more cer-
tain is that they protested vigorously against the corruptions
of the Church and were markedly anti-sacerdotal. They
spread throughout Provence and prospered throughout the
twelfth century. Their movement was in several respects an
anticipation of the Protestant Reformation. Whereupon the
Church invoked the harder, ruthless and more Catholic
north, and preached a Crusade against them. Moral and
religious indignation and the prospect of loot implemented
their destruction. Here we cannot tell the tale of massacres,
burnings alive two hundred in one auto~da-ftihe sadistic
terrorism and blackmail of the Holy Inquisition. . . -

The Armenians again are another much massacred, non-
Jewish but distinctive people.

But it is the Jews who have generally been the marked
people throughout the realms of Christendom and Islam.
They have generally "got it first." And repeatedly the door
has been slammed upon Jews who have been seeking to get
away or were actually getting away from the threats that
darkened over them*

Lewis Browne gives a compact and effective account of
the fate of the Marranos in Spain and Portugal. He tells of
the forcible baptism and conversion of the Jews in 1391 in
the face of a storm of popular hostility. The government,
because of their financial and administrative usefulness,
opened a door of escape for them. They were given the

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 115

choice between exile and massacre or Christianization. A
great majority chose the latter, and since all the synagogues
were closed and the practice of the Jewish law sedulously
suppressed, within three or four generations most of these
baptized Jews became just as good or better Catholics than
their neighbors. This from the outset was a huge disappoint-
ment for those neighbors who had been whetting the knife,
so to speak, for an orgy of murder and plunder. It seemed
to them the meanest trick conceivable. They called these
desperate converts the New Christians or more familiarly
swine (=Marranos), and set as rigid a bar as possible on
any intercourse with them. As Jews they had been "dogs"
but now they were "swine." "Conversion indeed!" they said.
"You don't get away with that"

In complete good faith the majority of the Marranos in
the next generation or so were Catholics, "These hapless
creatures," says Browne, "took no pride in their past. On
the contrary they were through and through ashamed of it
and groaned that it be forgotten." That did not help them
in the least. Massacre and detailed persecution closed in on
them. The tale is fully told in Mr. Cecil Roth's History of
the Marranos. It is a frightful story, but from the point of
view of the present discussion it is almost the same story,
Inquisition and all, as that of the Albigenses who were not
Jews at all.

An entirely parallel treatment has been meted out in the
last decade to the Christian Jews in Germany. They have
been herded back upon their orthodox brethren, in the same
spirit and for the same reason that the Marranos were kept
apart for destruction. We are witnessing now a swifter and
vaster repetition of that Marrano tragedy.

116 THE FATE OF MAN

A time has come when a multitude of men and women
of more than average intelligence, men and women who in
reality have no essential racial difference from the average
European, are finding themselves with no foothold what-
ever upon the earth, dispossessed and hunted from country
to country, marooned in impossible regions, deprived of the
normal protection of the law, beaten up by anyone who
chooses to beat them up, outraged, tortured, sterilized,
stripped of everything, ill-treated in every possible way. They
seek escape from one country to another, and the countries
where they would take refuge, suffering now from the fast-
spreading economic and social malaise of this current phase
in human history, are more and more chary of receiving
them even as assimilable individuals. Everywhere employ-
ment is dislocated. Everywhere they encounter the protest:
"We have our own unemployed!" 1

A great book, a book of victims with thousands of au-
thenticated cases, could be filled already with the tale of
forced suicides, murders and abominations done upon these
refugees, and there is no reasonable prospect of surcease.
From the narrower point of view the compilation might be
called The ]ewuh Boo\ of Martyrs, but from another it
could be entitled The Natural Man, because its broader
interest lies in the clear demonstration of what the inherent
brute in man can do when the grip of law and order relaxes.
It is a horrible recrudescence of primordial human reactions,-
but that is no reason why we should shut our eyes to the
role of the alien nationalism of the Chosen People in ex-
posing them first and foremost before any other people to
this accumulating outbreak of hatred, cruelty, bestiality and

1 See Note 12D upon the refugee question.

THE JEWISH INFLUENCE 117

every sort of human ugliness. They are the first to suffer in
the social dissolution of our epoch, because they have stood
1 out most conspicuously. They are the most obvious "mur-
'derees" and "plunderees." They come first. But they are only
the first. . . .

I have enlarged upon their case because it is not only con-
spicuously challenging at the present time but because it
brings into the picture most of the elements of the present
human situation, the general disposition of any established
community to adhere to forms and traditions of living long
after their survival value has disappeared, the normal blind-
ness of human beings to the onset of novel and more exact-
ing conditions until disaster actually supervenes, the swift-
ness with which social balance can now be overturned.

I can see no other destiny for orthodox Judaism and those
who are involved in its obloquy, unless that enormous effort
to reconstruct human mentality for which I have been
pleading amvesln time "to arrest their march to destruction.
That, if it is to save our species, must be a reconstruction so
bold and wide, an amnesty so fundamental, that it will
sweep the religion of the Chosen People and this age-long
feud of Juif and anti-Juif out of the living interests of man-
kind altogether. 1

1 For a practically identical view vividly expressed, read Wyndham Lewis's
The Jews, are they human?

13

CHRISTENDOM

FROM THE TRAGEDY OF Judaism we must turn now to Chris-
tianity, that second and greater branch of the Bible tradition,
which is the basis of contemporary Western civilization. The
word Christianity has covered and still covers an immense
variety of idea systems, but today it finds its most highly
organized and active expression in the Roman Catholic
Church. That too is a power transcending national and
state boundaries and playing a distinctive part in molding
human thought and destiny today*

In certain respects Catholic Christianity is in diametric
contrast to Judaism; in certain others the two cults run side
by side. They have this in common that nearly everywhere
they produce the feeling that they are alien cultures. They
are apt to be suppressed by governments together, as in
Hanoverian England and Hitlerian Germany, and to be
emancipated together. But they differ fundamentally in the
fact that while participation in Judaism after the early phase
of eager proselytism became for many reasons difficult,
Christianity from its beginning with Saint Paul (Acts xi, 26)
onward has been a missionary religion, seeking and incor-
porating converts throughout the whole world.

It not only incorporated converts but it incorporated

118

CHRISTENDOM 119

ideas. It sprang from the Jewish sect of the Nazarenes, but
in the course of the three centuries before its forcible sta-
bilization by Constantine the Great in 325 at the Council of
Nicsea and the definitive formulation of its three creeds, the
third-century Apostles 5 Creed, the fourth-century Nicene
Creed, so much more explicit about the Trinity, and the
Athanasian (of uncertain date and authorship) which finally
cleared up the Trinity business for good and all in a drum-
ming storm of intolerant nonsense, it had practically become
a synthesis of all the chief religious cults of that mentally
festering age.

The Catholic Church emerged from these formative cen-
turies as an organization of very considerable tenacity, but
intellectually it was already the most extraordinary jumble
of absurdities and incompatibilities that has ever exercised
and perplexed the human intelligence. It accumulated accre-
tions like a caddis worm. Still though now with more
deliberation it assimilates. At a very early stage it devel-
oped sexual obsessions unknown to its cognate Judaism. The
Virgin Birth began to worry its usually celibate theologians.
Jesus on one occasion (Matthew xx, 47-50) had very defi-
nitely denied any religious importance to his mother, but
with the taking-over of Isis and the Infant Horus, as the
Virgin and Child, this was disregarded. The Virgin became
a divine queen, very beautiful and adorable. St. Ignatius
Loyola, contemptuous of the earthly attractions he had
found unsatisfactory, vowed himself her Knight, and be-
lieved there was a mutual devotion. That the intenser re-
ligious succumb very readily to the suggestions of such
phrases as "The Bride of Christ," one can find ample evi-
dence for in the vast literature of the Christian mystics. It

120 THE FATE OF MAN

became necessary to sublimate the Virgin, the attractive
Queen of Heaven. She had to be made "sinless" and born
without "sin." So the theologians excogitated a "sinless"
begetting for her. It is difficult to tell these things without
a touch of derision. The doctrine of the Immaculate Con-
ception emerged from their meditations. It was mainly a
Spanish product, and there is a monument to the Immacu-
late Conception outside the Alcazar in Seville. It is perfectly
decent; it is a grouping of the divines, thinkers and spiritual
heroes, grave and dignified figures, who contributed to the
perfection of this profound discovery. For centuries, how-
ever, this Immaculate Conception was not a matter of faith.
It was made so by a bull of Pope Pius IX as recently as 1854.
There was a great assembly of bishops and dignitaries in
Rome from all parts of the world, a great gathering of adult
men robed very beautifully and carrying themselves very
seriously. A happy sense of a great consummation pervaded
them. And now all good Catholics must believe in the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, though what it
is they think they are believing in I cannot imagine.

And so, century by century, the great fabric of the faith
goes on accumulating. It has become a sort of Cumberland
Market of religious notions. 1 There is something from every-
where in it and, wherein lies its chief attractiveness, some-
thing for everybody. No single mind can cover that mighty
mental jumble sale in its entirety, so that anyone willing
to be converted has no difficulty in ignoring the less con-
genial articles of the collection. You will, for example, find
the sternest condemnation of socialism, no Catholic can be a
Socialist, and then you will find that the author of the com-

1 For a frank Catholic admission of this, see Note 13A

CHRISTENDOM 121

pletest forecast of communism, commissars and all that, Sir
Thomas More, has been canonized as a saint.

The organization of the Church, with its confessional and
its spiritual direction, facilitates this fragmentary approach
to faith in every possible way. The convert is invited and
trained to help in his own subjugation. He is implored to
pray for light. He must bury his sense of humor. These, he
is told, are serious matters. A hearty laugh at the metaphors
of relationship in the triplex composition of the divinity
would -shatter the whole process. Derision is the deadly
enemy of Catholicism; it drives it to indignant persecution,
indignant silence or indignant flight, according to the ex-
igencies of the situation.

Christianity picked up the Holy Trinity, it would seem,
in the second century, and very manifestly from Alexandria.
By that time Alexandria far more than Jerusalem had be-
come the spiritual home of Christianity. Neither St. Paul
nor Jesus insisted upon the fundamental importance of
right views about the Mystery of the Trinity to their fol-
lowers. To say the least of it, it was inconsiderate of them
to leave it to the author of the Athanasian creed, centuries
later, to formulate in terms of the now long-abandoned meta-
physics of Alexandria, "The Catholic faith, which except
a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved." Did Matthew
know? Did Peter understand? It leaves one anxious about
the ultimate fate even of St. Paul himself.

Why do intelligent people accept this strange heap of
mental corruption as a religion and a rule of life? That
question will bring us back to that reorientation of the
human mind, and that conflict between the actuality of the
present and the accumulating reality of the future, to which

122 THE FATE OF MAN

I have devoted 9. They accept it because it is there before
them and because it existed long before they did. They grew
up to it and even if they were not actually born and bred
Catholics, they saw it everywhere taken for granted and
treated with respect, cathedrals and shrines, saints and
martyrs, in art, in literature, in history, in the world about
them. There is no reasoning in a stained-glass window, but
there is an immense amount of conviction. To turn from
the menaces of stark reality to established religion is to be
immediately reassured. To turn from active, questioning
minds to the company of the faithful is inexpressibly com-
forting. And with that you get prescription and direction
for all the main issues of life. The Church, the faithful
about one, a vast volume of literature and history, agree in
saying: "Don't trouble. You are all right. Do as we do and
all will be well." At times I have tried to imagine what
such a natural born scoffer and rebel as Mr. Hilaire Belloc,
whose mental processes have always interested and dis-
tressed me, thinks at Mass. But that is just when he suspends
all tliinking. Credo quia absurdum, I suspect is the note of
it, a triumphant revolt against his own intelligence. He be-
came a scoffer and rebel against liberalism and scientific
revelation because he resented their compelling convincing-
ness. Any fool, he felt, could believe that.

And it is equally easy to understand the attraction of the
Catholic Church to those outside but within the influence
of the fold. They are already half converts. They "go ove^"
without the slightest examination of the fundamental ab-
surdities of the faith. Conviction comes after a discussion
of the A ]^ gt 2lir jSuK^fWMV apdjh 1 * validity (^j-h^ P^nf^fanf
Orders. Such things are deKberate^vefy gravely. WxtETT

"' '.,*,.'***""*****>? %-*---***

CHRISTENDOM 123

sense of enhanced importance, the convert takes to fjish on
Tndays7is receiv^'attends Mass, feels unutter^le things.
TJni^ ^"evealoJiimself. ItJs^aJJ^so' tremendously estab-
lighed Quiescence, spiritual *pegg^qgpes. UnShtHe anxiety

of the times taices hSdTo these rmjjjtys l?pi^ f act, they

^r^j-ijHft. ^tflRr **** t *Mfttaf w* 1 * <Mtt <^n*w** a ^ . . .
wilinpt recognize the element or malignity in the activities

oFtiis gx^aforganization to^which they, are^ clinging. Even
feel ffost"r3uctance ir^v^^gojt

to

creative reality,, which would make ^

in this world of limitless A danger^ Ijmitlcs^ difficiu^ an

Fantastic, defiantly absurd as this vast pile of the Faith
becomes to anyone who dares to go into it and question it
fearlessly, it is far less fantastic than the actual organization
of the Church. Its central control rests with a close corpora-
tion of priests, mainly Italians, the cardinals, who with
scarcely a break have elected a continuity of Italian Popes
for the last three centuries. Spiritually Italians must be a
very superior people.

In the Vatican, in entirely unveracious succession to St.
Peter, sustained by a handsome subsidy from the Fascist
government and the less reliable contributions of the faithful
at large, the Holy Father, in the measure of his intelligence
and the quality of his advisers, keeps his court and steers
the Church through the pitfalls of this world. He has had
the medieval education of a priest; his advisers have worn the
mental blinkers of the devout, and just as far as they dare,
they influence the political life of the world, according to
their limitations and prejudices. In all the democracies the
"Catholic vote'* obeys the tortuous wisdom of these scheming

124 THE FATE OF MAN

old anachronisms. Here tyrannies are blessed and here re-
volts are fomented. The devout in France or Britain, for
example, must support the Franco pronunciamento to the
infinite injury of their own countries.

Joseph McCabe in his History of the Popes tells the story
of the Papacy with a certain bitter accuracy and an ample
citation of authorities. The Catholic reader will, I know,
feel that my recommendation of that outspoken book is in
the worst possible taste. But let me nevertheless urge it upon
his attention. It will trouble his mind, but it will purge it.
But if he asks his co-religionists questions about it, they will
make him feel as if he were making rude noises.

When we try to estimate the role the Church is now
playing in mundane affairs we have to realize that on earth
it has no definite objective at all. It is a vast, self-protective
organization which seeks merely to exist and if possible
spread. Its friends are those who support and serve it; its
enemies and its enmity has the unrelenting quality of an
instinct are those who have thwarted, controlled and sup-
pressed it. It is against Soviet Russia, against every Protestant
system, against every country which insists upon secular
education; it is on the side of every government, however
corrupt and evil, which attends Mass and makes the sign
of the cross. Its real objectives, it alleges, lie in another
world. In some strange existence outside time and space
the reckoning will be made, and those who have swallowed
the Athanasian metaphysics, taken the advice of their priests,
and performed all their religious duties, will enjoy heaven,
and those who have fallen short will pass to heaven through
a state called purgatory or descend into hell forever, accord-

CHRISTENDOM 125

ing to the enormity of their disrespect. Bolsheviks, I assume,
will all go to hell.

In the past it was the custom of the Church to suggest
that the sufferings in hell and purgatory were essentially
physical tortures, and simple folk were given pictures of the
damned being burnt in flaming bowls, tormented by red-
hot pincers, racked and maltreated very richly and variously.
The state of bliss was less fully particularized. Nowadays
one hears remarkably little of either the upper or lower
aspect of the future state. Yet why is there no copious and
attractive literature upon the subject? Why are there no
speculative anticipations? Why have Catholic poets recoiled?
It should be a most fascinating preoccupation to imagine
that unearthly loveliness ahead. There are not even im-
postors to offer us dreams and visions. No one has ever
produced a plausible page from a celestial Baedeker. Even
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress stops short at the gates of the
Celestial City. We are left to imagine "these endless Sab-
baths the blessed ones see." There is the Book of Revelation
indeed, but who except cranks and lunatics reads the Book
of Revelation? And that, after all, is symbolic prophecy and
not to be mistaken for a picture of reality. The fact of it
is that the majority of Christians are not even reasonably
curious about the future life, and they are not curious be-
cause they have no more positive belief in it than I have.
They are Christians because it is the most convenient and
agreeable pattern of life for them, and for no other reason
whatever.

And yet the Church is something more than a picturesque
and reassuring frame for an everyday mode of living. It

126 THE FATE OF MAN

provides that, just as it provides dispensations, annulments
of marriages for the wealthy, titles, blessings, missions, fes-
tivals and displays, but such things are by the way. It exists
primarily for itself. It is always anticipating and warding off
dangers and occasionally it counter-attacks. There is an in-
cessancy in its self-preserving activities, and in this present
phase of world crisis it is encouraging much partisan activity.

There comes to hand as I write a book, Crisis for Christi-
anity by William Teeling, which summarizes very clearly
the ideas of a Catholic reaction and recovery that are stirring
the imaginations of the more active faithful I do not know
who William Teeling is. His title page supplies no informa-
tion beyond his bare name; he has written at least one other
book, The Pope in Politics; but he seems to have met and
discussed affairs with most of the leading Catholics in
Europe; and I understand that that very peculiar body, the
British Council, which spends 100,000 a year in endearing
England to foreigners by sending them carefully chosen,
if occasionally highly unrepresentative, samples of British
thought and behavior to lecture and talk to them, has availed
itself of his services. So that his book gives us not only the
present Catholic outlook, but one at least of the many faces
the now highly diplomatic and incalculable British Empire
turns to the world.

The first thing to remark about this book is that it com-
pletely ignores the existence of any modern, scientific picture
of the world. So far as I am able to judge, this is a real and
not a deliberate ignorance. Mr. Teeling was probably edu-
cated in a Catholic atmosphere from which such knowl-
edge is excluded. He seems to have no idea of the
Good Life except in what survives today of Christendom,

CHRISTENDOM 127

White Christianity that is to say, finding its completest
embodiment in the Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of
the foreign missions, he fears that Christ may "desert
Europe" and leave it "to be completely overrun by the
Yellow Races or -the Black or the Comjnunists and to pass
through horrors undreamt of even today." The most Chris-
tian countries of Europe now, he says, are "Franco's Spain,
Catholic Belgium and God-fearing Britain." Mrs. Nesta
Webster, to whose mentality I have devoted a Note at the
end of this book (Note 12c), could not have a livelier horror
of Jews and Russia. Outside the Christian pale there is one
single movement to which he turns with a certain hope
and kindliness, and there I think he is probably giving us
a fair reflection of the Vatican-centered mentality. He has
met and discussed matters, it is to be noted, with the present
Pope. He seems to be a fair sample of how Catholics think,

He writes: "No matter what we may think of the Nazi
leaders, or the methods they employ, they are at least instill-
ing into the nation as a whole, and not only into those who
might be their willing converts in a free country, a desire
to help the maimed, to support one's neighbors, to work
and live clearly, such as no democratic country is able to
show. The democratic governments pay only lip service to
much that is Christian, and they scarcely ever try to enforce
it, while the Trade Unions and other socialist groups in
this country" (i.e., Britain) "encourage, as indeed do some
of the less-thoughtful Conservative die-hards, a form of class
warfare which Christianity can never tolerate.

"My own feelings are all in favor of a free democracy
giving the opportunity to lead a Christian life, seeing that a
willing Christian is worth more to God than an unwilling

128 THE FATE OF MAN

one. But if the democrats do not respond, and under the
cloak of freedom carry on a most un-Christian life, can we
expect that God should favor them, rather than a disci-
plined body that at least is practicing some of the teachings
of the Sermon on the Mount?"

That is how the Church wishes to see the Nazis today.
Our exponent ignores the implacable resolution with which
the education of the young is being wrested from the Cath-
olic teachers in favor of Wotan, and the bulk of this edify-
ing book is a discussion of the possibilities of a sympathetic
swamping of this Nazi movement by the incorporation of
more and more Catholics into the Reich so that at last it
will be possible to chip off the flapping ends of the swastika
and restore the cross. It is all set out very attractively. The
curious reader can learn how Dollfiiss on "Great Catholic
Day" (Sept. llth, 1933) inaugurated the first German Cor-
porative Christian State, and less explicitly how he stamped
down socialism and labor. It was Dollfiiss who betrayed and
destroyed the radical republic that had ruled in Austria from
the end of the War. It was he who stood behind Major Fey's
smashing-up of the workmen's dwellings that had been the
pride of the socialist regime in Vienna (Feb. 1934). This
was not only a frankly uncivilized act but a piece of political
folly. 1

It left him face to face with the Nazis. They assassinated
him in July 1934, but the Catholic Corporative movement
went on less confidently under Schuschnigg, until the for-
cible realization of the Anschluss in 1938 by the Nazi army
made Austria an integral part of the Reich.

Ultimately Mr. Teeling thinks Nazi Germany will have

1 John Gunther's Inside Europe is particularly good on this.

CHRISTENDOM 129

an indigestion of Catholics. That is his hope. Large parts of
Bavaria, Baden and possibly Wiirttemberg and the Rhine-
land, are to break away and join up with Austria. Com-
munism may gain control in Italy Mr. Teeling throws that
out quite abruptly and gives no reason for his assumption
and then the Vatican will have to make Vienna its head-
quarters, Nazism and Fascism will be at a discount, and the
Authoritarian State, founded on the suggestions of the Papal
Encyclical Quadragesima. Anno (Pius XI, 1931) for a cor-
porative society will be installed in Vienna, with the Em-
peror Otto at its head and the Pope near by.

There you have the sort of thing the energetic young
Catholics of today can imagine; the sort of thing the present
"God-fearing" British government is unobtrusively subsidiz-
ing and spreading about, to the ultimate confusion of all
Jews, atheists, men of science, Bolsheviks, Russians (but see
tile Note 12c on Mrs. Nesta Webster.) . . .

So much for the Catholic contribution to human adjust-
ment today.

We are too apt to forget the narrow educational limita-
tions of those who figure as wise, unquestionable leaders of
men. Everywhere that applies, we live in a medley of
ignorant systems, but it is the Catholic culture I am now dis-
cussing. It is a common tendency in our minds to believe
that what we know clearly is also known clearly to other
people. We are all too apt to believe that these dignified
directors of human consciences know and understand the
body of modern knowledge, that they have studied, judged
it and rejected it.

But these Catholic prelates, so imposing in their triple
crowns and miters and epicene garments, are in fact ex-

130 THE FATE OF MAN

tremely ignorant men, not only by virtue of the narrow
specialization of their initial education, but also by the inces-
sant activities of service and ceremony that have occupied
them since. They can have read few books, they can have
had no opportunities of thinking freely. They are not nearly
the cynical rogues so many non-Catholics think them; most
of them are trying most earnestly to do right by the dim and
dwindling oil-lamps inside their brains. They are quite
ready to believe Mr. Belloc when he tells them, with that
buoyant assurance of his, that Darwin was inspired by the
ambition to abolish God in the universe. That fits in com-
pletely with their prepossessions. Why should they seek
further? Mentally they live in another universe from ours,
and the pity is that materially our universes intersect.

The slovenly, unorganized, intellectual world in which
we and they live together, gives them no opportunity of
grasping modern ideas without an impossible expenditure
of perplexing inquiry. And to set against that we must re-
member that their world of theological elaborations remains
an unmapped jungle to the unbeliever. They may have some-
thing to say to us but we are quite unable to get it, and con-
versely. The mind of mankind is still like a scattered jig-
saw puzzle, bits of knowledge here and bits of knowledge
there and no common pattern visible. And until we have
something in the nature of that permanent world encyclo-
paedia I have tried to foreshadow, so matters must remain.
That revival of the Holy Roman Empire under the Emperor
Otto, which strikes a realistic modern intelligence as fan-
tastically absurd, presents itself to the Vatican intelligence
in the guise of sober and subtle statecraft.

CHRISTENDOM 131

It is not necessary for us to wait for the return of -the Holy
Roman Empire to appreciate the nature of the Roman Cath-
olic Christian State. In Eire (formerly Southern Ireland)
and in Spain, the Church rules and we can watch it in
operation. Franco's Spain is still too busy cleaning up the
Republican Opposition, by shootings, expulsions and pro-
scriptions, to develop the Christian life in its complete beauty,
but in Ireland, Catholicism has been in control for some
years.

A stringent censorship of books and publications and a
fairly complete control of education have produced a first
crop of young men, as blankly ignorant of -the modern
world as though they had been born in the thirteenth cen-
tury, mentally concentrated upon the idea of bringing the
Protestant North under Catholic control in the sacred name
of national unity. That tension of the young men to which
so much social disturbance is due seems to be increasing.
There has been a steady flow of emigrants to Great Britain,
and recently there have been a number of bomb outrages
designed to terrorize the British government into an aban-
donment of Northern Ireland. These patriotic zealots set
about their business in a vein of pious devotion. They take
Mass and purify their souls by confession of everything
but -the particular enterprise they have in hand. And if the
British police deal sternly with these foolish, misguided
youngsters, all Catholic Ireland will set up a. great outcry,
possibly with more and better bombing, to avenge or release
this new crop of national martyrs.

The future of Ireland is incalculable. Hopeful Irishmen
abroad have indulged in dreams of a restless and independ-

132 THE FATE OF MAN

ent-minded people tiring of priests, piety and patriotism
and returning presently as an animating influence to world
civilization. But how can these young men get the idea of
that? We may perhaps find sounder intimations of Ireland's
future in the experiences of the Catholic South American
States. A people jyhich learns little forgets nothing, and the
Church in Eire may be trusted to see to it that the young
men of Ireland learn little and so sustain their tradition that
inveterate animosities are dignified and desirable. The prob-
abilities seem to point to murderous faction fighting, with
Northern Ireland and England always to fall back upon in
phases of comparative unity. There is a close temperamental
kinship between the Irish and the Spanish, and the history
of South America has already produced a series of bosses
and pronunciamentos, vindictive massacres and pitiless wars.

Never has there been such heroic, cruel, senseless warfare
as those little Christian hells in South America have known.
Paraguay under Solano Lopez fought on until its population
was reduced from 1,300,000 to under a quarter of a million.
Regiments were made up of boys between twelve and fif-
teen, and women were enrolled to carry ammunition and
stores. When these women could keep up no longer, they
were either left to die by the roadside or, i there was any
chance of their falling into the enemy's hands and yielding
information, butchered out of hand. No doubt many a
wretched young conscript rebelled against his lot, but what
could he do ? He might hope for a change of leaders. He
had no other ideas. It was impossible for him to have other
ideas. 4

The Roman Catholic Church, that clumsy system of frus-
trations, that strange compendium of ancient traditions and

CHRISTENDOM 133

habit systems, since it lies in the closest entanglement with
the intellectual life of the Western world and still holds
many millions in its grip, is certainly the most formidable
single antagonist in the way of human readjustment to the
dangers and frustration that now close in upon us all.

14

WHAT IS PROTESTANTISM?

THE CONFLICT OF JUDAISM and anti- Judaism is a tragedy in-
volving the misery and destruction of at most a few million
people, and were it not that the abolition of distance has
made every one of us his brother's keeper, it would be an
incident of secondary importance in the general collapse 'of
civilization that is now going on. But the struggle of Chris-
tianity to maintain its present ascendancy affects the larger
part of the human race. The Roman Catholic Church is
the most highly organized and efficient embodiment of
Christian teaching, the Orthodox Churches of Greece, Ser-
bia, Russia and the like are relatively negligible systems of
ceremony and superstition, the British Imperial culture it
will be more convenient to consider later, and the next
group of world forces to which we must direct our attention
is the Protestantisms, that series of movements and organiza-
tions which has arisen through the incapacity or unwilling-
ness of people to accept this or that outstanding incredibility
of the Catholic faith.

They protested. But for the most part they did not pro-
test outright against the ensemble of Church beliefs. That
would have been too awful for them. The earlier reaction
was to discover some incompatibility between the Bible and

134

WHAT IS PROTESTANTISM? 135

the practice and teaching of the Church. The courage of the
Protestant has grown by degrees. None of these earlier
doubters were capable of facing, even in their secret hearts,
the terrific isolation of denying Christianity. Such a denial
was almost unthinkable in Christendom for those born
within the pale, and they did not think it. For reasons we
made plain in the preceding section, when we asked why
it is that fairly well-educated people cannot merely remain
but become Roman Catholics, these early dissentients clung
quite desperately to the assertion of their essential orthodoxy.

A convergence of mechanical inventions occurred in the
sixteenth century to strengthen the Book against the priest;
paper in sheets of a uniform size replaced parchment, and
the rapid multiplication of books by printing from movable
type became possible. Suddenly Europe was sprayed with
Bibles and vernacular translations of the Bible, and the
Church found itself assailed by a variety of new Protestant-
isms that steadily gathered strength and enterprise. Men
brooded dubiously over the inspired word. All the Protes-
tants began as "reformers," and their original protests were
the distressful cries of honest men, who were as I have
noted iu an earlier section usually priests.

But though the Church monopolized education, ruled
men's minds, sanctioned and condemned conduct, adjudi-
cated on political claims, preached crusades, excommunicated,
put states under interdicts, and held an ever increasing accu-
mulation of land and wealth, it had never secured a physical
grip upon the secular arm* It trusted for obedience to the
spiritual fears it could arouse and the civil inconveniences it
could cause. It could turn state against state and subjects
against their rulers. It could dissolve allegiances. In an

136 THE FATE OF MAN

illiterate world this gave it an effective security. Many mon-
archs and princes lived in a 'state of uneasy resentment
against the restrictions imposed upon their conduct. There
was a continual struggle going on over such things as the
appointment of bishops, the restriction of gifts and bequests
to the Church, the taxation of its accumulating property.
These lords and princes struggled and lived and died, but
the Church had a massive continuity. Sooner or later it re-
covered its concessions and advanced to further aggrandize-
ments. So long, that is, as its moral power, its grip upon the
minds and consciences of the people, remained.

It could bluff its way through many scandals and abuses
so long as faith was unimpaired. But these honest doubters
and critics, with their arguments and proofs, gave a novel
strength to the recalcitrance of the princes. Before, they had
been recalcitrant like naughty boys, there had been fear and
the possibility of repentance behind their outrages, but now
they began to behave like youths growing up and discover-
ing flaws and weaknesses in the character of the governess
that hitherto even in their disobedience they had respected.
They seized very gladly upon this new destructive criticism
of the doctrines of the Church. They gave the reformers
their protection and ample opportunity to spread their doc-
trines. So that a thinly concealed desire for autonomy and
the confiscation of the vast estates of the Church, mingled
very remarkably with honest protestations in the Protestant
Reformation.

All this is a matter of history. We need not recapitulate
the process by which the new Protestant States that detached
themselves from Rome sought first to utilize and then to
limit this process of protesting and questioning, of which

WHAT IS PROTESTANTISM? 137

they had made such good use, by setting up government-
controlled Established Churches. Nor need we do more than
glance at the way in which Peter the Great took a leaf from
the English Establishment and applied the same process of
nationalization to the Orthodox Church in Russia. These
Protestant State Churches play a diminishing role in the
present drama of human aff airs. What is of greater interest
for the purposes of our present inquiry is the inability of
any of these would-be-religious settlements, as reading, writ-
ing and controversy spread, to arrest the progressive release
of the human intelligence.

The implementing of the Bible by printing had two di-
vergent results. The most conspicuous at first was a definite
return towards the spirit of Old Testament Judaism. The
Old Testament is the larger, more various and intriguing
part of the Word. One theme in it, which appealed more
to the reformers and thoughtful subjects generally than to
the princes, was the Calvinistic theme, the assertion of a
stern Theocracy, the rebuking and warning of kings by
prophets, a republicanism under God. The other, politically
more agreeable to the established rulers, attached less im-
portance to predestination and more to the good works that
came naturally from the Christian monarch. According to
the former doctrine he might fail to be one of the elect and
be denounced and disobeyed in this life and damned for-
ever in the next, however amiable his behavior. According
to the Lutheran alternative he justified himself by the in-
evitable rightness of his works.

Here we cannot enlarge on these attempts to adjust the
new Bible Christianity to the needs of that period. But one
very natural mental twist may be noted, and that was the

138 THE FATE OF MAN

widespread disposition of the Protestant Christians to iden-
tify themselves with the Chosen People, either mystically or
physically. It would need a small encyclopaedia to recapitu-
late the writers, movements and societies that have sought
to prove some magical migration of the "Lost Ten Tribes"
to Western Europe. There are British Israelites of that per-
suasion today. Such a jungle of absurdities it is, as could
only flourish in an ill-instructed world. But one curious vari-
ant upon this craving to be an elite with specific divine
favor we shall have to consider when we come to estimate
the value of the Nazi movement in the complication of
human destiny. . . .

The reversion of large parts of Christendom to Bibliolatry
and the Chosen People idea was however only the first and
most immediate result of the invention of printed books.
Many accepted the authority and read and believed. But
some read and thought and compared as they read. Gather-
ing momentum more slowly was a new skepticism, which
began to question the divinity of the Bible itself.

The doctrine of the Trinity was on the whole one of the
less fortunate acquisitions of the Catholic Church. It has
always given trouble from the days of the Arian heresy
onward. It gave Charlemagne an excuse for breaking with
Greek orthodoxy on the profoundly important point whether
the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father only or from the
Father and the Son. Arian and Trinitarian, Latin and
Greek the history of their wars was written in the blood
of millions. With the increase of questioning in Christen-
dom, that triplex divinity began presently not merely to
untwist but to lose its second and third strands altogether.

WHAT IS PROTESTANTISM? 139

Men dared presently to call themselves Unitarian, bowing
politely but distantly to the Biblical record.

Then came another step. A fashion of skepticism spread
among -the European nobility and gentry in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries; bold spirits encouraged each other
to the pitch of doubting and ridiculing the Bible altogether.
They became naughtily wicked about it. They were deists.
There were soon enough of them to live in easy understand-
ing with each other. Voltaire and Gibbon typify their qual-
ity. But atheism still remained a rather shocking extrava-
gance. Only temerarious individuals professed so extreme a
lack of belief, and usually it was associated with defiant
blasphemies and a general pretension to extreme depravity.
By this note of defiance in their excesses, these eighteenth-
century atheists betrayed a lingering belief in the God they
had denied. It was the ideas of God and good not only in
the world about them but in themselves that they fought
down.

The bright young people who gathered about Sir Francis
Dashwood at Medmenham Priory set out to be terrible fel-
lows with their Hell Fire Club and their Black Masses,
but how could one get the slightest thrill out of a Black
Mass unless one had a lingering awe of the Mass itself?
Without that much belief a Black Mass is an inane bur-
lesque of nothing in particular.

It is only in our own time that Protestantism, the pro-
gressive etching away of belief by inquiry, has reached its
natural finality in complete, untroubled disbelief in super-
human authority. Even now many atheists prevaricate. If
the word "God" means anything at all, it means a powerful

140 THE FATE OF MAN

being sufficiently anthropomorphic to have reciprocal rela-
tions with the individual man. A God who is not a personal-
ity is a contradiction in terms. But because of the ribald and
ungenteel associations of the word "atheist," a great num-
ber of atheistic thinkers and teachers and writers have clung
ambiguously to the entirely deflated name of "God." God,
they say, is -the Absolute, he is a force not ourselves making
for righteousness, he is the whisper of conscience, he is the
brainless Thinker responsible for the mathematical order
of the world, he is immanence. These are mere subterfuges,
God-shaped vacuums.

A sort of theism in effect, a theistic feeling at the begin-
ning of life, may be as innate as suckling. The natural and
necessary disposition of all immature creatures to believe they
are being taken care of, survives and will no doubt survive
always. Even if they do not think in theistic terms they will
still believe in protection. And throughout the Western
world, in Christendom and Islam and Israel, children will
be constantly hearing talk of God, so that a father-like divin-
ity becomes the form of this basic feeling. Until a mind is
fully adult, it finds great comfort in that ancient personifica-
tion of a natural but transitory need. And there is still a
disposition on -the part of unbelieving parents and of teachers
who should know better to utilize this craving for depend-
ence in the moral training of their children. Most educa-
tional psychologists are convinced that it gives a better result
in behavior to teach children that the right thing should be
done, not because of an all-seeing eye or a loving Father in
Heaven, but because it is simply just that the right thing
to do. Innumerable Confucians and Buddhists have lived

WHAT IS PROTESTANTISM? 141

noble and beautiful lives without the assistance of an unseen
Inspector.

Protestantism carried on to its end is a complete accef i-
ance of the limitless, impartial and continually more wonder-
ful universe that scientific inquiry is illuminating for us;
that is to say, it culminates in atheism without qualification.
Its final stage is a world of grown men, free from supersti-
tious fear and free equally from belief in any guidance of
the world that can relieve them from responsibility for the
shortcomings and failures of our race.

15

THE NAZI RELIGION

WE COME NOW TO the Nazi movement, which is, in its pos-
sibilities of destruction, the most urgent challenge -the human
mind and will have ever had to face. Nazi Germany may
well bring down conclusive disaster on our species. Yet its
intellectual content is naive, and its sudden extreme impor-
tance the result of a convergence of accidents. A people al-
most stupidly warlike, led by a maniac, threatens the world
and holds in its hands all the exaggerated powers of de-
struction modern science and invention have created.

It is plain that the Fuehrer is insane; he shows all the
symptoms of a recognized form of sex mania, the jealous
fear and hate of the great raping black man who in his
case becomes the Jew. Since in his case his obsession endan-
gers the lives of people about him, he should be certified
and put under restraint. But insanity has its advantages as
well as its handicaps. It involves an abnormal concentration
of purpose and nervous energy. In its phase of mania it
abolishes or at least defers fatigue and sustains long spells
of sleepless vigilance and penetrating distrust far beyond
the compass of the normal man. These qualities alone never
made any man the leader of a mighty nation. Hitler's in-
sanity would have had little effect upon the world if it had

142

THE NAZI RELIGION 143

not slotted veiy easily into certain essential needs of the
German situation. But for that he might be shouting, froth-
ing and orating in a madhouse at the present time. But it
happened that he supplied just the inflexible spearhead, the
inhuman pertinacity, required to give extreme expression to
the feelings of a humiliated and outrageously treated people.

The Nazi movement, or something essentially like it, was
inevitable. Had there been no Hitler, or were Hitler to van-
ish tomorrow, Germany would still be the problem sister
among the European states, the embittered and crazy sister
clutching the high explosive bomb.

The Nazi movement was inevitable because she had a
greater surplus of young people without reasonable hope of
life than any other country in the world. They had no colo-
nies to go to, no great business enterprises to develop; no
employment of any sort. There you have the primary condi-
tion for a desperate outbreak. If you want the state of mind
of pre-Nazi Germany compactly rendered, read Hans Fal-
lada's Little Man, What Nous? That post-war generation
grew up to explode and it has exploded. What else could
have happened?

In 12 the conditions under which social order may
degenerate into phases of suspicion, persecution, and
plunder have been discussed. Post-war Germany displayed
these conditions to an exaggerated degree. A new regime
should have its own new education to explain itself to the
community, but the staggering liberal Republican Germany
of the twenties carried on without any revolution in its
schools and colleges. They had become a great means of
patriotic consolidation under the Hohenzollern regime, they
had been purged and vetted for a third of a century to that

144 THE FATE OF MAN

end, and now they were hard at work establishing in the
minds of a new generation the innocence of Germany for
the war and the conviction that she had never been de-
feated; she had been cheated and betrayed. She was suffering
bitterly through no fault of her own. The teachers mined
the democratic republic. Everything was ripe for an out-
break of hysterical patriotism and a great pogrom before
Hitler became of the slightest importance.

And here another factor in the mentality of that domi-
nating section of the German peoples which we may call
Nordic-conscious came into play. Much of it was only
less anti-Catholic than it was anti-Jewish. Its mentality had
been framed upon the Lutheran interpretation of the Bible,
and with a certain acceptable reversal it was possible to ap-
ply the conception of a Chosen People to the Germanic
world. The Nazis took that over in one magnificent plagi-
arism. The Slav Prussians, the Alpine Bavarians, the
melange of Gothic and Celtic peoples in the Rhineland,
discovered that they were one single, pure race of beautiful
blonds. They saw through their mirrors to the inner truth
of themselves. They knew that in spite of appearances they
had lovely, pure, blond souls. They turned upon the Jews
and all foreigners with the completest paraphrase of the old
Bible nationalism. And, wiser in their generation than the
post-war liberal Republic, they have seized upon the schools
and universities, and are doing their best to mold the men-
tality of the entire Reich to this fundamentally Biblical idea
of a militant Chosen People Germanized.

Explicitly the new teaching retranslates Jehovah as Wotan,
the old Kaiser's unser alter Gott f and flouts the most ele-
mentary concepts of Christianity. But it is impossible to esti-

THE NAZI RELIGION 145

mate with what consistency this new religion of heroic com-
bat is being imposed upon the youth of the Reich. Variations
in statement may set the brighter ones thinking. All the
books have not been burnt. We do not know how much of
social democracy remains beneath the Nazified surface. We
do not know how much counter-propaganda is going on in
the outwardly submissive and still tolerated Protestant and
Roman Catholic congregations.

I have cited Mr. William Teeling to show the Roman
Catholic expectation of a German return to the faith, but I
doubt whether he fully realizes the relentless vigor of the
educational drive of the new religion. In Austria just as
much as in Germany they are turning the children against
parent and priest. Mr. Teeling, I think, counts his Catholics
before they are hatched. He would be wiser to count them
after they are educated. The complete de-Christianization
of the entire Reich, of southern as of northern Germany, is,
I think, the greater probability. 1

But that involves no release of German thought; it is only
a relapse into organized, relentless barbarism. Science in
Germany has been silenced completely. There is no free sci-
entific opinion any more. What remains of German science
is enslaved to produce either secret discoveries of military
importance or sustain the crazy ethnology of race superiority.
But if research in non-German countries is forced, barbarism
for barbarism, to adopt a reciprocal protective secrecy, it
may not be long before Germany realizes a decline in her
technical efficiency. She may cease to make discoveries
herself and she may be able no longer to borrow them from
abroad and develop them for her own purposes. This may

1 See School for Barbarians by Erika Mann (1939).

146 THE FATE OF MAN

move her to some loosening of the gag on her laboratories
and an attempt to re-open communications with the alien
world outside. And that again may undermine that still
very unstable Wotan.

The problem of what will happen in Germany is the
major problem of our immediate future. If the Nazi process
continues upon its present lines, then all die world must be
given over to the .servitude of war preparation, at least until
Nazi Germany ceases to exist. So far, Germany has con-
quered the earth already. The demonstration of the impos-
sibility of independent sovereign states under modern condi-
tions is complete. This finishes it. The declared Nazi objec-
tive is to create a unanimous, belligerent Germany, a blood-
thirsty nation, entirely tough and ruthless, resolved to use
any weapons and any methods, however monstrous and de-
structive, in its march to world dominion. It will fight and
conquer, or blow the world to pieces.

How will that drive to destruction end? It is possible but
highly improbable that this desperate adventure may suc-
ceed, and the whole world, or what is left of it, may cower
at last at the feet of Wotan's Chosen People, its masters. Or
that after a world storm of war, more horrible than any war
has ever been, Germany may be defeated and stamped out
by victors become at last as ruthless as their enemies. Or as
a third possibility; something may occur within Germany
to shake the Nazi solidarity. Many accidents are possible.
Mental forces at present unrevealed may appear. All Ger-
man thought is not in concentration camps. Individuals
may die, new groupings may occur, resolution may falter
at the eleventh hour. Every month that this tension endures
without an actual explosion, the search for escape from

THE NAZI RELIGION 147

Armageddon will become more intelligent both within and
without Germany. The magnitude of the still impending
danger will help more and more people to realize the mag-
nitude of the reconstruction needed to restore safety and
hope to mankind. Which means, inter dia, restoring security,
hope and ample scope for energetic activities, to the stifled
youth of Germany from whose exploited frustrations all
this trouble has arisen.

Before we leave this vital question of the German outlook,
it may be well to note one sinister possibility in contempo-
rary thought. Because of the peculiar filthiness and malignity
of the Nazi concentration camps, because of the sheer hor-
ror of the stories told by the more or less broken creatures
who have escaped from them, there is a widespread dispo-
sition to assert that Germans are particularly cruel; that they
are indeed a specially evil-spirited variety of human being.
Old stories of atrocities are being revived. Now this is to
concede the Nazi claims to be a unique people. We cannot
have it both ways, and, if we argue, as we have done in the
preceding sections, that the Germans are not the pure blond
Chosen People they imagine themselves to be, but a melange
of Slav, Celtic, Gothic and Alpine elements with only a lan-
guage to bind .them together, then we cannot also entertain
this idea of a specific sadistic streak in Germans.

Yet when we compare the evidence of those who have
been interned in various countries, we find a general agree-
ment in one respect, in regard to the attitude of the minor
officials towards the prisoners, which at the first glance does
seem to justify this particular charge against the Germans.
There is a consensus of evidence by those who have been

148 THE FATE OF MAN

there, that in British and Russian prisons the attitude of the
guard, the warder, -the turnkey and so forth is generally
sympathetic to his charges. Fellow feeling is his quality. He
regrets his instructions and does his best to mitigate them.
At times he may lose his temper or dislike and bully some-
one, but that is an individual lapse. But his German equiva-
lent, there is no doubt of it, does his tortures with zest, hates
his charges as though they were loathsome animals, and is
ingenious in devising new pains and abasements and suf-
fering for them. It is important that we should make up our
minds about the real nature of this difference. If it is innate,
then biologically it would be an excellent thing to kill all
Germans.

But most of us who have known and seen Germans in-
timately have found them as humane and helpful as most
people. They are generally more law-abiding than the Irish
or the English. They like to be relieved of the dangers and
troubles of responsibility by explicit directions. That may
be a habit of mind due to a persuasion that this is a danger-
ous world with which it is unwise to take liberties, and it is
quite compatible with these cruelties. The position of the
Germans in Central Europe has always exposed them to an
exceptional imminence of warfare. The country has been
overrun time after time by alien armies. Plunder and rapine
have flowed over the land. The German-speakers lived for
the most part in a great plain, they had no mountains in
which they could hide. It was only by screwing themselves
up to fighting pitch and facing all comers, that the divided
German states were able to maintain themselves at all. They
were called upon by their circumstances to be tougher fight-
ers than any other Europeans.

THE NAZI RELIGION 149

Toughness therefore is as much in the German tradition
as it was, for other reasons, in the Spartan. They had to de-
spise fear and pain in themselves, and that for most human
beings means despising fear and pain in others. The Nazi
is not a born tough. If he were changed at birth and put
among gentle, fearless people, he would not be a tough at
all He is a being innately as gentle as you and I, only he is
inspired by an hysterical desire to be utterly tough. He re-
fuses to give way to the horror of other people's torments,
because from doing that it is only a step to giving way to
pain and fear himself. And, attacking his own shrinking and
disgust, he goes out of his way in a sort of desperation, to
devise and inflict ruthless, disgusting and intolerable things
on the recalcitrants, the evil-doers, the detected conspirators
and we must remember that he has been made to believe
them that committed to him for reformation. Deliberate
cruelty is not a characteristic of limitless strength. Great
strength may be heedless and unconsciously cruel, but not
ingeniously and appreciatively cruel. It would get no thrill
out of it. That is reserved for men and women who are in-
wardly afraid. It is sensitive people who seek to sustain and
fix themselves by outrages.

Here it would take us too far from our main argument to
examine other cases of torture and cruelty, the abominations
done by Red Indian and Arab women for example, after
battles. There is indeed no people on- earth against whom
some phase of cruelty cannot be brought. The English as-
sume themselves to be a particularly gentle people, and with
some truth now. Yet consider the cockshies and bear- and
bull-baiting that delighted their ancestors in the past and
the extreme savagery of the penal laws at the end of the

150 THE FATE OF MAN

eighteenth century. There is a strain of cruelty, suppressed
or overt, in every human being. It is inseparable from self-
assertion and the craving to exercise power. . . .

But enough has been said to qualify this charge of a spe-
cial German cruelty. Those concentration camps must be
forgotten if ever Germany comes to judgment. Vindictive
reprisals may be part of the behavior pattern of a patriotic
Irish Catholic who knows no better, but not of a civilized
man. Let the dead past bury its grievances. They can have
no part in the rational reconstruction of human life. . . .

And here, apt to my argument, comes confirmation. Since
I wrote the above I have had a talk with a man who has been
in a German concentration camp, and he told me of how an
official, instructed to give him, for no particular reason,
thirty lashes, fell into conversation with him after the sec-
ond stroke, found out that he had been the editor of an
illustrated paper he liked, sat talking journalism, omitted
the rest of the prescribed beating, saying only, "I suppose
your friend here won't give us away," quite after the Rus-
sian or English pattern. The friend was trustworthy. All
fellow-prisoners are not trustworthy. One of the minor
vilenesses of Dachau is that prisoners are bribed by petty in-
dulgences and payments to report small relaxations of dis-
cipline. And many are in such physical misery, craving to
smoke, craving for taste of sweetness, that they do. 1

1 See Stefan Lorant's I was Hitler's Prisoner.

16

TOTALITARIANISM

TOTALITARIANISM is NO NEW thing in the Western world. It
is stated very completely in Hobbes' Leviathan. Leviathan
is the State into which the individual life is almost com-
pletely incorporated. Its will is concentrated on the sovereign
who heads the collective monster by right divine. He makes
war and peace, he raises up and casts down, he levies taxes
as he will. Even while Hobbes was preparing his book for
press, England decapitated Leviathan in the person of
Charles the First. The practical difficulty of the Corporative
State has always been the question who should be the head
and how a new head should succeed its predecessor. The
High Anglican Church upheld the monarchy and main-
tained the hereditary principle, but the liberal gentry, the
merchants and the tax-paying classes generally, were too
much for the state monster.

Except in the case of Franco's Spain and the extinguished
Catholic Corporative State of Dollfiiss, the heads of the
totalitarian states of today are usually sustained by "parties"
of a distinctly gangsterish quality. At the cost of mental
flexibility and adaptability, the corporate state gains a cer-
tain immediate concentration of will. Our problem is to
estimate what amount of mischief these obstinately knotted

151

IKJtfi FAIE OF MAN

will systems may do with the monstrous weapons of the
present time, before they themselves can be undone. It may
be irreparable mischief.

The Nazi culture has been weighed in the previous sec-
tion. Now we turn to its weaker associate, fascism. This is
immediately interwoven with the career of one single man,
Benito Mussolini. Compared with Hitler he is sane, intelli-
gent and human. He is vain, rhetorical and immensely ener-
getic, with the energy not of morbid concentration but
physical abundance. He is what many men would like to be.
His career from his early days as a socialist conspirator,
when oddly enough he was already nicknamed U Duce, to
his present supremacy on the crest of middle age, is a fairly
open book. It is laced throughout with a thread of the ridic-
ulous. Where Hitler is an unqualified horror, Mussolini
often is, as schoolboys say, a bit of an ass, which is much
more endearing. Until we remember the castor oil cam-
paign and the poison bombs in Abyssinia and the Lipari
Islands, and Amendola and Mateotti and Roselli and the
like, he is a lark. But then the lark stops singing. We know y
absurdities about him from which he cannot escape, ^e
have the researches of the curious and the revelations of inti-
mates. Madame Balabanoflf x tells a fairly convincing story
of his life at Geneva, Mr. G. Megaro 2 gives the particulars
of his upbringing among the rebel spirits of the Romagna,
quotes relentlessly from his early speeches, and shows with
chapter and verse how strenuous have been his efforts to
conceal the truth about his early career. That anxious eye on
posterity, these absurd and belated efforts to escape the unre-

*My Life as a Rebel ( 1938) .

* Mussolini in the Making (1938).

TOTALITARIANISM 153

Jenting pens that pursue him, are naturally pleasing to a
writer with a weakness for derision.

But do not let us judge Mussolini only by the writings of
his enemies. A more flattering study, written indeed in
terms of unrestrained admiration, is My Autobiography. It
was dictated by the Duce himself at the request of Mr. Rich-
ard Washburn Child, if possible a more fulsome hero-
worshiper than the autobiographer himself, and it is amus-
ing to compare its evasive flourishes with the relentless doc-
umentation of Megaro. If one learns little about the black-
smith father one gets hitherto disregarded particulars about
the aristocratic Mussolinis of former days and their armorial
bearings and castles and so forth. Anybody on record who
was ever called Mussolini seems to have been his ancestor
and to have anticipated some or all of his distinctive quali-

ties. 1

Here we are not concerned either with biography or his-
tory except in so far as they throw light on the present world
situation, but it is of very great importance in our estimate
of the future of fascism to realize that the personal vitality
of its creator must now be passing its maximum. He was
born in 1883. For some years there has been an increasing
appearance of effort and uncertainty in his grandiose ges-
tures. It is as if he felt Italy was slipping away from beneath
him. He has manifestly become dependent on the tougher
initiatives of Nazi Germany. He is less sure of the Church.
Six years ago he was holding up Dollfiiss in Austria as a
barrier against Hitler. And where is that barrier now? The
Nazis look down on him from the Brenner Pass. He is
losing face with his own people and his Nazi friends do

1 See also Professor Salvemini's The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1928).

154 THE FATE OF MAN

little to help him in that matter. A few years ago it was
dangerous to talk about him in Italy. Now they are talking.

Can there be a second Duce to follow the first ? His high-
spirited daughter and his son-in-law, Count Ciano, seem
impatient to outdo his Fascist intemperance, but they will
scarcely dare to attack and oust him, and it is not in his
character to resign. Unless some unanticipated accident re-
moves him from the scene, we shall have, not Giovinezza,
but a middle-aged fascism to reckon with from now on.

The Italian situation has several incongruous elements
and their relative importance varies continually. The Vatican
(face Mr. Teeling and his friends) seems now firmly dug
in at Rome. Its relations to fascism have always lacked en-
thusiasm; it has ideas of its own. In the case of Fascist col-
lapse or national defeat, the monarchy also stands ready to
return and save the country. If the monarchy returned,
would it be liberal or Catholic totalitarian? And the for-
eigner knows nothing of the possibilities of social discontent
in Italy. Italy is a land peculiarly unfitted to stand the
stresses of modern war. She is mostly coast line. She has no
coal, and the Apennines are a thousand feet too low for her
to have snowfields that would give her irrigation or water
power. She can better defend herself against Germany in
the Alps than against the sea power of France and Britain.

All these considerations lead towards the same conclusion,
that in the probable war tornado of the near future, Italy,
if she is not clever enough to keep out of it, will play a sec-
ondary and gesticulating role. She may suffer many things.
She has not the fixed will, and she cannot afford to have the
fixed will, for war, at which the Nazi culture aims. It is
Nazi Germany which remains the danger center of mankind.

17

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY

THE NEXT NETWORK OF thought and behavior we must bring
into this reckoning of world forces is the British Empire.
British Imperialism, like Roman Catholicism, is a natural
aggregation. No man planned it; it discovered itself in be^-
ing. It is a crowned oligarchy, claiming to be democratic
because it uses universal suffrage for election to one of its
two Houses of Parliament, and to correct that it has an
easily manipulated voting system and a proprietary press
dependent on advertisement revenue for the information of
its citizens. At no phase in history have the common people
played a dominant part in the government of Great Britain,
and in every phase the baronial oligarchy has prevailed. It
is the tradition and education of this oligarchy which deter-
mines the behavior of the Imperial Government and its role
in contemporary world affairs.

Runnymede is the typical scene in the pageant of English
liberties; Magna Carta documents the fundamental British
situation. Magna Carta secures the liberties of the baron and
free yeomen of the realm from all the main abuses of un-
qualified monarchy. It concedes no more rights to the churls
and common folk of the land than it does to cats and dogs.
About this central picture of the monarch amidst his bar-

155

156 THE FATE OF MAN

ons English history groups itself. The king is restive, but his
peers are stern. They war with the Scots and the French
and they conquer and parcel out Ireland. The Church car-
ries on its habitual struggle for existence, asserts itself, is
restrained; it becomes rich and is reformed and plundered.
The Crown, with a Tory following and a sympathetic
Church, tries to go back upon Magna Carta, asserting its
divine right to absolutism, and one king is beheaded and
another goes into exile with his family, leaving the oli-
garchy, with a manageable new dynasty of Hanoverians, in
possession. It over-exploits its American colonies and loses
them, and it happens upon a greater Empire in the East.

Never once in the proud island story does the will of the
common people matter a- rap. Occasionally they give trou-
ble; they get rather out of control after the Black Death;
and a little later we find them asking quite inconclusively:

"When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?"

They subside into deepening misery with the industrial
revolution, and they reappear in the nineteenth century
struggling for nothing more than better wages and rather
more tolerable living conditions. There was nothing very
democratic about British trade unionism as we have de-
fined democracy in 6 and hardly more in the Labor
Party that derived from it. The British Labor Party has
never displayed any ambition to direct the affairs of the
Empire. It aspires to nothing of the sort. It acknowledges
the class inferiority of the workers and haggles by means
of strikes and votes for a more tolerable but admittedly in-

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 157

ferior way of living. By diminishing the discomfort of the
masses and mitigating and soothing the exasperations caused
by excessive business enterprise, it plays a stabilizing role in
the existing system. Not only is it utterly absurd to call the
British government now or at any time in the past a demo-
cratic government, but it flies in the face of manifest facts
to deny that it is farther off now from anything that can be
recognized as a democracy than it was thirty years ago. The
old Liberal Party was liberal in its professions at any rate;
the Labor Party is densely conservative. The British masses
neither rule nor want to rule. They are politically apathetic.
They do not produce outstanding individuals to express their
distinctive thoughts or feelings, because they have no dis-
tinctive thoughts or feelings to express. Outstanding indi-
viduals of humble origin are obliged to fall into more or
less easy acquiescence with the ruling system. There is noth-
ing else for them to do. The oligarchy is privileged, it has
to be served first at table with everything, office, honors,
opportunity, but it is not exclusive, and that is one of the
factors in its continued existence.

I do not know of any comprehensive study of the educa-
tion and training of the British ruling class throughout the
ages. The feudal world was limited enough for a lord to
get away with very little reading and writing. He had his
clerk, his cleric, at his elbow, and he felt he could keep his
eye on him. His world was all in sight. Leech, lawyer and
priest knew their places and stuck to them. The renascence
and the coming of the printed book altered all that. The
medieval universities were swarms of poor scholars. The
gentleman of the renascence had his tutor at home and
went to grammar school and university. The grammar

158 THE FATE OF MAN

school became the narrowing portals through which the
poor scholar had now to pass on his way to the learned
professions. The Latin and Greek classics came into the
Western world first as a stimulant and then, as the peda-
gogues watered learning down to scholarship, as a distinc-
tive culture. The British oligarchy of the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries conceived of itself as Roman patricians
and was rather ashamed of its illiterate members. It made
the grand tour with its tutor, achieved a sort of French and
Italian and became artistic and architectural. The apt clas-
sical quotation adorned the Parliamentary debates into the
middle of the nineteenth century. After -that it became in-
frequent. It was not that the classics were going out of
fashion but that the standard of learning was sinking.

Culturally the British oligarchy was at its best in the sev-
enteenth century. It knew what it wanted and how to get
it. It managed its estates ably. It built fine houses, it made
great progress in agriculture; its younger sons went into
trade and spread adventurously into America, India, China.
A prolific Protestant clergy supplemented the supply of en-
terprising young men. Yet a shadow fell upon the outlook
with the Hanoverian importation, and Pope's Dunciad
marked the change. The Goddess Dullness is enthroned:

"And at her fell approach and secret might
Art after art goes out and all is night."

The oligarchy still ruled and flourished materially under
that unstimulating dynasty, but it made no further progress
mentally; it ceased to be alert and adaptable, it became ac-
quisitive, tenacious and conservative. Because of these quali-

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 159

ties it presently irritated the thirteen American colonies into
separation. The French Revolution took it by surprise. When
the French in their turn decapitated their king it was not
flattered by the imitation. It was scared. The revolutionary
mob, it realized, was something different from the Iron-
sides. The Ironsides sang hymns and were sternly respect-
able. These people from Marseilles sang a much more
alarming song.

The deterioration of an education is usually a complicated
process. The mere fact that it is materially successful makes
for uncritical contentment, and discredits change. Teaching
falls into the hands of sound, orthodox, unenterprising men.
It becomes humdrum. Interest shifts to the greater reality
of the playing fields. The history of British education of
the education of the oligarchy, that is to say, for popular
education had hardly begun from, 1760 to 1860 is a his-
tory of resistance to change and steady deterioration.

The nineteenth-century British gentry had nothing like
the full-bodied classical education of the preceding centu-
ries; they had only the pedagogic vestiges of that education.
Mathematical studies had been introduced, but they were
as stylistic and useless as the pedants could* make them. By
the middle of the nineteenth century the self-complacency
of the British governing classes was being protected educa-
tionally not only from the subversive ideas of the French
Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution, but also from
that more fundamental upheaval which was making biolog-
ical science the key to a modernized mentality. A dwindling
section of the upper classes could read French still; there
was an attractive breadth in the French novel that the do-
mestic fiction of the period did not display; but Voltaire

160 THE FATE OF MAN

and Gibbon were passing out of fashion. When gentlemen
scoffed, Queen Victoria was "not amused."

Within the narrowing field of their cultivated ignorance,
the young gentlemen prepared themselves vigorously for
Parliamentary and administrative careers, and they devel-
oped an -enthusiasm for open-air sport and that primitive
form of bath called the Englishman's tub, which was quite
outside the ideology of their Tudor and Stuart ancestors.
Many of them still shoot with distinction; others devote
much time and attention to fly-fishing; others again culti-
vate gardens and watch birds. They have developed a pecul-
iar literature of their own; memoirs, biographies and auto-
biographies, collections of letters and speeches, which estab-
lish their social values and supply them with patterns for
the careers they follow. This constitutes the bulk of their
reading. So equipped, the British oligarchy, at the head of a
vast and scattered medley of dominions, crown colonies,
mandated territories, India, faces the vast occasions of our
time.

It is questionable whether it faces them with any ideas
about their future at all. Or its own future or any future.
Like the Catholic Church, its main purpose seems to be to
hold on, aimless except for self-preservation. It means to go
on with the sort of life its fathers have left it, forever if
possible, and that apparently is all it means. Crown, Church,
lords and gentry will just stick at what they are where they
are, until something shatters and replaces them. And they
will do this not out of any essential wickedness but because
in fact they know of nothing better to do.

The English-speaking world produces an abundance of

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 161

thought and new ideas, and it has a reading public suffi-
ciently large to secure the translation of any really original
book written in any language under the sun. But that read-
ing public is widely dispersed and the major part of it is
probably outside the boundaries of the Empire. The British
ruling class is shy of ideas and imaginative creation, it
dreads and hates what it calls highbrow conversation, and it
can have very little time to explore beyond its distinctive
literature of personalities. A number of concepts and under-
standings, a vast multitude of facts, that are known and
clear to all well-informed peope, seem never to have entered
the British ruling-class mind or to have entered it only in a
crippled or belittled state.

Here again, just as in our examination of the mutual un-
awareness of Catholicism and skepticism, we may fall into
the error of imagining that what is known to us must nec-
essarily be known to other people. But in reality these peo-
ple who rule the British Empire do not willfully ignore a
great number of things, they are simply ignorant of them
or ignorant about them which is quite a different matter.
Ever since the first French Revolution, for example, the
mind of the British ruling class has remained barred against
any understanding of revolutionary democratic ideas. The
French Revolution frightened them and they pulled down
the blinds upon it. They chose to think that liberty means
nobody doing any work, that equality means bringing the
under-housemaid up into the drawing-room and sitting her
down to play the grand piano, to her and the general em-
barrassment, and 'that fraternity means embracing extremely
unwashed untubbed people. Socialism again they regard

162 THE FATE OF MAN

as a dividing-up of all the property in the world into exactly
equal shares for everyone. ("Inequality would come again
tomorrow.")

Since the advent of a real social democracy would certainly
mean very profound readjustments in life for them, these
quick shorthand interpretations so to speak, are far more
satisfying and sufficient than a sustained argument. They
insist upon thinking like that, and if their sons and daugh-
ters get other ideas they discourage them and "laugh them
out of it" if they can. Everything indeed outside that little
anecdotal world of theirs with its importances and routines,
that world they would like to go on forever, they know as
little about as possible; and since they have never looked at
such projects and interpretations directly and intelligently,
they cease to be projects and interpretations and are appre-
hended vaguely as prowling monsters, threats and perils
the Red Peril, the Yellow Peril, the Black Peril outside
rational existence altogether.

I have had plentiful opportunity of sounding the minds
of socially well-placed people, and in common with all the
world I have watched the political conduct of the Empire
during the past few searching years. Manifestly the mental-
ity now ruling is one in which "Bolshies" are the enemies
of God and man, men who go east are "pukka sahibs,' 1
royalties, beloved mascots whose very pet dogs are adorable,
and workers honest drudges so long as they are not "spoilt,"
with only one weakness, susceptibility to foreign agitators.
Americans it is understood are snobs in grain, but rich, and
they should be kindly entreated. They will just simply fall
down before the dear king and queen, whenever they get

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 163

a chance. And also remember, "they cannot afford to see the
British Empire overthrown,"

If the men get a little away from that sort of thing, the
chatter of their women brings them back to it. Their women
interfere a lot; the Colonel's lady is the typical figure of
feminine influence throughout the social scale. In the army,
in the Church, in politics, her good word raises up or casts
down. All this is recognized openly in novels, in plays and
social intercourse, but when it comes to political discussion
and Times leading articles, then reality has to be wrapped
up in a lofty pretentiousness. . . .

This is undignified writing. This is in the worst possible
taste. Yet I cannot explain the twists and turns of Mr.
Neville Chamberlain unless I use the terms I do. How can I
adorn him with splendid prose? I cannot see him as any-
thing but essentially ignorant, narrow-minded, subcon-
sciously timid, cunning and inordinately vain. He and his
father, Joseph, before him appear to me as the appointed
scavengers of the fading Imperial dream. Joseph Chamber-
lain, with his mean yet extravagant idea of monopolizing
the vast resources under the flag by means of an Empire
Zollverein, aroused that convergent hostility of the Have-
Not States, to which his son, with a sort of poetic justice,
now makes his propitiatory surrenders.

I do not think Mr. Chamberlain wants to "save the Em-
pire." The Empire came and the Empire may have to go.
He adheres to something less transitory. His more immedi-
ate purpose, unless all his acts belie him, is to save the oli-
garchy and its way of life from its predestined end. He
cannot understand that that way of life is over forever.

164 THE FATE OF MAN

His family have been at such pains to achieve it, have been
so eager, so clumsily eager, to serve it. Still he and his kind
dream of friendly hospitable chateaux in a restored Holy
Roman Empire or under a Spanish monarchy, and of a
France, an Italy, a Greece made safe for the gentry again
by the crushing out of all subversive forces. That I am con-
vinced gives the ultimate range of the political vision of
Mr* Chamberlain and his class.

When New York made an Exhibition to stimulate imagi-
nations about The World of Tomorrow, the British pavilion
stressed the sentimental past, exhibited Magna Carta, crown
jewels, pedigrees and an old English village. There was a
genealogical diagram to demonstrate that George Wash-
ington was "one of us." There was not the faintest anticipa-
tion of that great fusion of English-speaking thought and
activity throughout the world, of which all modern-minded
men are dreaming. World Federation? Instead there was
the most definite reminder that the British Crown and
Church stood gently but inexorably in the way of anything
of the sort.

In the days before "Tariff Reform," it was possible for
young Englishmen to dream of the Empire as a great prop-
aganda and medium for liberal and broadening democratic
methods, free migration, free trade and open speech, steadily
weaving all the world together. It was a dream that cap-
tured many an alien imagination, as for example, Joseph
Conrad's, but now it is an altogether abandoned dream* The
idea of the Empire as a step towards world unification has
lost all plausibility, and while the Chamberlain school of
statecraft engages in its propitiatory dispersal, the creative

THE BRITISH OLIGARCHY 165

imagination turns to the still living possibilities of one com-
mon culture of the English-speaking peoples.

An increasing number of British people look now to the
present President of the United States for some sort of
world leadership. He is a good, liberal-minded fellow any-
how, but in a sort of despair of anything better they do their
best to exaggerate him. Britain herself produces no one to
speak whatever liberal thoughts she has to the world. She
has nobody of that quality, and even were there such a man
it is difficult to imagine how under existing conditions he
could emerge to popular attention. Without an objective,
dumb, the Empire is becoming an anachronism, an Empire
of passive and inadequate resistance. Its progressive disartic-
ulation seems inevitable, and if after all the dream of a fed-
eral reassembling of the English-speaking and English-
reading communities struggles towards realization, it will
owe very little to the Imperial tradition and organization.
North America, with its looser, freer and more abundant
mental activities, is far more likely to become the backbone
of such a reconstruction, and to carry it out on a democratic
rather than oligarchic ideology. Monarchy, Church, influen-
tial families, experienced administrators and old Parliamen-
tary hands, would merely clog and encumber the develop-
ment of the social machinery necessary for a modernized
world state.

So far from exercising any further leadership in world
affairs, Great Britain is much more likely to withdraw into
itself. With a dwindling population, an inadequately pro-
gressive educational system falling more and more behind
the headlong needs of our time, and a shriveled prestige,

166 THE FATE OF MAN

the island may become unimportant enough to stand out
altogether from the effort to effect a world synthesis. It may
remain a crowned oligarchy yet for many years, fatuously
content with itself and still as unaware as it is today of its
continual decadence. Today in the Eastern world one can
find a dozen anticipatory parallels, the self-satisfied and
self-contained vestiges of what were once proud and im-
portant ruling powers.

Possibly this residual Old England, in addition to its
hunting and shooting and fishing and race meetings and so
forth, will carry on, will be almost forced to carry on, a
small but bickering warfare with the equally decadent dic-
tatorship of Catholic Ireland. In that manner, if the world
fails to reconstruct itself, the British Islands seem likely to
pass into the gathering darkness of the future. And if after
all, mankind as a whole does meet the challenge of facts
and the scientifically organized world state emerges, it will
be into enlightenment rather than darkness that these
island residues will dissolve. Macaulay's New Zealander
may arrive after all, and when, according to the prophecy,
he has visited the ruins of St. Paul's, he will be shown over
the Houses of Parliament ("curious and rewarding," as
Baedeker would put it) and do his puzzled best to imagine
what that strange narrow life was like, assisted by extracts
from Hansard, carefully preserved gramophone records of
important speeches, enlarged photographs of Mr. Gladstone,
movie glimpses of Mr. Neville Chamberlain in a state of
indignation, and the still surviving political novels of Mrs*
Humphry Ward.

18

SHINTOISM

AND NOW WE MAY consider another great mental system
ruling the minds and behavior of millions of men and
women, which has recently become a leading factor in world
destiny. This is Shinto, the official and compulsory religion
of the Japanese. Formally, other religions are still tolerated,
the Roman Catholic for example, but only on condition of
ceremonial and practical acquiescence in the main doctrine
of the creed* the recognition of the supreme divinity of the
Mikado. Mr. A. Morgan Young has recently published an
admirable summary of this culture, 1 and to this mainly I
am indebted for the material of this section. He in turn
gives his sources for whatever statements he makes, so that
the interested reader can easily verify and expand what is
given here.

The basis of Shinto is the Kojiki, a compilation of the
eighth century A.D. It is readable in its entirety only by
scholars, its language being far more remote from the
Japanese of today than eighth-century Anglo-Saxon would
be from current English. For various reasons only portions
of it have been modernized for general use. It begins with
a sort of storm of Gods neither made nor begotten but

*The Rjse of a Pagan State (1939).

167

168 THE FATE OF MAN

passing away. From this tumult emerge two highly sexual
figures, Izanagi and Izanami, who might be described in
Hollywood language as male and female "sex appeal."
They respond to each other with tremendous vigor, beget-
ting gods and islands and at last a Fire God who burns up
his mother Izanami. But by this time Izanagi is so set on
procreation that everything about him procreates; he throws
off his clothes and they become sea gods and land gods.
Finally he produces the Sun Goddess from his left eye, the
Moon God from his right eye and the headlong Susa-no-o
by blowing his nose. After which he seems to have retired
and the Sun Goddess and Susa-no-o occupy the stage.

After various remarkable adventures, no doubt of the
greatest spiritual significance and full of lessons for the true
believer, Susa-no-o meets a formidable damsel-devouring
dragon with eight heads and other alarming accessories,
makes the beast drunk with saki, and then kills it and cuts
it up. But one of the tails resists and breaks his sword, be-
cause in it there is hidden a better sword. This he extracts
and presents to his sister the Sun Goddess. It lies today,
thickly swathed in brocade, in the Family Shrine of the
Imperial House in Tokio. It is one of the Three Sacred
Treasures, the sword, the mirror and the jewel, which the
Sun Goddess transmitted to her heirs, the divine Emperors,
the living Gods of Japan.

To the Western mind accustomed to a widely different
system of myths and absurdities, this reads like monstrous
nonsense. But it is wiser not to say that in Japan. For ex-
ample, Mr. Morgan Young tells of what befell Dr. Inoue
Tetsujiro, a loyal but liberal-minded Shintoist who ventured
to doubt the authenticity of the Three Sacred Treasures. He

SHINTOISM 169

was denounced, his publisher was penalized, and he was
expelled from the Imperial University. Later on, while at-
tending the memorial service of a friend, he was set upon
by a gang of pious ruffians and beaten so that one eye was
destroyed. So much for a man who had attempted to
spiritualize and rationalize the Japanese faith. No one was
punished for the outrage upon him, which indeed is
only one sample among many of the spirit of renascent
Shintoism. It is quite good form to jump at a man who
uses a phrase or makes a gesture that seems lacking in
piety, and stab him. It is like those fierce old colonels in
England who assault people for not standing stiff to "God
Save the King."

Mr. Morgan Young makes some interesting suggestions
about the temperamental make-up of the Japanese. There
are important Mongolian strains in them, but he quotes
Putnam Weale ( The Truth about China and Japan) to sup-
port the thesis that the virile and dominating factor is
Malay. Their clothing beneath the kimono, the construction
of their houses, their lapses into moody murderousness are
all Malay. He insists upon the constant recurrence of head
hunting proclivities in their history. An unintelligent blood-
thirstiness is in their nature and tradition. They have an
inferiority complex with regard to Chinese and Western
civilization, which takes the form of an extravagantly ag-
gressive and assertive patriotism. I have followed my author-
ities in these generalizations. So far as official Japan is
concerned they seem to be thoroughly justified. They ac-
count for the fact that the head of the state is not so much
a leader as a mystically sacred symbol. The rulers of Japan
today are Nazis without a Hitler, Fascists without a Musso-

170 THE FATE OF MAN

lini. In the animal world an acephalous monster is some-
times, tougher to tame or destroy than one with a head.

From the deliberate isolation of Japan in the seventeenth
century when all the bickering Christian sects and in par-
ticular Xavier's Jesuits were expelled, and the entry of
foreigners and foreign travel prohibited absolutely until the
barrier was broken down by Commodore Perry in 1853,
there was an age of internecine feuds and exciting strife
of every sort. Vendettas were honored. The play of the
Forty-Seven Ronin, the most popular of Japanese plays, is
the heroic consummation of a vendetta, ending, after the
decapitation of the initiator of the feud, with the hara-kiri
of these forty-seven heroes. Japan was indeed a romantic
head-hunting preserve for the tough. And among the tough
everywhere loyalty to the gang is the supreme virtue, loyalty
to the gang and no mercy for the flats, the serfs, the common
cattle, outside the gang.

This is as true of the "wise guys" of Soho as it is of the
gangsters of San Francisco. Wherever there are young men
without proper employment the tough guy reappears. The
ultimate sin is "squealing"; the crowning heroism is silence
under the severest questioning; the master triumph is bril-
liant outrage. These gallant fellows in Japan would rape or
try their swords on peasants without compunction. In such
an atmosphere of swagger and loyalty lived the Daimios,
the feudal noblemen, and their henchmen the Samurai, until
the barriers were forced and the outer world broke in.

About the beginning of this century, the code of honor of
these bickering toughs, the noble warrior's way of life, was
idealized by a certain Dr. Nitobe, who wrote a book in
English called Bushido, "through which the word was for

SHINTOISM 171

many years far better known abroad than in Japan." He
incorporated all the finest pretensions of European chivalry.
His Samurai became the disciplined and fearless knights-
errant of the world. It took in a lot of people including
myself. In A Modern Utopia (1905), the world was taken
care of by an order of "Samurai." They assumed the role of
the Syphograuntes in the original Utopia, and in that they
anticipated the Communist Party commissars very strik-
ingly. Since 1900 we have had, inter alia, the Nazis, the
Fascists, the Phalangists. I was thinking with my generation.

In a lecture at the Sorbonne, in 1927, Democracy under
Revision, I returned to that idea of a disciplined liberal
"party." It arises naturally and inevitably out of the problem
of contemporary indefiniteness and the relative ineffective-
ness of intelligent people.

Perry's guns in 1853 aroused that ringed-in Japan of blood
feuds, hara-kiri and heroic decapitations to the existence of a
dangerous and aggressive outer world. The Japanese nobles
and their Samurai, given over altogether to pride, realized
their enormous practical inferiority. While they had been
enjoying life after their fashion, the outer world had stolen
a march on them. It was plain they had to modernize or
succumb like India, like Java. They had to learn the tricks
of these foreigners and learn them quickly, their machinery,
their weapons and generally how they did it. At first it
seemed that Christianity might be part of the coveted advan-
tages, and Japan thought seriously of making Christianity a
state religion. After much recalcitrance and rebellion, the
Shinto religion was revived and the country was unified
under the divinity of the Mikado.

Happily for the renascent Japanese, the British Empire

172 THE FATE OF MAN

suffers from practically incurable Russophobia. It is a con-
stitutional disease of the British ruling class. Every assistance
was given, material and mental, to the new forces of consoli-
dation, and in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) an East-
ern Asiatic power shattered the prestige of Europe on land
and sea alike. The Great War completed the job. After that
there were no more inquiries for an adaptation of Christi-
anity to the headship of a divine monarch a slight improve-
ment upon the Royal Headship of the Established Church
of England. Instead of Christianity, Shinto, a genuine home
product, came into its own.

And gradually, in association with the concentration of
power in the warrior class, it has consolidated itself and all
its absurdities as the sole religion of Japan, driving every
alternative faith and conception underground. For the better
part of the period of modernization since 1868, there has
been a steady influx of Western science, Western ideas,
Western radicalism into Japan. There were endless circles in
which "advanced" ideas were discussed freely. With an
astonishing swiftness that liberal Japan has disappeared. A
few murders, a clean-up of schools and colleges, and the
thing has been done. In the place of an intelligent people
we face a national monomaniac. This, from our present
point of view, is the most important aspect of the whole
business.

With an apparent singleness of purpose Japan has flung
itself into the attempted conquest of China and the most
reckless defiance of the chief naval powers of the world.
Here, as in the case of Nazi Germany, we are left asking,
"Where have all these reasonable mitigating people gone?"

SHINTOISM 173

"Where" and this is perhaps even more to the point "has
the rational element gone in those who have succumbed?"
So many who once talked liberalism, seem now to be whole-
hearted belligerent patriots.

Our essential theme in this book is the possibility of
changing the mental superstructure, the knowledge, idea
and habit system of mankind. In that we hope. The tre-
mendous rapidity of this last Japanese change-over is almost
incredible. Is it an irreversible process ? And if so, what will
it go on to next? Can it stand military defeat in China?

Many things seem possible in this catastrophic world of
today, but one of the higher probabilities of the present
world situation seems to be the failure of the Japanese attack
on her greater neighbor. China has astonished the world by
her tenacity, by the steady unification of her resistance, by
the emergence of a sort of pervading militant wisdom. The
Japanese have been stupendously energetic and stupendously
unoriginal. There has been much detailed cunning in their
operations but no essential wisdom. Desperadoes may mur-
der many people but they cannot divide and rule a hostile
country. What will happen in their heads as they realize
defeat with nothing but that childish Shintoism of theirs and
a tradition and cant of swaggering victory to sustain them?

Will it be wrath and social revenge? Many of these young
warriors who landed in China full of the toughest dreams
of heroism, victory, rape and authority, must now be in a
state of profound disillusionment. They will have a sense of
having been fooled. And in China unless I underestimate
the quality of Chinese and Communist propaganda they
will have met not only hardship but ideas. Sooner or later

174 THE FATE OF MAN

they must go back to a country where the endurance of the
peasantry and the people has been tried to the breaking
point.

Here are the same factors that existed in Russia in 1918,
the factors for a crude and violent social revolt. There is no
greater threat to a government than the return of a defeated
army. It will go ill in such an event with nobles and digni-
taries and priests, and it is quite among the possibilities of
the next few years that the last divine heir of the Sun God-
dess, shorn of all divinity, may share a parallel fate to that
of the last Little Father of Russia. Then, starting from an
even lower level than Russia in 1918, Japan will have to
reconstruct its social and economic life.

That may be one possibility, but history never repeats it-
self exactly, and revolutionary methods have changed very
greatly in the last twenty years. As one turns these matters
over in the mind, China looms not merely as a military but
as a mental reality of the first importance. What systems of
thought are operative there, what new systems of thought
are worming their way into the brains and many authori-
ties declare that they are rather above the human average
of that immense multitude? That is a question of more
importance in a forecast of the human outlook than any we
have hitherto discussed.

19

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK

THE PRIMARY IMPORTANCE OF China in the current interplay
of human forces is due not only to the fact that it is the
greatest mass of human beings with any sort of solidarity in
the world, but also to its manifest educability. It is not only
the largest but now it is probably the most plastic mass on
earth. Hitherto we have been weighing the influence and
destinies of set and blinkered cultures. But in China, tradi-
tion, cultural ideas, cultural methods are passing through a
phase of extreme dissolution, the mind of every intelligent
man is in a state of stimulated inquiry, and creative proposi-
tions, if they could be presented there, would surely have a
freedom and effectiveness such as no other part of the world
can display.

The immemorial basis of Chinese life is an industrious
peasantry, the primary source of wealth, on whom the land-
lord, the loan manager, the merchant, the tax collector have
lived in a state of inconsiderate refinement for a long period.
When the pressure of taxation or population becomes intol-
erable, the peasant becomes a bandit and the tension is
relieved. Bandits, says J. D. M. Pringle, are the Chinese
equivalent of the "unemployed," they levy an unsystematic

175

176 THE FATE OF MAN

dole. There have never been any fixed impediments to peas-
ants acquiring wealth or gentlefolk becoming poor, and so,
though there has always been much poverty, it has pro-
duced little class antagonism. No race difference exists be-
tween rich and poor; there is no superimposed nobility, no
chivalry with a strong military and hunting tradition. The
absence of great natural barriers led to a precocious expan-
sion of governments to a size that, almost from the outset,
made a class of literate administrators more necessary and
more important than soldiers.

The early need for writing in China arrested its develop-
ment beyond a quasi-pictorial and clumsily elaborate stage.
It was wanted too soon, before it could undergo simplifica-
tion into a syllabic or alphabetical system. This also contrib-
uted to the distinctive quality of China, to the Chinese if
we may coin a word para-democracy. The extreme diffi-
culty of the written language did indeed put popular educa-
tion out of the question and set a practical barrier between
literate and illiterate more effective as between man and
man than any Western class distinction, but at the same time
the very difficulty of scholarship obliged the mandarinate to
draw continually upon the clever sons of poorish homes.
These special conditions converged to give China its distinc-
tive social and political structure, a structure so difficult to
alter without complete destruction, that so far neither inva-
sion nor civil commotion has ever changed it in any essential
particular. When for example the Manchus conquered the
land, they merely founded a new dynasty and imposed the
now vanished pigtail rather by way of assimilation than
sublimation. So far. But now this refractory system has to
face something more powerful than Hun or Manchu or

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 177

Japanese; it has to face the change of scale, the change of
pace, that is shattering all other human societies.

The religious basis of the Chinese system is equally in
contrast with the God-centered beliefs of the West. Confu-
cianism, Taoism and Buddhism are all alike atheisms. There
is no one God standing in any personal relationship to man.
Confucianism is concerned entirely with the present life, it
discourages speculation and inculcates an excessive an-
cestor worship and respect for the state. It insists upon
public service and dignified self-control, not to please a
god but simply because that is the right way of living.
Taoism is in contrast a religion of abandonment to nature.
Politically it is anarchistic and around it cluster a great
accumulation of superstitions, spiritualisms, spookisms and
quasi-magic beliefs, incantations and astrology. Every folly
of the wonder-lovers of today has been anticipated by Tao-
ism. Buddhism teaches a transmigration of souls, souls that
may be entirely unaware that the good and evil they experi-
ence is due to their behavior in a previous embodiment.

Essentially these religions are behavior systems or misbe-
havior systems. Taoism is frankly anti-social, an imaginative
dissipation of the mind and will, and Buddhism is at least a
withdrawal from life. They are both what it is now fashion-
able to call escape systems. Their teaching finds its Western
equivalent in the "detachment" of Mr. Aldous Huxley. Both
foster religious orders and inflict a great multitude of monks
md nuns upon the community, and neither has anything of
importance to contribute to that intelligent reconditioning
3f the human mind which the present world situation de-
mands. Politically and educationally, the yellow (or gray)
:lad Buddhist monk with his begging bowl and his pimping

178 THE FATE OF MAN

possibilities is a social nuisance; the convent passes by insen-
sible degrees into a common brothel. 1 But Confucianism is
almost pedantically upright. It is the religion of a respectable
totalitarianism. Whatever political backbone is found among
the older generation of Chinese is in the tradition of Mencius,
the disciple and exponent of the master.

In the crucial period of the nineteenth century, China was
more self-satisfied with itself than Japan, and altogether
indisposed for fundamental change. It had no such sudden
shock as Commander Perry gave the Japanese, and it had no
consciously ruling caste to react effectively to a warning. It
knew the European better than the isolated Japanese, and it
had long since formed a poor opinion of the physical and
moral bustle and inelegance of Western living. It found the
Westerners ugly, truculent and requiring cautious manage-
ment; but although they had a variety of curious mechanical
advantages it deemed them despicable. Since it took on an
appearance of Westernization, China held out against mod-
ernization for half a century after the Japanese awakening. It
endured much. We cannot even sketch that story here from
the British Opium War onward. China's first reaction to
these aggressions was violent xenophobia. This culminated
in the Boxer outbreak (1900) and the punitive looting of
the Summer Palace at Peking by the allied European powers.
Still China would not pull itself together to fight Outlying
parts of its Empire fell away; ports and provinces were
seized; this did not affect the routine in the regions still
intact. Even under direct foreign rule much of the old life
still carried on. The ancient order seemed as incurably con-
tented with itself as the British.,

1 See Lin Yutang's My Country and my People (1936).

THE CHINESE OUTTOOK 179

Here is how that keen and witty writer Mr. Lin Yutang
characterized the Chinese way of living so recently as 1936.
". . . Face, Fate and Favor. These three sisters have always
ruled China, and are ruling China still. The only revolution
that is real and that is worth while is a revolution against
this female triad. The trouble is that these three women are
so human and so charming. They corrupt our priests, flatter
our rulers, protect the powerful, seduce the rich, hypnotize
the poor, bribe the ambitious and demoralize the revolution-
ary camp. They paralyze justice, render ineffective all paper
constitutions, scorn at democracy, contemn the law, make a
laughing stock of the people's rights, violate all traffic rules
and club regulations, and ride roughshod over the people's
home gardens. If they were tyrants, or if they were ugly, like
the Furies, their reign might not endure so long; but their
voices are soft, their ways are gentle, their feet tread noise-
lessly over the law courts, and their fingers move silently,
expertly, putting the machinery of justice out of order while
they caress the judge's cheeks. Yes, it is immeasurably com-
fortable to worship in the shrine of these pagan women."

So Mr. Lin Yutang in 1936, and in 1936 he still despaired
of any purposeful consolidation of his country for many
years to come. But in three years Japanese military savagery
has brought about a desperate unification beyond any fore-
sight.

Mr. Lin Yutang is by nature and disposition a Taoist of
the finer sort. He betrays at times a certain patriotic uneasi-
ness and impatience, but these are lapses from his usual
artistic self. For the most part he sustains a genteel detach-
ment from the revolution of 1911 which ended the Manchu
regime and the pigtail forever. He deplores the novel energy

180 THE FATE OF MAN

of Sun Yat Sen who "kept up his reading." He notes that
Chiang Kai Shek and his financial ally T. V. Soong work
"like horses." His heart turns back to "Merry old China"
in all the infinite strength of laziness. "The racial tradition/'
he concludes, "is so strong that its fundamental pattern of
life will always remain."

Nothing in the world is so perennial as that. The history
of China since the fall of the Manchus displays altogether
new forces at work. It is not the old, old story. However
reluctantly, she now faces towards Cosmopolis, The republic
was the creation of Chinese students who had been educated
abroad or by foreign missions, and mostly they had been
trained in America. Never before had there been a Chinese
revolution fostered in exile. But this last one, like the kin-
dred Russian one, was made by expatriates. Its revolutionary
technique followed Western patterns. The Chinese Republi-
cans borrowed ideas from the Communist Party, and the
organization of the Kuomintang provided a nexus for the
restless and intelligent throughout the Empire. Numerically
the Kuomintang, like the Communist Party in Russia in
1917, was a relatively small organization, but it was the only
thing that had continuity and a definite will of its own in
an otherwise planless chaos.

This is not the place to review the stormy confusion of
Chinese affairs since the establishment of the Republic; 1
the experimental policies of Sun Yat Sen and the signifi-
cance of his will, the treason of Yuan Shih Kai and his
transitory usurpation of the Imperial throne, the clumsy
attempts of the Russian Borodin to introduce an uncon-

1 A compact summary is to be found in China Struggles for Unity, by
J. D. M. Pringle and Marthe Rajchman.

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 181

genial class war and to revive xenophobia in the form of
anti-British Imperialism as a fundamental motive. He failed,
and returned to obscurity in Russia, but the Party, under
Chou En-lai, organized a successful peasant communist state
in Kiangsi I say peasant communist because there was no
attempt at collective farming and a very efficient Red Army.
Driven out of Kiangsi, this Red Army retreated fighting for
six thousand miles in one of the greatest retreats in history,
and stood at last with its back to Soviet Russia in Shensi and
the northwest. The intricate struggles between the Nanking
government, the private armies of various warlords and the
Red Army, need not concern us, nor the romantic and mys-
terious cessation of the war against the "Reds." The fact
became apparent to the Japanese that slowly and steadily
China was being unified under one government. There was
no time to lose. Like a fiery new birth came the tragic con-
solidation of the Chinese national spirit in the face of intol-
erable Japanese outrages. Today under the military and
administrative ability of the energetic Chiang Kai Shek we
have a China more united and purposeful than it has ever
been before, and apart from its resolve for complete national
emancipation, more incalculable than any other human
aggregation.

So faded and nerveless are the old conceptions of life, so
Taoist, that the entire collective mentality of China is now
in effect a tabula rasa upon which it is possible to write
almost any constructive idea* And what is written will be
evidently determined very largely by movements in the gen-
eral world mind outside the boundaries of China. The
native contribution is in the nature not of initiatives but
adaptive qualifications. Lin Yutang, in one of those invol-

182 THE FATE OF MAN

untary lapses of his from "detachment" into patriotic distress
and irritation, notes that a dozen years after the death of
Sun Yat Sen, who is by universal consent the father of the
new China, no Chinese writer has yet displayed the energy
and intellectual power .needed to write a full and competent
account of tKe Founder's life and teaching. It would cer-
tainly be an immense commercial success; it would be of the
greatest political importance; and in that land of lassitude,
evasion and passive resistance to change, nobody produces it.

It would seem as though a Chinese mind must needs go
abroad and lead a foreign life, before it can even begin to
see China. And when it sees China it still depends upon a
push from the exterior, for action.

The most vital new thing so far that has been written
upon this blank Chinese intelligence is a sort of commu-
nism. In a later section we must examine communism as a
world force, but here it is to be observed that just as Chinese
democracy is not the same thing as Western democracy but
a para-democracy, so Chinese communism is not by any
means the Russian article, but a para-communism. It has
rejected Borodin's crude ideas of liquidating the "rich," the
class war and collectivized farming. It is essentially a peasant
communism, a revolt against rent, taxes, debt, forestalling,
speculative marketing and all the handicaps that enslave the
little man. Its leaders are often the fanatical enthusiastic sons
of wealthy men, sons who have read Marx and Lenin, but
the responding rank and file are the commonalty. It educates
earnestly and well, it carries on a propaganda by means of
plays, concerts, meetings. It promotes a modernized script.
It is making its people into newspaper readers. It is in fact
producing a new sort of Chinese common man, with a

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 183

genuine workers' and soldiers' solidarity. Everywhere the
peasants, even those who do not belong to the Party for-
mally, believe in it. Its "Red" Army is as sturdy as any China
has ever seen, with partisan tactics peculiarly adapted to the
country.

A second set of ideas which is being scrawled across the
Chinese tabula rasa is the New Life movement. This was
deliberately created by Chiang Kai Shek as a rival and sub-
stitute for communism. Chiang Kai Shek is at present the
central figure on the Chinese stage; he has been fairly
explicit about his ideas and motives, and there is consid-
erable artlessness in what he says. He has an interestingly
responsive and representative mind. He speaks with pro-
found reverence of the influence of his mother in forming
his character. She remained an earnest Buddhist to the end.
She watched over his tender years. She trained him for an
energetic life of public service and self-subordination. He
took his early political leadership from Sun Yat Sen and the
Kuomintang. Sun Yat Sen was a Methodist with a passion-
ate desire to free his country from 'Western Imperialism."
This brought him at last into close association with the anti-
Imperialist Borodin. It was Borodin's aggressiveness and the
killing of rich people and foreigners that estranged Chiang
Kai Shek from Sun Yat Sen.

Chiang Kai Shek became for a period militantly anti-
Communist. His marriage with Miss Mayling Soong, a
member of one of the richest families in China, may have
had its subconscious influence upon him. His close associa-
tion with the Soong family, and particularly with T. V.
Soong, has relieved him of many temptations that have over-
come other leaders less financially secure. Madame Chiang

184 THE FATE OF MAN

Kai Shek is a woman of manifest beauty and force of char-
acter, and for some time she seems to have done the religious
thinking for her husband. He was baptized as a Christian
in 1930. Their type of Christianity is a simple evangelical
bibliolatry, inclining to fundamentalism rather than to
either modernism or Catholicism; it is fundamentalism with
a dash of Buchmanism. Every day the Generalissimo reads
his Bible and prays for guidance. He prays regularly and
abundantly and says grace before he eats. In moments of
doubt the sacred book is opened and consulted for an omen.

The New Life Movement is not however professedly
Christian, though it speaks in the name of the Christian Sun
Yat Sen. It is essentially a patriotic behavior system, attack-
ing opium, polygamy and "immorality" generally, tobacco,
alcohol, tea, coffee, meat. It is in violent reaction from the
enervation of Taoist self-indulgence. It expresses the realiza-
tion of the middle and upper classes that things are getting
serious for them. Its ambition is to be stern and powerful,
to promote a "clean" and strenuous life.

Chiang Kai Shek has been immensely impressed by Fas-
cist and Nazi propaganda, he speaks in profound admira-
tion of "the strength of present-day Italy and Germany," he
swallows, as I did, the legend of Bushido ( 18) and
like Mr. Teeling ( 13) he believes that the Nazi disci-
plines make for brotherhood, obedience and particularly
for that "cleaner" life of sexual and imaginative suppression
which leaves the mind free for militant authority. (Both he
and Mr. Teeling would be all the wiser and better for a
cleansing month in the latrines at Dachau.) But since the
aim of the New Life is power even more than purity, it is
flatly opposed to any infringement of the rights of private

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 185

property. It was indeed primarily organized for that end,
as a counterblast to communism, and by its emphatic denun-
ciation of Communists and "traitors" and its rigid insistence
upon the payments of debts, it makes a special appeal to
foreign finance. Its Methodist virtues are a means to an end.
The end is self-righteous power. No doubt the New Life
stimulates the open campaign against opium, vice and in-
sanitary living, and no doubt it releases a genuine streak of
solemn masochism in the composition of the Generalissimo,
but how far the natural Chinaman will give himself whole-
heartedly to the New Life remains to be shown. The failure
of Prohibition in America and the social demoralization
caused by it, seem to have had no lesson for Chiang Kai
Shek.

For my own part I believe in the complete honesty of
Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek, but it is plain that they
have not the faintest conception of the demands that fate is
making upon mankind. They sound indeed in all their pub-
lished utterances, terribly limited and self-satisfied, and how-
ever much we may be pleased to see China led to victory
against the Japanese, that is no reason why we should exag-
gerate the intelligence and vision of these two leaders, be-
cause they are instrumental in that hoped-for deb&cle.

Such are the chief forces that are operating to produce the
China of tomorrow Chinese communism, or, to define it
more clearly, para-communism, and this New Life which is
plainly para-fascism. Neither is yet what one can call a com-
manding force. They combine against the common enemy,
but they have no real convergence. The end of the war with
Japan will release rather than conciliate their oppositions.
China liberated will become more and more definitely a

186 THE FATE OF MAN

battleground of world ideologies. She will waver between
Soviet Russia and fascism, between Christianity o the J. D.
Rockefeller type on the one hand and a tentative socialism
after the fashion of the New Deal, rather to the left of the
New Deal, on the other. One may well doubt if she has any
initiative of her own to give the world.

In most Chinamen there struggle a Confucian, a Taoist
and a Bandit. To judge by the present state of things that
completes the inventory. And yet there is an accumulation
of artistic work, a record of invention and ingenuity to the
credit of China, witnessing to something not covered by any
of these three factors, to some constructive element that ex-
isting circumstances have failed to release, some higher intel-
lectual development which may still be waiting there for
the proper evocation.

This raises what is from our present point of view a very
important issue. Is there a real scientific modernism, a con-
structive originality, latent in that very respectable Chinese
brain? Has it unexploited mental reserves? That is a ques-
tion that might be extended far beyond the Chinese horizon.
At present China is almost completely unaware of the eco-
logical view of life. She has never heard about it. Science
subsidizes no missions; it has failed even to organize its
friends in defense of its own freedoms. Almost all this "new
education" in China, that has been replacing the classics
since the revolution, has been ear-marked for the service of
some narrow dogmatism or other. Her brightest intelli-
gences have had but a poor chance of any broader vision.
So in China even more than in our Western world, political
and social life is still a disastrous clashing-together of blink-
ered minds. What she thinks new is already old. She is no

THE CHINESE OUTLOOK 187

more prepared to attack the gigantic problems of adjustment
that close in upon her, in common with the rest of the
world, than she was thirty years ago.

In these thirty years she has done great things. The great-
est has been to discover and assert her national independence
and solidarity. And still she has everything to do. It is either
a prelude to renascence or failure, to have installed a Meth-
odist-Generalissimo in the place of the Son of Heaven, got
rid of pigtails, given ijp smoking, drinking, swearing, neck-
ing and suchlike scandalous behavior, and driven the opium
traffic underground. Things will not stay at that.

So China, because of its nascent state, because at present
there is no deep-rooted system of ideas imposed upon her
character and habits, presents, in the barest form, the uni-
versal human problem. What prospect is there of an effective
drive towards a scientific understanding of history and pres-
ent realities, and of a reconstruction upon the lines of that
knowledge?

Here again we must repeat the refrain of this book.

There exist already scattered about the world, all the knowl-
edge and imaginative material required to turn not merely
these seething four hundred million people but the whole
world into one incessantly progressive and happily inter-
ested world community. All that is needed is to assemble
that scattered knowledge and these constructive ideas in an
effective form. The world cannot go on, a hydra-headed con-
fusion of sovereignties; it has to concentrate its direction in
a World Brain. The organization of a few thousand workers
and the expenditure of a few score million pounds could
.bring that indispensable organization into being. And I
doubt if it will ever be done.

188 THE FATE OF MAN

It would give this rudderless world, as it drifts towards
the rocks, a chart-room, a compass, a bridge and steering-
gear

It would change the face of human politics from the aim-
less stare of dementia to understanding purpose. . . .

To vary the image once more, in China, the greatest, most
central and representative human accumulation in the world,
the fields are manifestly "white unto harvest" for a compre-
hensive renewal of civilization, the whole land aches for it,
and there are no reapers; there are only spreading fires,
trampling beasts in the corn, and a few weaklings gathering
a handful of ears. 1

a A very convincing and readable picture of China in dissolution is to be
found in Miss Nora Wain's The House of Exile, and there are also the
various effective and well-informed novels of Mrs. Pearl Buck, The Patriot
for example, and The Good Earth. Edgar Mowrer's Mowrer in China is a
convenient little book, compact, full, and understanding.

20

SUBJECT PEOPLES

ONLY VERY BRIEFLY AND, as it were, in parenthesis, is it pos-
sible to glance at the future of the black peoples massed in
Africa and their kindred in America.

The argument of this book is framed on such a scale that
the lives and deaths of scores of millions appear as details of
microscopic size in relation to the general ant-hill Moreover,
it has a perspective of its own. It looks from the directive
centers of human thought, outwardly. Estimates of the popu-
lation of tropical and southern Africa vary round and about
one hundred and fifty million. Probably it is subject to con-
siderable fluctuations. These millions live, hope, desire and
suffer. But this great population is so remote from the cen-
tral intellectual processes of mankind, it contributes so little
to these processes, that it counts for far less than the sixteen
million Jews, from whom, in spite of great handicaps, come
men of science, original thinkers, mental workers of all sorts
by the thousand. Later, but many decades later, the Negro
mind may make a steadily increasing contribution to the
World Brain. But at present it is held off by such a tangle
of difficulties, obstructions and mind-traps as only the rarest
and luckiest of natural geniuses may hope to overcome.

In Lord Hailey's An African Survey (1938) and in Julian

.189

190 THE FATE OF MAN

Huxley's Africa View (1931), the reader may learn some-
thing of that tangle. There, for example, he will find a dis-
cussion of the language problem. Is the young Negro of
genius to begin his learning in some narrow dialect or in
such a wider medium as Swahili, which still provides only
a very limited literature for his study, or shall he be given as
soon as possible the key to contemporary knowledge and
thought, in English or some other European tongue? And
where are the teachers and schools to be found for that?
Even if he gets English, will it be good, fresh English? Will
he encounter anything better than the faded methods, half
a century stale, of a lower type of English school? Will it let
him get to anything better than Bible Christianity, the his-
tory of England and a nice Christmas story or so about holly
and robins ? Where the Negro is apt to become a little ridicu-
lous is in his exaggerated response to white religious teach-
ing. He takes it in good faith and brings out its absurditiesj
That is not his fault. Green Pastures and Father Divine are(
products of white revivalist teaching; they are not natiW
African creations. They smell of the camp meeting and not
of the Heart of Darkness. We have no right to call a Negr<&
a fool when it is our people who have made a fool of hinty
Julian Huxley insists very definitely on the desirability 01
biology and descriptive geography as the backbone of native
African education and on the natural interest and aptitude
of the African for such studies. There he would be on his,
own ground. But because the African is ready for the right
education, it does not follow that the governments in author-
ity over him are. These poor-white schoolmasters can teach
him nothing of the sort, because they know none of it
themselves.

SUBJECT PEOPLES 191

There is a great conflict of testimony about the abilities
of black Africa. His bitterest detractors are unable to deny
the Negro an enviable sense of rhythm, natural good-humor
and an instinct for civility, a sense of fun, brilliant mimicry,
rich artistic aptitudes. And more than that. In the United
States, in spite of the severest handicaps, black men have
been able to struggle up to do distinguished scientific and
literary work, and in South Africa it has been found neces-
sary to protect skilled white labor from the competition of
able colored people by discriminating against the apprentic-
ing of natives to skilled trades and restricting "certificates of
competency" in various mechanical employments to whites.
Obviously you cannot put up barriers to protect yourself
from the colored man and at the same time declare that he
is incurably your inferior.

The outlook for tropical and sub-tropical Negro life in
the coming years is dark and indefinite. An adequate educa-
tion, that would make a large proportion of that population
conscious world-citizens, seems improbable, and the utiliza-
tion of that great reservoir of ignorant animal vitality as a
source of conscript soldiers or conscript laborers is highly
probable. It is one of the good marks in the checkered record
of British Imperialism that in Nigeria it has stood out
against the development of the plantation system and pro-
tected the autonomy of the native cultivator with the most
satisfactory consequences to everyone concerned. But against
that one has to set the ideas of white-man-mastery associated
with Cecil Rhodes and sustained today by General Smuts,
which look to an entire and permanent economic, social and
political discrimination between the lordly white and his
natural serf, the native African, Aj&d this in the face of the

192 THE FATE OF MAN

Zulu and Basuto, the most intelligent and successful of
native African peoples. The ethnological fantasies of Nazi
Germany find a substantial echo in the resolve of the two
and a half million Afrikanders to sustain, from the Cape to
Kenya, an axis of white masters (preferably of Dutch origin
and speaking Afrikaans) with a special philosophy of great
totalitarian possibility called holism, lording it over a subju-
gated but much more prolific, black population.

That racial antagonism makes the outlook of South Africa
quite different from that of most of the other pseudo-British
"democracies/' Obviously it is not a democracy at all, and
plainly it is heading towards a regime of race terrorism on
lines parallel and sympathetic with the Nazi ideal. The
Afrikander will do his best to be a terrific fellow to the last,
and he will see to it that the black insurrection gathering
under his heel, is sufficiently under-educated and sufficiently
embittered to behave savagely when its day of opportunity
comes. He will always be rather afraid, and his fears will
brutalize his treatment of his helots until he is intolerable.
Slowly but surely a racial self-consciousness, a collective re-
sentment, is being forced upon the Negro, not only in South
Africa but throughout the world, and South Africa seems
the inevitable theater for its release.

But the fate of South Africa need not concern us now,
beyond the plain probability that whether the Dominion
follows the fate of Haiti or San Domingo or whether the
sjambok holds its own, it is very unlikely to contribute any-
thing of primary value to the reconstruction of human
society upon a planetary scale.

And so, too, we cannot consider here the possible survival
or disappearance of that little group of human beings, the

SUBJECT PEOPLES 193

Australian blackfellows, with their undeniable artistry, their
aptitude for mechanical work, and so subtle a sense of form
that they invented the boomerang ages before the white man
made his first experiments with the much simpler propeller.
Nor can we bring in that great festoon of interesting and
distinctive human societies which hangs across the sub-
tropical seas from Singapore in the west throughout the
Dutch East Indies and New Guinea to Guam in the east.
Sixty million brown and yellow peoples they are, illiterate,
unawakened, but for the most part excessively polite and
subservient.

The problem of all these colored peoples is a vast one, but
vast as it is, it is still secondary to greater decisions. If the
mind of the world can be pulled together so as to give our
species a collective rational guidance, this problem will fall
into proportion and be solved deliberately and sanely. The
colored man will understand and be understood, he will get
his fair chance, so that he will come at last to look the white
man in the eye, feeling as equal to him as a musician does
to an engineer, with as complete an acceptance of difference
and as complete a mutual respect. But if we cannot achieve
that intellectual readjustment, then the prospect is fear and
more fear, cruelty and more cruelty, trampling suppressions,
wild insurrections, massacres and reprisals, atrocities and
counter-atrocities, and the ultimate waste of every good pos-
sibility in these still largely unbroached reservoirs of human
variety.

It is not in their own lands that the destiny of all these
people will be determined. It is not on the "illimitable veldt"
or in the tropical forest, not in mountain fastnesses or on
stormy seas that their hope is to be found. Natural aptitud<

194 THE FATE OF MAN

is not enough. The inherent intellectual quality of a can-
nibal savage or a coolie laborer, a starving share-cropper or
an Abyssinian slave, may be as high or higher than that of a
distinguished professor or a brilliant colonial administrator,
but the latter is not simply his inherent self; he is that plus
an education. The one is like a photographic plate that has
been casually exposed to the light, it is an accidental blur; it
means little or nothing. The other is a plate that has been
exposed in a carefully focused camera. It means. It is
related. The education and habits of behavior it imposes are
the greater part of the civilized man. The better and fuller
his education, the better the knowledge organization of his
life, the higher he stands over the bare human being, and the
more he and his kind control him and are responsible for
human destiny. The only salvation of these threatened mil-
lions lies through the patient, incessant ordering of the col-
lective human mind. A man working in a study at Harvard
or a student sitting, as Marx and Lenin sat in their time,
in the Reading Room of the British Museum, may be link-
ing ideas and devising phrases that will open the way of
escape for all these menaced and benighted peoples to equal
participation in a reconstructed world.

And here is the place to apply the same line of reasoning
to that great miscellany of peoples and cultures which is
India. They seem destined to play only a secondary and
supporting role in any unification of human affairs that is
achieved, not by reason of any inherent inferiority, but be* v
cause they are debarred by their complicated mental barriers
and divisions from any collective understanding of modern
constructive ideas. These hundreds of millions also I see as
people struggling in a net. At present none of their cultural

SUBJECT PEOPLES 195

movements displays an original line of its own that amounts
even to a slight contribution to world reorganization. Vague
aspirations to an obviously fictitious nationalism of an imita-
tive parliamentary kind, sustained by non-co-operation, pref-
erential trading and the fasts of Mr. Gandhi, point to any-
thing but the coming city of mankind. Starving on the
doorsteps of the ruler in the Gandhi fashion is a curiously
unfair appeal to the ruler's decency. Directly it is used
against anyone tough enough to say "Starve then, and be
damned to you," it ^becomes ineffective.

There would be much to be said for an Indian nationalism
based upon the idea of human brotherhood and the com-
mon future of mankind. If all these peoples can be fused,
'the whole world can be fused. But speaking generally Indian
nationalism is no sort of synthesis; it is based on a common,
understandable resentment at the British Imperial Govern-
ment and on very little else. You cannot build a nation on a
vanishing grievance. The old Raj is not going to last forever,
and when it fades out the Hindu will still be wearing his
caste marks and the Moslem slaughtering cattle at him in a
derisive spirit.

A culture which said "We are ignorant and divided and
condemned to a collective sterility by our ignorance, and
we mean to reorganize our mental energy and stock our
minds to play our proper part in human unity/' would be a
culture to respect. But even the Brahmo Sumaj, most liberal
of Indian cultures, does not say that. It is universalist reli-
giously, but it is not acutely educational. In India there are
numerous rich men, great industrialists, wealthy maharajas
and the like, but it has still to dawn upon any of them that
a great, growing, liberating mass of knowledge exists in the

196 THE FATE OF MAN

world beyond the present reach of any Indian, and that there
must be scores and hundreds of thousands of fine brains,
which need only educational emancipation and opportunity,
laboratories, colleges, publication facilities, discussion with
the rest of the world, to add a continually increasing Indian
contribution to the ever-learning, ever-growing World Brain.
In India now there must be a score of potential unrealized
Royal Societies, so to speak, running about in loin cloths
and significant turbans and Gandhi caps and what not,
running about at that lowly partisan level, and so running
to waste.

The British ruling class has been unable to impose modern
ideas upon India for the simple reason that it does not pos-
sess them itself. The indebtedness is the other way round.
The British picked up the idea of caste from the Brahmins
and gave very little in return. And other things they picked
up. I do not know if anyone has ever made an estimate of
the number of elderly gentlemen who return to Great
Britain with gurus in tow, mysterious dodges for breathing
down their spinal canals, Yoga and all that. They seem to
be quite numerous. Man for man when it comes down to
that sort of thing the Hindu is master.

What modernization may come into Indian thought and
life is much more likely to arrive tediously $pd belatedly
from the north as an adapted communist propaganda, a
propaganda modified perhaps by contact with whatever
modern Western science may have come in by, through and
in spite of British influence from the south.

21

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA

IT is DIFFICULT TO say whether on the whole dogmatic com-
munism is to be regarded as a disaster that has happened to
the growing discovery of the rational world state or an
unavoidable phase in that discovery. In the earlier half of
the nineteenth century and especially in the years of recov-
ery from that embolism called Napoleon, there was a great
bandying about of creative and pseudo-creative ideas, hu-
manisms, varieties of socialisms, hand-specimen Socialist
experiments, New Lanarks, Oneidas, Brook Farms. In all
of them there was a subconscious feeling that something was
still wanting, the ideas were incomplete. Such a phase of the
collective mind is very distressful to impatient intelligences.
They feel that nothing is being achieved; they want to "fix
something and get on with it." At this pace, they feel, we

shall get nowhere.

i '

So they get into the ditch.

Apt to the demands of such eager spirits came Marx. He
was a man of vast intellectual ambitions, emulous of Darwin
and Adam Smith. He seized upon that economic aspect of
life which the political revolution had ignored, and he hung
on to that. The "capitalist system," which was his misnomer
for privately owned capitalism, had to be abolished and then

197

198 THE FATE OF MAN

social justice would ensue. He proclaimed the materialistic
conception of history and the class war as the only prac-
ticable way to social justice.

Neither Adam Smith nor Darwin, with whom he was
obviously disposed to put himself in competition, betrayed
any sense of finality in his thought nor any ambition for
leadership. They contributed and passed on, according to the
new scientific morality. But Marx was of a more primitive
and more immediately practical type of intelligence. He was
for conclusive formulation, for dogma and an energetic
revolutionary effort according to that dogma. He evoked a
vigorous, rigid-spirited movement for the destruction of
"capitalism" by an insurrectionary class war. He had no
ideas, and he was probably incapable of producing ideas,
about the peace that should succeed victory in the class war.
It never entered his head that a powerful new organization
of knowledge and will would be required to direct an eman-
cipated world system. He was, to be plain about it, too lazy-
minded. He invented a phantom, more insubstantial than
the Holy Ghost, the proletariat. The ever-blessed proletariat
would see to it all.

The curious may read about that proletariat, and what is
and what is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and when
the Party is the dictatorship and when it is not, and how the
peasant comes in, in Joseph Stalin's Leninism. It is the
Athanasian Creed of socialism.

But these complications arose later, and at first the prole-
tariat sans phrase sufficed. That the proletariat would solve
everything with the hammer of Thor and the sickle of
Rhea Cybele was an all too attractive doctrine for eager
minds, and the communist movement, in perfect unison,

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 199

contemned and despised the intricate and difficult business
of foresight as "utopianism," and scientific criticism as a
sinful want of faith. And so at last when czarism and pri-
vate ownership of land and capital did collapse in Russia,
and that great country was thrown into the hands of the
communist leaders, they were totally unprepared with any
conceptions of a better organization of affairs.

The released Russia of October 1917 found itself wildly
experimental. It had to reorganize a great community fallen
into chaos, and it had only scraps of suggestion of how to
set about it. Upon Lenin fell the immense task of rationaliz-
ing Marxism and getting it to work.

In 6 the question "What is democracy?" is asked
and answered, and it is shown that the life of a human
being can be full and free only if it is politically, economi-
cally and mentally liberated; that is to say when it is living
in a state of political equality, socialism and universal ade-
quate education. Without that much realization, liberty,
equality and fraternity are mere words. Marx and his Com-
munist Party never fully grasped the third, the educational
condition. How to direct? how to keep direction?: these
were questions they never answered. They filled in the gap
in their doctrines with that sprawling, muscular divinity
with the 'hammer and sickle, who is in truth hardly more
real than those symbolic Hindu gods with countless arms
and extra parts who puzzle the realistic Western mind.
Believe in Him, said they.

In practice the Russian Communists were less elusive than
their creed. If they fudged a pseudo-God, in order to get on
with their revolution, they were still acutely responsive to
modern democratic ideas. They set themselves with consid-

200 THE FATE OF MAN

erable energy and success to liquidate the illiteracy of the
common people, but unfortunately they did not go on with
the harder task of educating themselves. They did not real-
ize the need for that Instead they suppressed disturbing
discussion. They are today blinkered and boxed-in to an
ideology as definitely restricted, within its wider limits, as
that of the orthodox Jews, the British oligarchy, the Roman
Catholic hierarchy or the Chinese patriots we have discussed
in preceding sections.

The Russian spectacle for the last twenty years has played
an immense part in the thought and imagination of the
young everywhere. When everything that can be said has
been said against it, it still seems to be ahead of the rest of
the world in its progress towards the practical realization
of the complete democratic idea. Whether it will go on and
keep that lead is quite another matter, but the improvement
not merely in the material circumstances but in the spirit of
the common people is beyond dispute. They were servile and
now they are proud. They have a wholesome conceit that
the world looks to them. That has been done at a price, yet
nowhere else has anything been done to compare with it.
America also has advanced in its ideas, as we shall note in
the next section, but it started far ahead, five Centuries ahead,
of Russia.

But Russia may have achieved this much progress less by
virtue of the Communist Party than in spite of it. The Com-
munist Party did no doubt bring the spirit of revolutionary
progress to Russia, but it was not in itself the spirit of revo-
lutionary progress. It might well have been belter prepared
for the task, and it might have produced men of a finer
caliber and greater magnanimity. The darkest shadow on

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 201

the Russian outlook today is its failure to produce a constel-
lation of first-rate men able to evoke its general intelligence
and speak for it to the world. Like most countries today,
Russia does not seem to be putting her best men foremost
She does not know how to find them and use them. She goes
on being clumsy. Russia is faltering and losing its imagina-
tive appeal. Her inability to deal with her internal difficulties
without a series of trials and executions, so presented as to be
extraordinarily repugnant to the Western mind, and the
open and undignified bickering of Trotsky and Stalin, have
done much to rob her of her once almost magical fascination
for the undergraduate intelligence. That intelligence is now
shocked and puzzled. It may easily stampede in some new
direction, and the real greatness of the new Russia may be
forgotten altogether in its superficial littleness.

But how intolerable these ardent young Communists of
the last fifteen years have been! What a rawness they have
imparted to social and political discussion, all the world
over! How unrighteously is the reasonable man tempted to
rejoice at this present deflation of noisy, juvenile leftism! It
is rare for the normal human being to attain to an adult
mental independence before thirty, and it is rare for it to
refrain from the vehement expression of opinions after
eighteen. Satan finds some mischief still for idle youth to do.
Its natural instinct is to rebel against its parents and the
parental generation, which has brought it into the world for
no end it finds explicable, and, since it is still much too timid
intellectually to act alone, its disposition is to go over, lock,
stock and barrel, to the organization in flattest repudiation
of the flaccid home atmosphere. The good pagan's daughter
goes Catholic and the Catholic's son goes Communist. And

202 THE FATE OF MAN

there they stick. They have made their little act of assertion,
but they must still have the comforting feeling of something
not themselves, something built up authoritatively, to which
they can cling. The boy who runs away from home likes to
get on to a ship and give himself up to that. If not, he
usually comes home again.

It is one of the primary difficulties of this creature Homo
sapiens that it grows up, so far as bodily and willful energy
goes, twenty years before its mind has ripened enough for it
to think and act alone. The young want to do vigorous and
effective things by eighteen, while their mental unripeness
obliges them still to seek authority for the things they want
to do. They cannot wait. They will respond to nearly any-
thing that lets their energy loose, as a kitten will pursue a
cork on a string. There we have the common clue to the
storming young Nazi, the Irish patriot, the Spanish Anarch-
ist Syndicalist, the bomb-throwing Zionist, the Shinto mili-
tarist, the gangster, the Ku Klux Klansman. They are all
forms imposed upon and accepted by that youthful surplus
which is the imperative problem of our species, which will
overstrain and wreck every social system until its insurgent
need to be used is anticipated and satisfied. It has been made
clear how this mental exuberance has been allayed in the
past by wars and migrations, and why it is that these natural
reliefs are no longer sufficient for the magnified destructive
forces of the new time,

In the last three years in Britain there have been three
magnetic movements with an unaccountable attraction for
unemployed vitality. Fascism, a fourth possibility, was hap-
pily made repellently ridiculous for our sons in the person
of Sir Oswald Mosley, but the impressionable young men

COMMUNISM AND/RUSSIA 203

f

who did not succumb to the God-guided woosh of Buch-
manism or the high-toned Anglo-Catholicism of T. S. Eliot,
fell very readily to the worship of the heroic Hammer-and-
Sickle-God. They joined the Party, surrendered themselves
to tasks and disciplines and strategies. They felt they had the
revolution and all Russia behind them. How they maddened
their serious elders, those undergraduates holding on with-
out thought or question to the Party and being as rude as
they knew how to critical liberalism, for all the world like
naughty children holding on to nurse's apron strings and
putting out their tongues at the grown-up passers-by!

That particular adhesion seems to be drawing to an end
after the political and intellectual waste of a generation of
silly, gallant young lives. They exaggerated the perfection
and finality of Soviet Russia. Some have died for that faith.
Now the drift is all against the present regime, and instead
of searching criticism we are likely to have partisan con-
demnation. Yet there is a strong case for the existing regime
in Russia.

There, there has been and there is still a sustained, wide-
spread and honest effort to build up a new social and eco-
nomic order. It is only necessary to contrast the Russian
drive with the relative ineffectiveness of the Kuomintang.
In Russia "revolution" still means, for millions of minds, a
new human beginning. In no other community is that idea
of a new beginning so manifestly at work. It had had to
work against bad social traditions and a widespread defen-
sive subtlety and disingenuousness, with a people to whom
punctuality and precision were strange ideas. Chekhov lived
and died before the war, but his stories are saturated with
the distress felt by a man with a modern scientific training,

204 THE FATE OF MAN

at the all too human indiscipline of the land he loved. The
Bolsheviks, planless themselves, as we have seen, had to take
over that world, shattered, impoverished, chaotic, invaded
from every direction, and make a working system of it,
some sort of new order, however rough and clumsy, or
perish. And they have made a new order, rough and clumsy
still perhaps in many aspects, but holding together, really
holding together, and not nearly so rough and clumsy as it
might have been.

I have visited Russia thrice, in 1914, in 1920 and in 1934,
I have had long talks with Lenin and Stalin, I have some
well-informed and variously orientated Russian friends, and
I have read a library full of books about Russia, pro and con,
Like most of the world, I was amazed at those strange pub-
lic trials and the killing-off of, among others, a majority of
the original revolutionaries. And I think that of all my
witnesses, I have learnt most from an American mining
engineer, Mr. J. D. Littlepage, who wrote a book called
In Search of Soviet Gold.

There never was a writer so free from the taint of political
prepossessions. He is no sort of ist or crat at all. But he likes
mining to be done properly and shipshape, no fudging, no
shirking, no waste, no stealing, no trickery. You have to
come down heavily on that sort of thing. He thinks vigor-
ously within his blinkers (excellent blinkers) of honesty and
high efficiency. And he tells the story of how he was en-
gaged to revive and reorganize the Siberian mines, copper
and other minerals as well as gold. He tells pretty convinc-
ingly and it is illuminating how Stalin was moved to
start this revival, and of all the difficulties and complications
of the task. At the Littlepage touch the vast, sinister phan-

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 205

toms of Trotskyite conspiracies and organized capitalist
sabotage vanish from the scene, the confessions of the ac-
cused join the confessions of sorcerers during the witch
mania, and we see the human reality of incompetent men
trying to cover up the mess they are making of things, of
wrongfully-appointed men holding on to their jobs by trick
and subterfuge, of hates and jealousies, of elaborate misrep-
resentations to save the face of groups involved in a common
failure, of the manufacture of countervailing evidence, coun-
ter-accusations, resort to influence in high quarters. These are
the ways of imperfect, inadequately watched men every-
where. The allied generals on the western front during the
great war behaved similarly, though unhappily there was
nobody to shoot them. And at the last come the confessions,
to put a consistent face on the untellable tale of fudging and
muddle-headness. Better persuade yourself you are a con-
sistent conspirator than a self-protective fumbler, a snake
rather than a worm,

Littlepage makes you understand not only the slackness
of the country and the disappointing output, but also the
perplexity at the head of things, the inability to get sound
information and to discriminate between merit and specious-
ness. The head does not know whom to believe, grows suspi-
cious and incalculable. The impulse of most of us when we
cannot hit accurately is to hit hard. The shootings become
understandable; take on the quality of necessity. After Little-
page you can re-read the reports of those trials and begin to
understand them. The wonder of Russia is that nevertheless
so much has been done.

I write with prejudice about communism, but it is not
prejudice on its behalf. I have made it clear, I think, how

206 THE FATE OF MAN

intensely I detest Karl Marx and how greatly my mind has
been irritated by the narrowly dogmatic communism of the
young. Yet I am forced to a recognition of the real advance
Russia has made since the revolution, not merely in material
things. Will it go on? What for us is the significance of the
new phase into which Russia is now passing?

The mass of the new Russia still seems in its crude way
to be revolutionary, in the best, the creative sense of the
word. The great raw organism is still moving forward. But
there is manifestly something wrong about the head of it. A
great number of disillusioned young men in the Western
world are saying now that it is Stalin who is to blame and
proclaiming themselves Trotskyites. But the matter goes
deeper than that. It is not really a personal matter. The
organization at the head of things must be radically wrong
to be put out of gear by a mere personal feud. It .must be so
framed as to eliminate good types of mind and promote
mediocrities. Lenin was a first-quality man, Litvinov is a
much abler man than the run of diplomatists; apart from
that the personalities directing Russian affairs vary from
honest ordinary to intricately mean. It is preposterous to sup-
pose that they are the pick of that Russian intelligence which
has produced men like Mendeleev, Mechnikov, Pavlov,
Pushkin, Maxim Gorky. . . *

The headquarters organization upon the shoulders of the
Russian giant is, to be plain about it, a head without a fore-
head; it has a brain that lacks anything more than a rudi-
mentary cerebrum. Russia, with an area of over eight million
square miles and a gross population of one hundred and
sixty-six million people, is being run by a directorate as
antique and rudimentary in its nature as some small pro-

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 207

nunciamento South American Republic or the tyranny of an
ancient Greek city state. It has no knowledge organization
at all. It has no powers of reflection. It has only the Com-
munist Party which is dogmatic ignorance. It is a giant
I speak of social structure and not of persons with the head
of a newt.

That is the absurd situation of Russia. Only, unhappily,
nobody seems to consider it absurd. The country is still
living on the mental impetus of Lenin and the democratic
socialism of the nineteenth century. When that impetus is
spent it will have nothing to fall back upon but die pre-
posterous pretensions of personal government.

It is this absence of a collective cerebrum that has made
the present feud of the Stalinists and the Trotskyites pos-
sible. Trotsky I have never met, but he seems to have a
considerable personal vanity; Stalin I liked when I talked
to him; I did not think he had an overwhelming intelli-
gence, but I thought he was honest and strong and human.
I have been disillusioned about him mainly by those foolish
films of personal propaganda he has allowed to be made,
Lenin in October, for example. Therein Trotsky is elabo-
rately belittled and Stalin made the all-wise hero of the
story. He stands over Lenin. Modestly but firmly he indi-
cates the strategic points in the map and tells him what to
do. Apparently he is trying to distort the whole history of
the revolution for his personal glorification.

Why do these two men behave in this way? Apparently
they are posing for posterity. That was something Lenin
never did. He was a man of the new order. Both Trotsky
and Stalin are middle-aged and have very few years left now
in which to do anything more for the world, and this is how

208 THE FATE OF MAN

they dissipate them. They are behaving as absurdly as Mus-
solini. Few human beings are adult before thirty-five and
most remain puerile to the end. Do they not understand
that even if they are remembered they are in the busy
world ahead certain to be misjudged? Nobody will have
time to read whole books about them. One or another thing
awaits these legends they are cherishing. If the world fails
to readjust itself now, they will pass, with everything else
that is human, into oblivion; and if it does readjust itself
to its new occasions, then so far as they are remembered at
all, they will be taken in hand by a more adult and motherly
Clio and spanked and put in their places.

I am amazed at these egotisms and astonished at the com-
plete inability of the Communist rank and file, out of Russia
at any rate, to avoid taking sides. Either they take sides or
they wander away from the idea of creative revolution alto-
gether, so completely are they dependent on the behavior of
their Great Men. This is infantile. The man of the new
world order, if ever it is to be attained, must learn to go
right on without leaders, just as he must learn to go right
on without God.

What is happening to the body of Russia, obscured by
this scuffle? The scuffle has so narrowed-down to personali-
ties that a great deal may be happening outside it. It may be
that in this matter my wish is father to my thought, but at
any rate I believe that a more or less complete restoration of
intellectual liberty in Russia in the next few years is a quite
possible thing. The Russian, who, like the Englishman or
the American, has grown up in an atmosphere of less im-
mediate militant stress, is not nearly so docile as the Ger-
man. There is an ineradicable disposition to humor and

COMMUNISM AND RUSSIA 209

laughter in these less controlled peoples. They are earlier
adult. I cannot suppose that the Nazi regime would tolerate
for a moment those popular stories by Michael Zoshchenko,
which hold up the weaknesses and discomforts of the Soviet
regime to the gayest ridicule. Laughter can dissolve prison
bars; it can outflank prohibitions. Russian writers are begin-
ning to take liberties.

The Russian mind is an insubordinate mind and an un-
tidy one. This virtue and this vice may be two aspects of
one quality. Russian thought lacks and needs the restraint
of the more disciplined Western intelligence. It has that
courage and irresponsibility which we associate with genius.
A release of intellectual energy in Russia, corresponding
with and responding to the appearance of a reorganization
of knowledge and collective purpose and judgment in the
West, would have a vastly stimulating effect upon the
thought and will of the entire world. It would be an event
of major importance in the mental reorganization of man-
kind. And in the brightness of this new beginning it would
hardly be observed that the Communist Party, the Comin-
tern, too narrow, too insincerely dogmatic and "too clever by
half," had unobtrusively disappeared, as I suppose that
sooner or later it must do. 1

x See R Borkenau's The Communist International (1938), a history which
is also an analysis.

22

AMERICAN MENTALITY

FINALLY, IN THIS STOCKTAKING of human forces, we come to
the countries more directly affected by the American and
French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, the
countries in which, beyond the shadow of the British oli-
garchy, radical and liberal and democratic ideas have had
a maximum freedom of expression. Chief of these, and
charged now, it would seem, with the main burthen of their
common destiny, is that third great mass of human beings
with any sort of solidarity, the United States of America,
China, Russia, North America; these vast countries make
more than a third and nearly a half of humanity; they
occupy most of the north temperate zone, which is the zone
of maximum human energy, and with the British Empire
they constitute the greater part of mankind. They are all
fermenting with change. And the most freespoken, active,
perplexing and various of all these great vats of destiny is
the United States.

The United States is of primary significance in world
affairs for a number of reasons. In the first place its popula-
tion is almost entirely literate, that is to say, it can read. How
it reads and what it reads is another matter. There are no
cheap books in America such as there are in Great Britain

210

AMERICAN MENTALITY 211

and France; most books worth reading can be got in Eng-
land for sixpence, while in America they cost from ten
times as much upward; and outside a limited world even
prosperous people hear very little of any but those best sellers
which follow each other like epidemics across the continent.
But the newspaper Sunday supplements and the public
libraries largely compensate for these present imperfections
of the book supply. So the American public as a whole, over
the vast areas it covers, is simultaneously accessible, if need
be, to new ideas, and that accessibility is greatly enhanced by
the nation-wide distribution of the cinema and the radio.
And next it has a tradition of free discussion. The American
says what he thinks, and even when he doesn't think he is
apt to say it. You can always contradict him, and there is no
handicap to help any opinion to win.

Education is in the hands of the forty-eight state govern-
ments of the Union, and varies widely in its standards and
organization from state to state; schools, colleges and uni-
versities are scattered abundantly over the land; they range
from sheer imposture upward, and the best of them are as
good as or better than anything else in the world. There are
great endowments for education and for educational enter-
prises. There are probably more highly educated people in
the United States than in any other single country whatever,
and when it comes to what we may call the half-educated,
people whose minds, already loosely furnished, could easily
be quickened, there is no comparison. In one or two back-
ward states, modern scientific teaching of evolution, for
examplesis prohibited in the state schools, and discrimina-
tory obstacles are put in the way of the education of colored
people. These are exceptions to a general freedom. The intel-

212 THE FATE OF MAN

lectual possibilities of this vast country are unlikely to be
seriously threatened by invasion, extreme war stresses or civil
convulsions for some time. They are threatened just enough
to stimulate them and prevent their becoming lethargic.

Like all the rest of the world, the Union has felt the
impact of the new conditions of human life, the progressive
abolition of distance, the immense increase of material
power and the ensuing dislocations of economic and social
order, but less confusedly and with more time and elbow-
room for consideration than any other country. It has been
able to look and see; it has been able to think more plainly
about the change that has come upon us all. It has only
realized in the last decade that it has an accumulating
surplus of unemployed.

There is a vast elementariness about the past hundred and
fifty years in America. It is as if social and political life in
the United States was simplified and made plain for demon-
stration purposes to all the rest of the world. We have there
in unqualified contrast the East and the West, the North
and the South, White and Black; no petty nationalisms, no
traditional hatreds, no language difficulties, no localized
religions obscure the broad issues. The War of Independence
left the country a democracy, democracy at its first stage,
the state of political equality and individual liberty. The
extension of the democratic idea to include socialism, educa-
tional equality and universally accessible information, which
we have traced in 6, scarcely affected America until the
close of the nineteenth century. Throughout all that cen-
tury she worked out the possibilities for good and evil of a
hard individualistic democracy. The Civil War, though it
arose out of a number of economic and political stresses,

AMERICAN MENTALITY 213

simplified out at last, to a logical completion of the equali-
tarian idea by the abolition of slavery and the enfranchise-
ment of the liberated slaves.

Life throughout that period resolved itself into a scramble
for wealth. The whole nation thought dollars, talked dol-
lars. For several generations it was a distinctly exhilarating
scramble. There were so much unexploited land, such re-
serves of natural wealth available, that it was possible to
accumulate vast fortunes and still find fresh employment for
everyone who chose to work. After the civil war came a
great development and organization of industry. American
invention, American enterprise, soon led the world in the
expansion of big business and the mechanization of life. For
a time it was not realized that this march of Triumphant
Democracy * was essentially the rape of virgin resources that
could never be replaced. Triumphant Democracy poured
across the continent, destroying the forests and so changing
the climate for the worse, ploughing up pasture that pres-
ently became sandy desert, exterminating animal species,
using up coal, oil, mineral wealth as though there was no
end to any of these things.

It was only as the "Wonderful Century" drew to its end,
that the immensity and the menace of Waste dawned upon
people's minds. Everyone was so keen to get dollars that
many of them forgot to get children, but the supply of labor
for all that vast ploughing-up, cutting-down and tearing-out
was sustained by a tremendous immigration. In 1906 a mil-
lion immigrants poured into America, mostly people who
knew no English and had a far lower standard of life than
the native worker. They were divided among tKemselves

1 Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (1886).

214 THE FATE OF MAN

at first by their special ignorances; they supplied a far more
manageable type of labor from the point of view of the
exploiting employer. 1 The home-grown strain hoped to save
money, get on, escape from employment, and so it was slow
to develop any class solidarity until it realized that every
door to hopeful competition was being closed upon it. Labor
legislation in America therefore fell far behind that of Great
Britain. Not only was the immediate real wealth of America
being turned to dollars; a rapid deterioration of the common
life was also going on. Very reluctantly would America ad-
mit that the great uprush was over. Theodore Roosevelt's
campaign for Conservation was the first practical recognition
in America that Americanism had gone too far.

This is not a history, but a survey of existing possibilities,
and we will say nothing here of the events that exalted and
depressed American life for the next third of a century, the
war, the boom, the collapse, until we come to that nation-
wide realization of crisis and panic that brought Franklin
Roosevelt in as the savior of a staggering social system.

Sometimes a work of art can do more to present reality
than a whole library of reports and statistics, and that tre-
mendous genius, John Steinbeck, in his Grapes of Wrath
(1939), has given an unforgettable picture of the last stage
in that process of material and moral destruction and dis-
illusionment with which the story of sturdy individualism
in America concludes. He gives it all, from the exhausted
soil dribbling down to dust, to the broken pride, the hope-
less revolt and the black despair of the human victims,
without rhetoric, without argument, but with an irresist-
ible effect of fundamental truth.

1 See my The Future in America (1906) ; Two Studies in Disappointment.

AMERICAN MENTALITY 215

The crisis discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt.
As I have written elsewhere, 1 he is a "patrician" rather in
the vein of Lord Grey and Arthur BaLEour than a typical
American politician. He is rich and his peculiar health
makes him float rather above the level of everyday tempta-
tions. He has the boldness of imagination needed to meet
the challenges of the time, but he has the great gentleman's
disposition to look to subordinates for the detailed execu-
tion of his designs. None too soon he has carried America
forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His
New Deal involves such collective controls of the national
business that it would be absurd to call it anything but
socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the
old individualist days against that word.

At the beginning there was much talk of the Brain Trust,
which he had gathered about him to realize the vast change-
over of American aff airs he had in hand. I was tremendously
excited by this Brain Trust idea, and I went off to America,
as my Experiment in Autobiography relates, to have a good
look at it. He had imagined that the universities could and
would give him men of exhaustive knowledge and capacity
in sufficient amount to create, on the spur of the moment,
a civil service competent to meet the huge demands of this
great transition he was so gallantly attempting. These Brain
Trusters were what the universities produced for him. My
wits were not quick enough to size them up at once. They
seemed to be an extremely interesting and miscellaneous
set of men, but I had a feeling from the outset that they
were not going to justify the President's expectations. He

1 Experiment in Autobiography, Chapter IX, 9, and World Brain f The
Fall in America, 1937.

216 THE FATE OF MAN

was under an easy delusion about the American universities.
He thought they were untapped reservoirs of wisdom. They
are not. They were quite unable to give him the knowledge,
understanding and responsive imaginations necessary to
convert his magnificent gestures of social and economic
reconstruction into a working reality.

I went, a traveling note of interrogation, from him to
Stalin, because I realized that the same insufficiency of
mental resources and support which was baffling the Amer-
ican President, the lack of any adequate mass and structure
of administrative knowledge in the state, must also be
crippling the socialist thrust in Russia. Was Russia meeting
or attempting to meet that difficulty? In some way of its
own? And in Russia I found Gorky in a dream of Russia's
greatness, unfolding the plans of non-existent universities to
my incredulous eyes, and nothing else but intolerant dogma-
tists and intriguing commissars.

Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a '
huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one
out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos, and the
lack of a brain organization to give that state consciousness
and coherence was a difference not in nature, but degree.

The brain organization of the United States is not up to
its new job. It needs to be revised, expanded, turned round
to face the future. I have compared the head structure of
the Russian giant to the brain of a newt. To carry on the
biological analogy, the knowledge and will structures of
the United States seem, to be somewhere about the level of
a horse. It has a cerebrum all right; it remembers almost
too well within a limited range, it shies at shadows, stam-
pedes very readily, and has no particular zeal for learning

AMERICAN MENTALITY 217

new things. Something very much better than that is de-
manded.

For the great, closely-organized, human community that
socialism contemplates, a World Brain is essential The third
aspect of a complete democracy is a tremendous educational
expansion, that not only opens the way to the White House
to Everyman but gives him the necessary mental equipment,
if he can use it, to get there. Such an educational organiza-
tion has been latent in America for a century and a half.
The fathers of the Republic were not unmindful of it. In
every state, land was set aside to supply the endowment
for a state university, and sometimes that turned out well,
and sometimes it did not. In addition, there were older en-
dowments of the British type, and fresh benefactions ex-
panded these and added to their number. The whole com-
munity was concentrated upon that fascinating dollar hunt,
but when one of the winners felt public-spirited and gen-
erous, it seemed a fine thing to him to get some more
knowledge and education for the people. And being es-
sentially a business man, he went and bought the stuff;
he bought the best in the market; and it did not occur to
him and why should it ? that America might be in need
of something at least as new and distinctive of her as the
great business plants and concentrations that he and his
fellow-magnates were, with such vivid immediate success
and such ultimate bad consequences, making. So that the
extensive and complicated university system of America
remained essentially European, first upon the British pat-
tern and then with an increasing German influence. To this
day it clings to the medieval cap and gown, the degree-
giving and medieval lecturing of the old world.

218 THE FATE OF MAN

Dollar preoccupation was almost as effective in leaving
unchallenged the ascendancy of Europe and European pat-
terns in the world of thought and artistic creation. Boston,
which had played a vigorous part in British intellectual life
in colonial days, resented this acceptance of inferiority, but
until well into the latter quarter of the nineteenth century
the European ascendancy was tacitly admitted in the rest
of America. Lowell might complain of a "certain air of
condescension" in the visiting English of his time. This
air of condescension had this much justification that
in many strata of the American world it was accepted.
There were insurgent spirits and many protests indeed, but
the War of Independence only reached the realm of literary
criticism towards the turn of the century, and then it came
as a great shock to the British writers of my generation,
who had taken the American tribute for granted. Today
no young American writer would dream of sedulously imi-
tating or indeed resembling a British model. And in many
fields of thought, the new history and sociological specula-
tion for example, individual minds broke into distinctive
American methods. Some thirty odd years ago the American
climate, by way of a protest, killed all the cherished ivy on
those red-bricked colleges, but it did nothing further in the
matter. To this day the shape of the knowledge organiza-'
tion and education, and particularly of the higher educa-
tion, remains in precisely the same state of picturesque
headlessness and material ineffectiveness as the older, nat-
ural-grown, European disorder of institutions. The erection
of facsimile buildings, Magdalen Tower in Chicago, for'
example, is merely the extreme expression of this reverential
attitude.

AMERICAN MENTALITY 219

The United States, let alone the world, cannot carry on
now with an unorganized mentality, a scattered higher edu-
cation that has no power over the press or the common
schools or political consciences. It produces no adequate civil
service, no well-informed and easily co-operative administra-
tors. It cannot compass any of the major problems before
the nation. The resort of the undergraduate world to the
realities of the playing fields is a sure indication of the un-
attractiveness of its array of subjects. They yell. Every uni-
versity has a yell. And well may they yell and go wild and
frantic in their stadiums, for their lives and their powers are
being largely wasted.

Yet it is in America now that the clearest hope for a
beginning of that World Brain resides. A country habituated
to the rapid development of vast commercial and industrial
enterprises must surely be capable of attempting an intellec-
tual and educational enterprise beyond the imagination of
men bred in smaller and more tradition-ridden communi-
ties. So far it has been impossible to awaken any influential
and resourceful people to this patent, if unprecedented
necessity. It is unhappily so novel that they seem afraid to
realize how obvious it is and unavoidable. There is no time
to lose about it. It is hard to guess what may happen when
this abnormal phase of personal government by one in-
spired, insufficiently able man of genius comes to an end.
There is no one to replace him and nothing to replace him.
Nothing is being prepared. America may relapse in quite a
little time into something as acephalous and incalculable as
Russia.

And so I return to my refrain: rf We need a World Brain,"
and to my insistence that the creation of a greater mental

220 THE FATE OF MAN

superstructure to reorient the mind of the world is an en-
tirely practicable proposal.

At this point I imagine an angry critic interrupts. He has
been skimming through this book he wouldn't deign to
read it or mark the course of its argument looking for occa-
sion for offense. And now he cries: '"Who are you, Mr.
Know-all, to tell us that all these splendid institutions. Har-
vard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Johns Hopkins
and a multitude of others, and abroad Oxford, Cambridge,
Paris, London, Coimbra, Upsala, Tokio one could count a
thousand galaxies of clustering colleges and dreaming spires
and all these wise and good men, thousands of them, men
of eminent learning, men of distinguished character, doctors,
teachers, investigators, scholars, not one who is not in every
respect a far better man than yourself, that all together they
amount to nothing! that this great constellation, this veri-
table shining skyful of gifts and powers is not sufficient for
the needs of the world today! that altogether it amounts to
no more, scale for scale what did you say? than the brain
of a horse! that it needs something far more powerful, some
far vaster embodiment of knowledge and purpose some
queer fad of yours ?"

To which I answer: What are they doing now? So far
from lighting the world, the skies are so overcast that these
starry constellations seem scarcely to be shining.

And far from being "Mr. Know-all," I am in helpless igno-
rance, in a sea of unconscious ignorance. There is one thing,
and one thing only, I know, that you do not seem to know,
and that is this that neither you nor I know enough nor
know the little that we do know well enough, to meet the
needs of the world's occasions. Unless we do something

AMERICAN MENTALITY 221

about this ignorance of ours, this universal blinkered igno-
rance, we shall be overwhelmed, we shall destroy one
another.

If only some small fraction of the still considerable wealth
and energy of America could be turned not merely to a
campaign against the ignorance of others but against its
own far more dangerous ignorance; if only this absolute
necessity for an organized World Brain, a gigantic but still
possible super-university, set above all these admirable but
ineffective scattered foundations to utilize and consolidate
them, if only that could fire the imagination of a few ener-
getic spirits; then the whole outlook of the human species
might still be changed.

There is a last possibility to consider in this survey. Some
such appeal as I am making may presently gather force,
attract a measure, but an insufficient measure, of support
and not enough critical attention. The thing may be tried,
the effort may be made, and, as people say, it may fall into
the wrong hands. Instead of a living World Brain we may
have a sham World Brain. The effort may be made. Money
may be forthcoming; the demand may grow. Something to
look like a world encyclopaedic organization may be
brought into being, good enough to pacify most of the
clamor, good enough for those people who say you cannot
have everything at once you must have a beginning. When
embryonic tissue cannot build an organ it can still produce
a cancer. We may have some large and plausible organiza-
tion of platitudes, irrelevances and compromises, as adequate
as an organization of knowledge as the old League of Na-
tions was of world peace. There may be great academic
comings and goings, ceremonies and solemn consecrations.

222 THE FATE OF MAN

And at last something in the nature of Dr. Nicholas Murray
Butler and President Grover Whalen will appear enthroned,
side by side, organizers of the World Brain triumphant, the
World Brain of Tomorrow, brooding profoundly over the
unmitigated destiny of mankind. 1

That may be. The history of most religions supports this
possibility. There is nothing whatever between the stars and
the atoms to show why the end of Homo sapiens should not
be absurd as well as tragic. The price of human salvation
is eternal vigilance, incessant fearless criticism and unre-
stricted wit. How can one tell beforehand whether that
price will be forthcoming? Without unrestrained free
speech and irreverence, how can we defeat the universal
human tendency to be satisfied with and tolerant towards
plausible, pretentious things ? There can be no rest, no tact-
ful acquiescences, no mental toleration, no enfeebling
politeness, in the Kulturfyimpf ahead, if man is to escape
the evils that close in upon him.

In the design of this book three primary themes interlace
and pursue and develop each other. There is first, that in-
vention and science have completely altered the material en-
vironment of human life. Next, that the disruptive driving-
force of an excess of bored and unemployed young men,
which must in some manner find relief, will probably shat-
ter human life altogether under the new conditions. And
thirdly, that the existing mental organization of our species
is entirely insufficient to control the present situation, which
nevertheless might, with an adequate effort, be controlled.
These are the Change of Scale theme, the Youth Pressure
theme and the World Brain theme. The first two create the

1 Cf . The Columbia Encyclopedia.

AMERICAN. MENTALITY 223

problem to which the third indicates the only possible
solution.

About the role of those young men; its cardinal impor-
tance is still not recognized plainly by sociologists, historians
and writers of contemporary history. In practice, however,
it is plainly apprehended, and a very considerable amount of
propaganda to capture the imagination of this vital stratum
is carried on, and particularly by the more aggressive con-
temporary states. They pursue their co-nationals abroad,
and make strenuous efforts to win over opinion in neutral
states and bring local conditions into parallelism with their
own. Nazi patterns are being studied in South Africa, for
example, and we have noted the Fascist disposition of Gen-
eral Chiang Kai Shek. There is a great totalitarian propa-
ganda, and now, awakening and responding to it, there is
counter-propaganda.

On the whole the totalitarians make the more exciting
and attractive promises and give the brooding young man
the most immediate prospect of authorized masterful activi-
ties. Official Great Britain pays the dole and encourages no
presumptuous hopes. But in America and elsewhere there
is a definitely anti-Fascist organization called the World
Youth movement. This is a brotherhood and fundamentally
a pacifist organization, a combination of a great number of
more specialized associations, which attempts to bring the
opinions and demands of the young for security from
massacre and for employment, training, adult education,
health culture and so forth, to bear upon governing and
administrative bodies, and exert a critical, helpful and
mediatory influence upon their social welfare work. It has
the open support of both the President and his wife, more

224 THE FATE OF MAN

particularly of Mrs. Roosevelt, and it extends its liaison
work into most of the so-called democracies and Russia.
Its activities vary with the country and occasion, but its gen-
eral objective is to keep its young people busy with work of
public importance, developing their capacity with use and
experience. This World Youth movement claims to repre-
sent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total
of forty million adherents under the age of thirty. Of
these, twelve million are credited to Russia, though I can-
not imagine how these figures are checked. It includes also
a number of War Resisters whose ideas stop short at a re-
pudiation of war. They will have nothing to do with war,
but how human affairs are to be carried on in a warless
world they do not trouble to think. Anyone else can bother
about that, it seems, not they. They carry passive resistance
to the pitch of know-nothingness. With a certain disapproval
they offer us their bodies to be protected and their mouths to
be fed.

I mention the World Youth Movement here, but I am
quite unable to estimate its possibilities. It may fade out It
may play an important and increasing role in the consolida-
tion of a new world order*

The President and Mrs. Roosevelt, though they seem
acutely aware that a developing Youth Movement may play
an important part in the political drama of tomorrow, have
neither of them betrayed any consciousness of the immense
intellectual reorientation of which the world is now in such
urgent need. Their circumstances have never directed their
attention to that. I doubt if these two fine, active minds
have ever inquired how it is they know what they know and
think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they

AMERICAN MENTALITY 225

might have been if they had grown up in an entirely differ-
ent culture. They have the disposition of all politicians the
world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never
inquired how it is that opinion is made.

The only representative of Youth I have ever met who
seemed to be aware that they were under-educated and im-
properly educated were some Burmans I met in Rangoon.
"We are taught to be clerks in European-owned factories,"
they complained. "What we want is technical knowledge
and the science of our own country and circumstances so as
to give us a clear conception of our role in the world. . . ."

Now that was saying something. 1

1 For a fuller factual and more hopeful analysis of the American process see
C. A. and Mary R. Beard's The Rise of American Civilization and America
in Midpassage. A characteristic statement of American notions is Speaking
of Change, giving the ideas, attitudes and limitations of the late Edward A.
Filene.

23

THREE FACTORS IN EVERYONE

WE HAVE NOW EXPOSED, in stripped outline, the primary
factors in world affairs at the present time. In all these mat-
ters I have written with the complete freedom of a bio-
logically trained and uncontrolled observer. Sir Arthur
Salter, for example, in his Security. Can We Retrieve It?
(1939), writes with all the discretions and reserves of a re-
sponsible politician who has to think and speak within the
conventions that I, in my entire irresponsibility, can repudi-
ate and kick aside. His thoughts are capped and gowned
and mine are stark. He has an air of scarcely recognizing
the realities I assemble. Nevertheless, his intelligence and
integrity are manifestly forcing him towards a conception
of public policy and the human future essentially the same
as those I have stated concisely and brutally here. 1

The cultural summaries made in the preceding sections
from 11 onward may be offensive to many readers, if only
because of their plainness, but they have been made with
deliberation, they have been sustained when necessary by
citation, and they will be much easier to run away from '
than to disprove. The political map is imposed upon these
primary factors and more or less conditioned by them, very

1 See Note 23A for a quotation from his Epilogue.

226

THREE FACTORS IN EVERYONE 227

much as it is imposed upon a contoured physical map of
the world. It entirely distorts the truth to attempt to reduce
this complex struggle for existence to any left and right
antagonism. At the maximum simplification we have still
to distinguish three absolutely divergent trends in ourselves
and in the world about us. Each of these trends has its vari-
ations, but these variations can be put very easily as species
under one or other of these three genera. The divergence
of the three main trends remains complete.

The first of these trends embodies the inveterate disposi-
tion of the normal man to accept his immediate circum-
stances as he finds them and make the best of them for
himself. He sticks to the creed he is born to or to the
alternative culture that gives him greater comfort. One
might write, indeed, not merely the inveterate disposition
of the normal man but the inveterate disposition of every
normal living thing. For the ordinary animal the loss of the
sense of security releases panic, flight, violence vehement
and usually quite unintelligent efforts to recover the con-
fidence that has slipped away. It is only in the human
animal, and probably it is only in the last two or three thou-
sand years that there has been any disposition to look for-
ward, even during a fairly prosperous social phase, beyond
the prescribed social round, not only to anticipate and arrest
danger but also to enlarge, enrich and alter life. There is a
faint uneasiness. "Man looks before and after." For the first
time in mental history the quality of reality is shifted from
the present or from a past-present system to the future.
Already in this book ( 9) the idea of a rotation of values
in time has been developed in reference to European thought
in the past half-century and with an auto-vivisection of one

228 THE FATE OF MAN

particular sample. Now we are able to envisage that forced
rotation of the mind as a world phenomenon.

Everywhere we note a natural, retrospective conservatism,
and everywhere we have minds reluctantly and inadequately
coming about and taking up the constructive challenge of
the age. Such are the two main antagonistic trends in the
mental life of the world today. The third trend goes neither
backward nor forward; it is moral abandon. It is equally
regardless of the reactionary passive peace desire and of the
creative peace impulse* The manifest relapse of the world
towards lawless warfare and recklessly destructive violence
is due to the successful blocking of the road to the latter
peace by the resistance of those who desire the continuance
of the former. The deadlock between conservative instinct "
and creative readjustment releases the suppressed beast, the
unqualified egotist in the species, from control. It can only
be recalled to discipline for good and all by the complete
triumph of the new peace over the old.

This triangular struggle is going on now not only in the
human species as a whole but in every intelligent individual
among us. It is the essential religious struggle of the time.
In every one of us there is the disposition to acquiesce in the
dear, familiar values, faith, creed, patriotism, culture, amidst
which we began. In every one there stirs the protest against ,
a fatuous surrender to things plainly unstable and unsound;
the protest and the creative desire even at the price of per-
sonal loss and injury. Moments come when we feel that we
"must speak out." And there is the ever-recalcitrant egotism
which lies in wait for every phase of perplexity, inducing
us to abuse every confidence put in us, to snatch the profit
and pleasure and personal glorification that offer themselves.

THREE FACTORS IN EVERYONE 229

so that even leadership turns insensibly into a clamor for
precedence, a jealous tyranny and the betrayal of all it set
out to serve.

So it is we are all constituted. "Let him who thinketh he
stand, take heed lest he f all,"

24

SUMMARY

THERE is NO CREED, no way of living left in the world at all,
that really meets the needs of the time.

When we come to look at them coolly and dispassionately,
all the main religions, patriotic, moral and customary systems
in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to be
in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement,
like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some
vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide. To the very
last moment, in spite of falling rafters and bulging walls,
men and women cling to the houses in which they were
born and to the ways to which they have grown accustomed.
At the most they scuttle into the house opposite or the house
next door. They accuse each other of straining the partitions,
overtaxing the material; they attack the people over the way
for secret mining operations. They cannot believe such
stresses can continue. The city is still sound enough, they
say, if it is not too severely tried. At any pause in the wreck-
age they say "What did I tell you? It's all over. Now we
can feel safe again," and when at last they realize the in-
evitability and universality of disaster, most of them have

become too frantic to entertain the bare possibility of one

230

SUMMARY 231

supreme engineering effort that might yet intercept those
seeping waters that have released the whole mountainside
to destruction.

Such a salvaging of the species is still just possible. That
is as much as the most hopeful mind can say.

25

IMPOSSIBILITY OF UTOPIANISM

IN A PREVIOUS SECTION ( 10) I have given my reasons for
and against believing that this creative world peace I have
shown to be possible, will be achieved in time to save our
species from disaster. I fluctuate, I admit, between at the best
a cautious and qualified optimism and my persuasion of
swif tly advancing, irretrievable disaster. Now let me assem-
ble the probable experiences before our children in the event
of such a conclusive frustration of democratic and progressive
hope.

This is a much easier task than an attempt to forecast a
progressive triumph. Upon that it would be possible to
speculate only in the most general terms. What the human
intelligence, no longer hag-rid, released from that abject
fear of change that has restrained it through the ages, what
the released and implemented creative imagination of thou-
sands of millions of free and happily active individuals
might achieve, is beyond any anticipating. At the utmost
we can produce words like vacant frames and empty show-
cases, to indicate that undelivered wealth. We can talk of
unhampered and unhurrying swiftness of realization, of

universal variety, of abundance and balanced beauty. We

232

IMPOSSIBILITY OF UTOPIANISM 233

are forced to take refuge as St. Paul did, when he evaded
the greedy materialism of those who demanded a bodily
resurrection from him, in "eye hath not seen nor ear heard,
nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive" . , .

It is impossible to foretell what the liberated human mind
may produce, but at least we can foretell one certain reaction
to what is given here. There are those who cling with an
obstinate willfulness to the persuasion that a unified world
must be a uniform and stagnating world. It is ridiculous,
but they manage to believe it. "Horrible monotony," they
say, "stress and servitude. Bolshevik tyranny. Prigs' Para-
dise," and nothing will dissuade them. 1 Many, I am per-
suaded, feel an intense jealousy of the possibility of a state
of affairs better and happier than their own. It is an intoler-
able thought for the greedier sort of mind that there should
be any possible life finer than the one they live, a finer life
that they will never share and which indeed they would be
incapable of sharing. Their reaction to all forecasts and
Utopias, possible or impossible, is self-protective hatred. They
interrupt; they leap out with "That wouldn't suit me!' As
indeed it would not. How inevitable is that uncomfortable,
protesting laugh: "I'm glad I shan't have to live in this
dreadful, tidied-up, drab, ordered world of yours."

The ^congratulations are mutual. I won't even ask you,
Madam, to read in your newspaper between the social and
the sporting columns and mark how brightly and swiftly
you and your kind drive down towards your destiny.

On the other hand, mankind in defeat and decadence
involves no great probabilities of mental novelty. There is
nothing to alarm your self-complacency in that. It is the

1 See, for example, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

234 THE FATE OF MAN

world we live in now, only a little farther on and a little
more so. We need not speculate outside the traditional,
limited, human stuff, that dear old "unchanging human
nature" of the past twenty or thirty thousand years. And to
that we will now apply ourselves.

26

DECADENT WORLD

IT WAS BECOMING EVIDENT to everyone that the present state
of affairs could not continue. The greater part of mankind
was living in the immediate fear of sudden, undeclared war.
At any time, by night or day, with less than an hour's notice,
the screaming sirens and the high explosive and incendiary
bombs were expected to burst about us. Every other occu-
pation was subordinated to the ill-conceived exigencies of
air-raid precautions, and an ever-increasing proportion of
our human and material resources was pouring into military
preparations. Almost every intelligent human being and
every township and community in Eur-Asia was in a state of
mental tension which was rapidly approaching the breaking-
point. Suicides were increasing. Lucid thinking became of-
fensive and intolerable. People attacked and persecuted one
another on flimsy excuses. Because of the limited and dis-
torted idea systems in which they are living, they were, as
we have seen in 11 to 22, incapable of setting about the
necessary readjustments of relationship. We have dismissed
any such outbreak of sanity, therefore, as improbable. There
is no basis on which it can start. There will be no world
unification, because our species is too distraught and divided
for anything of the sort.

235

236 THE FATE OF MAN

What seems much more likely is a lapse into actual
warfare, red war, on a planetary scale. This will not be a
clearly conceived war carried out with the intention of estab-
lishing a world peace. Governments will pretend it is that,
but fundamentally it will be a fit of frantic violence with no
rational objective whatever. The first offensive was just as
likely to come from the so-called "democratic" as from the
"dictator" side.

As we have shown quite clearly by an appeal to mani-
fest facts, the threefold forces making for conflict are to
be found busily active in every existing human community
the evil patriotic and religious traditions, the horribly
magnified weapons, the relative excess of unemployed young
men but the states where the pressure of these forces, be-
cause they were most pent up, has produced its maximum
effect in menace and belligerent gestures, will be marked
as the aggressor states. rt They will be assailed by a loose
alliance of incongruous countries animated by the diverse
motive systems we have scrutinized, and agreed only upon
the need of suppressing these desperado nations. The en-
suing war is likely to be briefer but far more violently
destructive than the previous world war, because while that
war began at a level of equipment which permitted a steady
increase in the supply of munitions almost to the end when
the losers collapsed through material and moral exhaustion,
the combatants this time start from the beginning at some-
thing like a maximum of armament, and will reach the
breaking-point much earlier. Staying power will decide the
formal victory, which is less likely to be decisive even than
the surrender of the eleventh of November, 1918.

DECADENT WORLD 237

The material and moral destruction of the actual warfare
will certainly be enormous. The population stratum of mili-
tary age will be largely killed, mutilated, poisoned or
mentally unbalanced, and after it, will come a generation or
so, which has been more and more undernourished, under-
educated, demoralized and mentally distorted, as the con-
centration upon preparation (guns for butter) and the actual
stress, noise and disorder of the conflict, have made a
normal growth impossible for them. Vast resources of power
will have been wasted for good and all, and the land and
the sea bottom will be littered with smashed-up aeroplanes,
shattered tanks, twisted railway trucks, burnt-out aerodromes
and a great abundance of sunken ships and stores. Exoduses
of population hardly less frightful than battle routs will
have dislocated all sanitary balances, and famine and its
follower, pestilence, will have swept the world. Even the
influenza epidemic which followed the previous Great War
killed more people than were actually slain in battle. This
time the sanitary disorganization will certainly be much
greater and the possibilities of morbid infections far more
various. Probably there will be a deliberate spraying of dis-
ease germs to assist this, more natural mischief. There will
have been much gratuitous bombing of cities. There will
have been a great burning and smashing-up of human habi-
tations which no one will have had energy to replace, and
such a destruction of beautiful buildings, works of art and
irreplaceable loveliness of all sorts, as will make the feats of
the Huns and Vandals seem mere boyish mischief. All that
lies plainly ahead.

And when at last one side admits defeat, and peace is

238 THE FATE OF MAN

proclaimed upon the world battlefield, what will be the situ-
ation? The defeated will be treated as the incurably guilty
parties. If that were so, if there were incurably malignant
peoples, then the wholesome thing to do would be to mas-
sacre them carefully and completely. Mankind will balk at
that.

Instead of any such biologically conclusive settlement,
there will be, once again, a punitive peace. The victors, to
the best of their ability, will make the losers pay. The losers
will be quite unable to pay. Further punitive measures will
then become necessary. Modern war is a very impartial
process, and the victors will probably have suffered quite
as much and even more material and social devastation than
the vanquished. They will be in no mind for generosity.
No country in the world, even those that have preserved a
technical neutrality, alert under arms, will emerge from the
storm at anything like the level of civilization at which it
stands today. There will be less freedom of speech, less op-
portunity to speak freely, far more fear and far more danger
of frantic mass impulses.

In 11 to 22 there has been an attempt to estimate the
general trend of the main idea systems of the world. Here
we may recapitulate the conclusions to which that survey
points. What is going on now?

A very considerable festering of minds is no doubt occur-
ring. People arc reading and thinking feverishly but they
are often thinking wrong and with an assisted wrong-head-
edness. Patriotic and religious teachings surround them, and
subtle and insidiously mischievous suggestions. The arts of
propaganda in enemy countries improve rapidly. There is
no country in the world where enemies are not sowing tares

DECADENT WORLD 239

with constantly increasing effectiveness. Every form of dis-
content is fomented with a skill and energy worthy of a
better cause. The suggestions of desperate and destructive
revolt that men may fear to whisper to their neighbors, will
come to them from abroad.

We have seen that the break-up of the British Imperial
system in face of a complex of insurrectionary movements,
troubles on which the sun will never set, has a high degree
of probability. The conflict of the new Nazi religion with
Catholicism is plain and open, we have studied it in the
ingenuous speculations of Mr. Teeling, and beneath the sur-
face of most of the established systems of today, some queer
development of social dissent is latent. The present ebb of
communism is no end to insurrectionary class war. It is mut-
tering vaguely, it may be unorganized and criminal, but it
will be none the less socially destructive. We have noted the
waning charm of the Italian dictatorship and the lamentable
tendency of original sin to emerge as murder and fanatical
cruelty under the very shadow of obscurantist Christian
teaching. Where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken the
pronunciarnento flourishes with undiminished vitality.

America has a transitory unity and stability under the
protean aspects of the New Deal, but no one knows what
will follow when the extremely personal direction of Frank-
lin Roosevelt ceases. There may be a heavily financed drive
to put back the New Deal and return to a hard-faced busi-
ness individualism. Big business has used some rough meth-
ods in the past and may resort to still rougher methods
again in an atmosphere that has become much less tolerant
of the old forms of firmness. Not without reason do Ameri-
cans talk of their Bourbons. That once unorganized alien

240 THE FATE OF MAN

labor has become assimilated and unified and more capable
of meeting pseudo-legal violence with extra-legal violence.
The country that produced Franklin Roosevelt also pro-
duced at the same time Huey Long and an unprecedented
regime of gangster terrorism. And in the same period came
the revival and the suppression of the intimidations of the
Ku Klux Klan. Things have a way of beginning in Amer-
ica, running large and rank, and then coming suddenly to
an end. This applies to evil and hopeful things alike. Every-
thing may occur in some part of the United States or an-
other, and the country may still retain an apparent unity.
With a strong personality the White House may concentrate
the nation, as it were, into one mind; with a less vigorous
head that federal unification relaxes and the continental
expanse is revealed as a miscellany of divergent issues. War
and Roosevelt might impose a temporary national person-
ality upon the United States that would vanish again in a
subsequent reaction, giving place to a state of affairs as in-
coherent and variegated as Europe. The apparent solidarity
of the United States may be as personal as any dictatorship;
it may be accidental and not essential.

The question of what will come after Roosevelt opens a
vista of localized possibilities varying between dull conflict,
boss rule and chaotic violence, and the corresponding ques-
tion of what will come after Stalin opens up not a vista but
darkness. We have weighed up the uncertainties of China
and Japan, and there too there is no assurance of stability
and many intimations of degenerative revolution. A Japanese
collapse would probably disintegrate China again, for noth-
ing but patriotism holds China together.

So we have left as the main factors in the settlement after

DECADENT WORIJD 241

the second world war, a patchwork of staggering govern-
ments ruling over a welter of steadily increasing social dis-
organization. The settlement after the next world war will
be only a prelude to further conflict. Informal warfare will
succeed the formal struggle. What else can happen? Victors
and vanquished will go to pieces and rearrange themselves.
There is no body of ideas in existence, no tradition or frame
of a world law to which an appeal can be made, that can
carry on the shattered, mentally and morally overstrained,
but still heavily armed combatants to any sort of world
synthesis. The seizures and pronunciamentos that followed
the Treaty of Versailles will recur more abundantly and on
a more sustained and uncontrollable scale.

Since any new synthesis is improbable, the names of the
existing main political systems are likely to continue long
after they have lost any real authority, just as the idea of the
Empire prevailed among the barbarians in the Dark Ages.
The Union Jack, the Swastika, the Cross, or the Stars and
Stripes may still float over a thousand dissociated gangs
and tribes, claiming its authority, just as the Roman Eagle
survived as a legally dominating reality in man's imagina-
tions, side by side with the Church, long after Rome was
sacked.

Now it may be thought that so much political and social
dissolution may mean an ebb of invention and a break-up
of the industrial organizations that supply the destructive
apparatus which is smashing up the existing order so rapidly
and uncontrollably. The human process will go back, it
may be fancied, to a mechanically feeble barbarism, and a
new system of expanding states may finally reconstruct
civilization. It will be the Dark Ages over again, a planetary

242 THE FATE OF MAN

instead of a merely European Dark Ages. Homo sapiens
will be given a second opportunity. There will be a return
to primitive home-made weapons, non-mechanical transport,
a new age if not of innocence yet of illiteracy, and slow,
feeble and less lethal mischiefs will return to the world.
But history never repeats itself, ecological processes are ir-
reversible, and there are many considerations that make it
improbable that the new barbarism which is coming upon
us will have even a material resemblance to the barbarism
of sixteen centuries ago. It will be much tougher, with a
livelier and wickeder intelligence, and it will retain a far
more destructive equipment.

Because it is proving impossible to assemble and organize
knowledge and sane ideas for the establishment of a world
civilization, it does not follow that knowledge already scat-
tered about the earth will be destroyed. It may become
generally inaccessible and secret, but it njfay continue avail-
able in workable fragments to a number of enterprising
people, A vast store of metallurgical and industrial tech-
nique was completely lost with the downfall of the Roman
Empire, 1 but then the record of principles and processes
was very flimsy and vulnerable. Many technical secrets were
never written at all and none were printed. Even down to
the past century that sort of thing went on; a number of the
processes in Wedgwood's china factory, for example, were
transmitted verbally from one worker to another. Some of
the older men carried secrets with them to the grave, and an
analytical chemist had to be called in and the processes
laboriously rediscovered before the firm could go on pro-
ducing its characteristic wares. That was a survival of old-

1 Rendered rather -vividly in George Gissing's Veremilda,

DECADENT WORLD 243

world methods. Under such conditions the old techniques
disappeared in a generation or so. But nowadays scientific
and technical knowledge is embodied in so huge a number
of printed and widely distributed publications, the body of
people in contact with those records is so large and varied,
that even in a world of deepening and extensive disorder,
it will still be possible to assemble knots and groups of men
capable of carrying on the production of most of the lethal
devices now in use. Postal and railway organization may go
to pieces, newspapers disappear, roads become impassable
and gas supply, drainage, and public lighting cease, because
such things depend upon a widespread social co-operation,
and still there may be radio transmission, aeroplanes and
high explosives, which do not demand anything like the
same general participation.

It does not follow that mechanisms and contrivances will
disappear in reverse order to that in which they ap-
peared. It may have taken long years of research and
the contribution of thousands of scientific workers to dis-
cover an explosive or a poison, but when that has been
attained only a recipe and material are needed for its pro-
duction. It has become a part of "our human heritage."

This is evident for example in the steady increase of
bomb-making and bomb-throwing in the world. It is a
growing feature of the normal social life. Every morning
now we read in our newspapers of the young braves of the
Irish Republican Army throwing their cheap but effective
bombs in Great Britain, the Jew boys and the Arab boys
bomb each other with ever-increasing zeal and bloodier
results, bomb outrages comment on the new regime in
Spain, they multiply in India, in the occupied areas of

244 THE FATE OF MAN

China. In a world of deepening misunderstandings and
grievances, there is no reason to doubt that they will become
as common as road accidents and as little thought of, a part
of the normal give and take of politics. People will harden
their hearts to their consequences until the bomb comes to
themselves, and then their enlightenment will be too late.

The world emerging from the next great war, then, will
be a tougher world, more disunited than ever, abounding
still more in concealed aims and secret preparations and the
fears and suspicions they engender. What else can it be?
The open forum of the scientific world will have disap-
peared and the suggestion of any cosmopolitan ideas will
have been suppressed, as a weakening of combatant morale.
In every country. For the neutral powers, if any remain,
will still have had to be mentally as well as materially "pre-
pared-" Human beings who can do nothing else to gratify
their craving to exercise power, love to suppress and help
suppression.

No doubt great numbers of people will have felt the
irrational evil of all this shrinking of thought into strategic
holes and corners, but they will have had less and less ,
opportunity of getting together, or even clearing up their
own minds sufficiently to take effective action. Many of
them, under the stress of their conscious helplessness, will
lapse into mystical religiosity, will refuse to bear children,
will resort to suicide or the quasi-suicide of non-resistance.
Many will take refuge in opiates. The Japanese are doing
their utmost to spread the use of opium and heroin among
the Chinese, and they will probably succeed in affecting
their own troops also. The ideas and expedients of birth

DECADENT WORLD 245

control, now they have spread about the earth, will not
be easily forgotten.

More and more will the world be for the tough, for the
secretive, the 'treacherous and ruthless. Cities will be dan-
gerous labyrinths and the countryside an exposure to attack.
Ever and again some group or some individual by luck or
cunning may achieve a certain width of conquest and estab-
lish a peace of terror. Subservient millions may rejoice then
for awhile that at last strong government has come back
to the world. They will accept an imposed religion, a last
revival of Christianity a la Franco perhaps, or of that "clean"
Nazi creed, or something on the evangelical lines General
Chiang Kai Shek seems to favor; they will observe a dictated
morality and a mutual censorship. Any intellectual revival
is improbable. This light of free science will have sunken
and gone out long since; what remains of technical knowl-
edge will be in the safe hands of properly ordained men.
The first thing a youth attracted to mechanical or medical
knowledge will do, will be to take orders and put himself
under safe direction. History will have shriveled down to
the Creator myth again, but the popular imagination will be
titillated and appalled by a dim and dying tradition of a
former age, our age, of sinful knowledge, of lawless indul-
gence, of unconsecrated loves, of a terrible disrespect for cus-
toms and taboos and sacrifices and priests, that brought
great misfortunes upon mankind. A new "World before
the Flood" it will be.

A few secret doubters may exist, bookish, silent, hinting
and whispering men men, for a more "wholesome" use
of womankind will leave women little time for reading

246 THE FATE OF MAN

who will pore guiltily over the unfulfilled promises of a
golden age to come, in the old books which men wrote
when they still had pride and hope. There may be some
wistful whisperings, some weak attempts at a new Free-
masonry. But the necessary adaptation of human thought to
turn the tide of decadence is something too wide and open
in its nature to be brought about by any sort of secret organ-
ization. What can be done by timid men who are forced to
squeak and scamper like mice behind the arras?

Art may have an Indian summer. The dictator may even
build some fine buildings for most of them build mon-
asteries, cathedrals, palaces, before he passes. There may be
portrait painting and portrait pieces of an ennobling type,
glorified history, an effort at a technically lower level to
recall the Venetian bravura of Titian, Tintoretto and Paul
Veronese. At any rate we shall not live to see that last Art
Age. Then, because there will be no correction for the
material stresses of a static system, the darkness will close
in again. There will be peasant revolts, an exhausting war
or dynastic trouble. So human affairs have gone in the past,
and so, without any fundamental change in human mental-
ity, they must continue to go, so long as they go on at all.

The coming barbarism will differ from the former bar-
barism by its greater powers of terror, urgency and destruc-
tion, and by its greater rapidity of wastage. What other
difference can there be without a mental renascence? The
average life will be steadily diminishing, health will be
deteriorating. The viruses and pestilential germs will resume
their experiments in variation, and new blotches and in-
fections will give scope for pious resignation and turn men's
hearts again towards a better world beyond the stars. There

DECADENT WORLD 247

will be a last crop of saints and devotees. Mankind which
began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the
disease-soaked ruins of a slum. What else can happen?
What other turn can destiny take?

If Homo sapiens is such a fool that he cannot realize what
is before him now and set himself urgently to save the situa-
tion while there is still some light, some freedom of thought
and speech, some freedom of movement and action left in
the world, can there be the slightest hope that in fifty or a
hundred years hence, after he has ]?een through two or
three generatibns of accentuated fear, cruelty and relentless
individual frustration, with ever diminishing opportunity of
apprehending the real nature of his troubles, he will be col-
lectively any less of a fool? Why should he undergo a magic
change when all the forces, within him as without, are
plainly set against it?

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of
nature has any greater bias in favor of man than it had in
favor of the icthyosaur or the pterodactyl. In spite of all my
disposition to a brave looking optimism, I perceive that now
the universe is bored with him, in turning a hard face to
him, and I see him being carried less and less intelligently
and more and more rapidly, suffering as every ill-adapted
creature must suffer in gross and detail, along the stream
of fate to degradation, suffering and death.

That, compactly, is the human outlook, the only possible
alternative to the willful and strenuous adaptation by
re-education of our species now forthwith that I am
urging in this book. Adapt or perish, that is and al-
ways has been the implacable law of life for all its
children. Either the human imagination and the human

248 THE FATE OF MAN

will to live, rises to the plain necessity of our case, and a
renascent Homo sapiens struggles on to a new, a harder
and a happier world dominion, or he blunders down the
slopes of failure through a series of unhappy phases, in the
wake of all the monster reptiles and beasts that have flour-
ished and lorded it on the earth before him, to his ultimate
extinction. Either life is just beginning for him or it is
drawing very rapidly to its close. This is no guess that is
put before you, no fantasy; it is a plain and reasoned
assembling of known facts it* their natural order and rela-
tionship. It faces you. Meet it or shirk it, this is the present
outlook for mankind.

THE END

NOTES

Note 4A. A shrinkage of the gross population, one may note,
under the new conditions, though it foreshadows an ultimate bio-
logical defeat, does not in itself compensate for that superfluity of
unemployed and dangerously restless young men stressed in the
preceding paragraphs. It does nothing to stabilize the community.
Not merely increased productivity per head due to technical progress
but also the prolonged activity of skilled older people will still be
diminishing employment and the young man's prospects of normal
assuagement. A falling birth rate or for that matter a rising one is
no relief for that primary social tension, which is essentially a matter
of proportion and not of scale. An island community of a few
hundred people will still be unstable if it includes a few dozen
young men with nothing definite to do.

Note 4s. Semaphore signaling systems seem only to have been
invented in the Napoleonic period, though it is remarkable they were
not attempted in the great Empires of Egypt, Persia, China and
Rome.

Note 6A. It is true that in Great Britain there are certain organi-
zations, the Plebs League, for instance, and the Workers' Educa-
tional Association, which owe their existence to the realization that
the traditional education, meeting as it does the requirements for
upper and middle class survival, may not be entirely adequate for
the needs of an awakening democracy. But in practice there is little
of the interrogative and creative spirit of science in the work of
these quasi-rebel bodies. A rash conceit of finality pervades them.
One need only turn over the pages of Plebs to realize the glib, trite
omniscience of its attitude. The aim throughout is not knowledge but
equipment for the political class war; it is to assemble and supply

249

250 THE FATE OF MAN

predigested controversial material for the Labor politician (research!),
prepare and train "speakers'* for the Labor cause, and sustain the
profound satisfaction of its clientele in such education as they have
already derived from the general atmosphere of their upbringing.
At a Royal Society Dinner one can stand up and say "We are all
self-confessed ignorant men, oui* common aim is inquiry and better
knowledge; we want to know, and that is why we are here to-
gether." But that sort of thing would provoke either indignation or
derision in the Little Bethel of a workers' educational gathering.
They have the Gospel; they know. Labor is going to take over
things and the millennium will ensue. The Plebs League, it seems,
has a doctrinal feud with the kindred Communist Party; I cannot
understand why. It preaches practically the same stuff. No seminary
for the missionaries of some eccentric sect was ever more specialized
and narrow-minded.

Note 7A. There is a very full and well-illustrated Italian (Fascist)
Encyclopaedia one of the many evidences of the higher mental level
of the Fascist as compared with the Nazi regime but I have never
seen any competent examination of this work in any English, Ameri-
can or French review. I have no idea of what this attractive-looking
publication gives, what it conceals, what it may suggest or misrepre-
sent, and short of learning Italian and reading it through I do not see
how I can find out. No university professor anywhere in the world
seems to have bothered yet to put a research student or so on to this
task. But why should he care? Why on earth should he care? It
would be infringing on journalism. It would be vulgar. There is
always something more to be done in the best academic tradition
about the probable sex life of Leonardo da Vinci or the personal
resentments of Dante, which will touch no current controversial issue
and still satisfy the highest standards of academic erudition.

Note PA. See Lord David Davies, The Problem of the Twentieth
Century (1930), Suicide or Sanity (1932) and various publications
of the New Commonwealth Society.

Note 93. Dr. John Beattie Crozier, 1849-1921. Author of The
Religion of the Future (1880) and A History of Intellectual Develop-
ment (1897-1901).

NOTES 251

Note 9c. "The world-wide English language is destined, I think,
to serve as the primary medium in this renascence of the human
spirit. Unquestionably that renascence must ultimately be cosmopoli-
tan, but to begin with it is likely to find its fullest and 4 most lucid
expression in one or the other, or maybe one or two, of the existing
thought and language systems in the world. What are they? What
other systems are there? There is the Latin cultural group expressing
itself in French, Italian and Spanish. In the past French has been
the common medium, but it is by no means certain that it will
remain so as intellectual suppression progresses in Italy and Spain.
Then there is the great Slavonic sprawl whose medium of expression
is Russian. There is the German system and, last and most wide-
spread and convenient of all, there is the English-speaking network.
I want to point out to you that for the next few decades at any rate,
the burthen and responsibility for human mental progress or human
mental failure will rest principally upon the series of communities
using the English tongue either as a mother tongue or as a cultural
language. It is becoming the lingua franca of the so-called "democ-
racies." Matters may change later, but that is the present state of
affairs. These communities are far more free to discuss, learn and
publish than any other people in the world.

Germany as an organized country has, for a time at least, with-
drawn herself from any claim to a share in the moral or intellectual
leadership of the world. The burning of the books by the Nazis was
a symbolical act of detachment from the free mentality of mankind.
The expulsion of such men of science as Einstein and Freud, and
the assertion of the racial hallucinations of Hitler in place of estab-
lished ethnology, were practical demonstrations of the same with-
drawal. Dogmatic nationalism has stamped upon science and free
thought and the German mind and retired into itself. And so too
has the Russian. Before the Great War, the Russian language and
literature were the medium for civilized thought not only through-
out Russia but all over the Slavonic-speaking world of southwest
Europe. In the summer of 1938, just before the destruction of
Czechoslovakia, I took part in a small conference upon Slavonic
culture in Prague. It was attended by representatives of all the Slav-

252 THE FATE OF MAN

speaking countries except Poland, and I found that everyone in that
meeting spoke and liked speaking Russian. But the present Russian
government has seen fit to sterilize this Russian influence by a sys-
tematic suppression of free speech, free discussion and free publica-
tion. For all practical purposes this leaves only the French- and
English-speaking systems. The French intelligence at its best is lucid,
brave and enterprising, still finer I think in its quality than any
other in the world,, but it works upon a much narrower base than
the English. The very precision of French deprives it of an amplitude
of expression of which English is capable. So we come to the con-
clusion that if the human race is not to go on slipping down towards
a bottomless pit of wars, conquests and exterminations, it must be
through the rapid and zealous expansion and reorganization of the
intellectual and education organizations of the English-speaking
communities.

But let me make it clear that when I say English-speaking, I say
it without any shadow of political propaganda, Anglo-Saxon radi-
calism, dear-old-Englandism, British imperialism or any shallow-
wilted stuff of that sort- 1 am thinking of the things our language
carries, and can carry, and not of our contemporary "culture/' And
I think of a flexible language expanding to meet every fresh need.
English is a very adaptable language; it borrows and assimilates
words and idioms very freely; and when I speak of the English of
the future, I have in mind something much more copious and power-
ful than the "correct English" of the academic scholars. It can
already narrow down to Basic or expand to express a thousand
delicate shades of meaning. I think of it as stripped of any remain-
ing idiomatic complications with a reformed spelling and a con-
tinually expanding vocabulary.

Even now English brings together into one creative fermentation
a vast diversity of peoples, from the Maori to the Eskimos; it
enables an educated Indian to talk to an educated Norwegian or an
educated West African Negro. It can bring all the thought and
learning of the world within their understanding, as no other lan-
guage can do. It translates everything of importance in every other

NOTES 253

language under the sun. Its center of gravity is now the United
States of America, but every several community which participates in
its free exchanges contributes its distinctive experiences. See, for
example, how the mental world of Australasia receives practically
everything that America or Britain can give it, and in return pro-
duces great men of science, brilliant artists, writers, thinkers, . . .
(Adapted from the Canberra lecture on The Role of English in the
Development of the World Mind.)

Note 10A. While I was working on this chapter a little friend
of mine who draws rather cleverly sent me a card to wish me a
Happy Easter. Below that she had drawn two chicks emerging from
their eggs with their little heads in gas masks over the legend "Be
Prepared." I find my little niece's jest rather a grim one. But maybe
there is an idea in that, a topical touch, for the Nativities they will
be setting up next Christmas in bomb-devastated Madrid, now that
Catholicism has waded through blood to its own again. It would be
a halfhearted incarnation that did not fully share the anxieties and
precautions of our distressful life.

Note 10B. Since the 10 was first drafted, a very revolutionary
device has come to hand in Major Muir's invention of the "air
mine." This is a balloon-sustained mine which can be set adrift in
the air at any level, and which will drift before the wind until it
contacts with a plane and destroys it. It is too small to be seen and
avoided. It can be timed to keep the air for a definite time, a day
or a week or so, and then explode and come down. These air mines
are cheap to produce and they could be made quickly and released
in enormous quantities. So long a.s they were up they would make
the air impossible for any sort of air transport, civil or military; they
would in fact for the time being eliminate the air altogether. I have
consulted several authorities in this matter, and they agree upon its
entire practicability. But obviously there are considerable obstacles
to its being properly tried out. The combatant air forces detest the
idea. Still there we have the possibility of putting the air completely
out of action whenever we wish it, and of restoring war to its
ancient and slower two dimensions*

254 THE FATE OF MAN

Note HA. It is the practice of those who find the results of
scientific inquiry unpalatable, to stigmatize such statements as we
have assembled here as "cocksure" and declare them as dogmatic
as any other dogmas. They will make it a personal matter if possible,
as though I individually had made it all up, or got it wrong, and
was being rather absurd about it. And then "Yah!", and they think
no more about these uncongenial things. But I am no more respon-
sible for the facts in this book than a telegraph messenger is for
the cable he brings, I have been simply gathering up undisputed
statements, and they remain intact, however brilliantly I can be
discredited personally.

Alternatively these recalcitrant spirits will have it that it is science
which is "cocksure." That is a flat misrepresentation of the scientific
spirit. Experimental science, natural science which is what everyone
understands by "science" nowadays, is never assured and final. That
is where it differs from all other established systems of belief, and
that is why I speak of it throughout this book as a new thing in the
development of human mentality, new within the past century or so.
The true symbol of natural science is a note of interrogation. A better
name would be research. It questions until some false assumption is
laid bare or destroyed. It tries out and rejects or accepts. And still
it questions. It is rare that it reverses its carefully tested conclusions
it is another defensive invention that "Science is always con-
tradicting itself" but continually it advances beyond these con-
clusions and restates with increasing precision and enrichment. The
utmost the man of science says to the religious dogmatist is "la view
of this and that, your general statement is unsound," or, "In view of
this and that it must be untrue."

Note HB. "The number of one's ancestors increases as we look
back in time. Disregarding the chances of intermarriage, each one
of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents,
and so on backward, until very soon, in less than fifty generations,
we should find that, but for the qualification introduced, we should
have all the earth's inhabitants of that time as our progenitors. For a
hundred generations it must hold absolutely true, that everyone of

NOTES 255

that time who has issue living now is ancestral to all of us. That
brings the thing quite within the historical period* There is not a
palaeolithic or neolithic relic that is not a family relic for every soul
alive. The blood in our veins has handled it."

From H. G. Wells. First and Last Things, "The Being of Man-
kind."

There are, however, certain qualifications to be made to this state-
ment of our common ancestry if it is to pass unchallenged. In every
generation there is an elimination of half the genetic elements. The
individual is not a mixture of the total ancestry of his four grand-
parents. He is a compound of a quarter of their genes. And in addi-
tion he may be a mutation. Genes are transmitted in associated
groups, but these groups fall infinitely short of carrying a complete
personality. They carry traits, but the traits are carried separately. In
so-and-so we may remark this and that trait of his Grandfather
William but they are mixed with traits from other progenitors; the
practical reappearance of Grandfather William is a mathematical
improbability verging on the impossible. Of all this and how there
are recessive characteristics masked by dominant ones, but capable
of reappearing in offspring, the reader will find a dear and full
account in The Science of Life.

A common ancestry does not therefore involve a common physiog-
nomy, and at any time an individual or a type may turn up in which
some once prevalent type virtually reappears. Mr. George Bernard
Shaw, for example, is a very exceptional person today, but Etruscan
tombs and potsherds reveal a departed world of quasi-George Bernard
Shaws. There are quasi-Cromagnards in La Dordogne and the
Canary Isles today. Certain regions, certain dimates, seem to attract
and favor their own special types and tend to revive them. That all
English people are descended from William the Conqueror and
most of the population of the earth from Abraham, implies brother-
hood indeed, but not uniformity. The fact that if humanity survives
so long, everyone alive will be the descendant of every fertile indi-
vidual among us today exposes the absurdities of family and national
pride, but it does not mean that the dance of the genes will not give

256 THE FATE OF MAN

us an incessantly restored human variety, in which every individual
will be consciously or unconsciously seeking the region, the occupa-
tion and the associates most congenial to his make-up.

Note 12A. Some of those who, in spite of much subsequent en-
lightenment, still cling, out of natural affection and association, to
traditions of their home and upbringing that have become a dear
and necessary part of themselves, take refuge, I know, in the plea
that the idea of the Chosen People has become altogether spiritu-
alized, that they are now segregated not for an ultimate conquest but
for a mission. Their mission is to serve and exalt all mankind.

There is moreover another line of sublimation with a bolder
appeal, and that is the line taken by that great neglected genius,
David Lubin, the founder of the International Institute of Agricul-
ture in Rome. His Israel was indeed an Israel with a mission, but
then he claimed everyone who participated in constructive work as
one of the elect. To Lubin I was an honorary Israelite.

"But why then call it Israel?" I protested.

This sort of transfiguration of the objectives of the Chosen People
is all very well in apologetic discussion, but there is nothing to
sustain it in the normal ceremony and practice and teaching of the
cult, which remains a narrow and troublesome nationalism. Let
these sublimators repudiate the Bible and the Promise and say what
they mean plainly. Then we shall be better able to believe in their
assertions of an exalted inaggressive modernization,

Note 12s. Louis Golding (in The Jewish Problem) argues that
anti-Judaism is due to the fact that the Jews cried "Crucify him,"
when Jesus came before Pilate. Jesus, as everybody knows, was
crucified (a particularly Roman method of execution) not by the
Jews but by the Roman Pontius Pilate. Countless people who
criticize the Jews today are extremely impartial about the Crucifixion,
and I find it difficult to believe that Mr. Golding, who, I presume,
is himself a product of orthodox Jewish education, is so entirely
unaware of the effect of this Chosen People cult upon the outside
world as he seems to be. He ignores it absolutely.

Browne also, refusing to face that primary issue, accounts for the
unpopularity of the Jewish community in an entirely different

NOTES 257

manner. He theorizes brilliantly about Jews being urban while non-
Jews are rustic. Certainly the Semitic-speakers were prevalently urban
in the first century B.C. The balance, says he, must be corrected and
all will be well. So the Jew, he decides (1935) had better go to
Palestine and dig himself out of his troubles. Both writers then
launch out into an account of the great intellectual superiority of
Jews to Gentiles, wholesome rather than ingratiating reading for a
puffed up Gentile, and cite a, string of names, Sigmund Freud, for
instance, and Einstein and so on, who are as a matter of fact no
more orthodox Jews than I am. They are citizens of the world, they
work for all mankind. Even now Freud is busy, he tells me, in a
patient analysis of the legend of Moses. Moses, he concludes, was an
Egyptian! His monotheism was Akhnaton's sun worship. (Moses
and Monotheism.)

Both Golding and Browne are typical of a vast literature on the
Jewish question. There is no need to multiply instances. Neither,
I think, realizes quite clearly what it is that encompasses them, be-
cause they are themselves enveloped in it. They accept this taught
and cultivated idea system, this ex-religious bias, this artificial
solidarity I am arraigning, as though it was in the nature of things
and could not be prevented, and thence they wander off into a
limitless jungle of controversial irrelevances, of the rights and
wrongs of ancient hates, misunderstandings, persecutions and
reprisals, to which there can be no conclusion.

But the eloquent and emotional Mr. Josef Kastein, who dedicates
his History and Destiny of the Jews quite incongruously to the
entirely unorthodox Einstein, concludes his Jews in Germany with
the real irreconcilable note:

**. . . we were once in Egypt. Already we have compelled a
Pharaoh to set us free. We have outlasted the Pyramids. We shall
outlast the denials of all those who surround us,"

As a matter of fact the Pyramids were there a long time before
the Jews.

I reiterate that the whole scheme and purport of this book is to
insist upon the supreme decisive importance of what in 4 I have
called the mental superstructure of the human animal. The recon-

258 THE FATE OF MAN

struction of its idea system is its only practicable method of adapta-
tion, and here is an. idea system that resists and evades reconstruc-
tion very obstinately. In 8 and 9 I have assembled and sum-
marized the nature of the great intellectual effort which is needed
if our species is to adjust itself to the terrific new conditions that
have risen about it. The Jewish conflict disregards this, cuts athwart
it, arrests and prevents it, like a noisy quarrel in a laboratory. All
the countervailing evil inj the world cannot make a bad tradition a
good one. Killing or ill-treating a man does not put him in the
wrong, but also, we have to remember, and that is not so easy for
the liberal-minded, it does not put him in the right The idea of the
solidarity of the Chosen People, evade it or not, remains the funda-
mental Jewish idea, and this fundamental Jewish idea, like any
other nationalism, is an offense against the unity of mankind.

Note 12c. Persecution mania is a well-known form of insanity.
With certain variations of phrase and form, due to the current ideas
of the period, it presents an almost stereotyped pattern through the
ages. Formerly it was usually witches and warlocks who were sup-
posed to be at the root of the matter. Anyone odd, anyone different,
came under suspicion, old crones and afflicted and odd-looking men
were distrusted, and very often the suspects caught a touch of the
infection and tried doing the things they learnt were so potent.
Multitudes of sorcerers have confessed, under no great duress, to
impossible crimes. They brewed potions, stuck pins in wax images,
cast spells, sent familiar spirits to gibber and creep and whisper in
the night.

Madness like everything else moves with the times; it clothes
itself in new fashions while remaining essentially the same. Nowa-
days the witches have become "Occult Powers." They use hypnotism,
electricity, infections (Pah!), they radio voices making threats and
evil suggestions. Every prominent publicist continually gets letters
from sufferers with this type of obsession. Such delusions may easily
make the patient a danger to himself and others, and then he is
"certified" and taken care of. But in times of social movement and
stress this disorder may become contagious, witness the witch mania
of the early seventeenth century. It is then more difficult to deal with,

NOTES 259

Like a dark shadow to the rational objections that can be made to
the in-and-out double nationalism of the Jews, there is a sustained
campaign of sinister suggestion with a considerable literature of
its own.

Some years ago four or five books written by Mrs. Nesta Webster
attracted considerable attention. She is a very competent writer and
so sound a Christian, of a faith so uncritical, that she is quite
unable to understand that many honest people find a vast amount
of Christian doctrine impossible. How impossible, I have sought to
show in 13 and 14. To her there is nothing good except in
Christianity, and this is so obvious to her that any objection to the
faith seems necessarily part of some diabolically hatched conspiracy.
She has set herself with the greatest industry to trace and fak
together the long-drawn succession of Cabalists, Gnostics, Mani-
chaeans, the Old Man of the Mountains, Knight Templars, Satanists,
Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Freemasons, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cagliostro,
^Madame Blavatsky, Mrs. Besant, Trade Unions, Anarchists, Socialists,
Theosophists, Communists, Those Bolsheviks, a frightful horde all
plotting and getting hold of power and handing it on and doing
down Christianity and the Christian life. Her books are written with-
conviction enough to make one look under the bed at nights. She
has never quite committed herself to those famous forged Protocols
of the Elders oj Zion which were published as the articles of associa-
tion so to speak of that world conspiracy, but she stoutly maintains
that though that book may not be genuine, it nevertheless shows
the sort of thing of which the Jews are capable. Her book Secret
Societies and Subversive Movements concludes: "For behind the
concrete forces of revolution whether Pan-German, Judaic or Illumi-
nist beyond that invisible secret circle which perhaps directs them
all, is there not yet another force, still more potent, that must be
taken into account? In looking back over the centuries at the dark
episodes that have marked the history of the human race from its
earliest origins strange and horrible cults, waves of witchcraft,
blasphemies and desecrations how is it possible to ignore the
existence of an Occult Power at work in the world? Individuals,
sects, or races fired with the desire of world domination, have pro-

260 THE FATE OF MAN

vided the fighting forces of destruction, but behind them are the
veritable powers of darkness in eternal conflict with the powers of
light/'

I should describe Mrs. Nesta Webster as a perfectly sane and
capable person with insane ideas, so widely do I disagree with her.
I believe her influence has spread far beyond the circle of her actual
readers. Milder forms of the same intellectual malaise at any rate
are now very prevalent throughout the more prosperous classes in
Great Britain and America. It is the only way to account for the
behavior of Mr. Neville Chamberlain, for example, or Lord Rother-
mere, the British newspaper proprietor, towards the Jews, towards
Russia, during the past two or three years. Mr. William Teeling
again, to whom I refer in 13, is another case. A tepid passive
Christianity is becoming an aggressive pro*Christianity tinder the
stresses of the time.

Note 12v. Sir Norman Angell and Mrs. Dorothy Frances Buxton,
in a very clear and almost pressingly persuasive book, You and the
Refugee (Penguin Books, 1939), argue for a practically unrestrained
admission of these outcasts. They show in particular how beneficial
a large refugee immigration might be to the British Empire. It
would bring in new trades, new skill, find fresh work for the
unemployed, and in Great Britain arrest the approaching decline in
population if that is desirable. Their plea for a more generous
treatment of refugees, so far as assimilable individuals are con-
cerned, is unanswerable.

But our authors* arguments- for an inassimilable immigration en
bloc are less convincing. That would only renew the trouble at a
later, date. There is no time to begin that old history again in new
regions and among fresh difficulties. Disaster is advancing too rapidly
upon our entire species. Jewish nationalism like every other nation-
alism must end and end soon. And even though the plea of existing
unemployment is an irrational social barrier to assimilable immi-
grants, it is, in a country where the sense of social insecurity is
growing, where confidence in the intelligence and good faith of the
government is diminishing, and where large masses of the popula-
tion, and especially the accumulation of untrained and unemployed

NOTES 261

young men, see no dear prospect of a tolerable life ahead, none the
less a barrier. Implicitly the British authorities admit: **We do not
know how to handle our own people, we are getting more and more
bothered by everything and if these people come into our muddle,
there is bound to be serious trouble." And so in effect they give
them up to destruction, not outrageously and openly as the Germans
do, but by looking in the opposite direction, and delaying action.

In a scientifically organized, forward-looking social order, there
will be no people unemployed and there will be no difficulty what-
ever in the movement of population from point to point. The whole
world will be everyman's and the fullness thereof. The bare possi-
bility of such a rational order sustains whatever hope there is for
mankind in this present survey of the human outlook. But this
world we are living in is not a rational world and the harsh reality
we have to face when we cast the Jewish horoscope is this dosing-up
of the avenues of escape.

Already in the past year or so, a multitude, scores and possibly
hundreds of thousands, must have been done to death. And still
it goes on. . .

In You and the Refugee, however, I came upon one passage that
affected me very disagreeably and I think I ought to say a word
about it here. It is too germane to this discussion to omit:

"Not all Jews are Zionists, but all Jews will resent the letting
down of Zionists, the surrender of Zionists ta Arab terrorism. And
their resentment will be world-wide. We do not perhaps realize the
possible repercussions.

"The power of world Jewry is moral the power of journalists,
writers, dramatists, scientists. It is worth while for an Empire as
gravely menaced as the British to have that power on its side." . . .

That is a threat and a very evil and embittering threat. Happily
it is not made by Jews but by two overofficious Gentile champions
on their behalf, I do not see things from the Imperialist standpoint
.. of these authors. I think the British Empire has outlived its useful-
ness. But the consolidation of the English-speaking people as the
vehide of a world civilization is quite another matter, and a matter
of great urgency. Yet unless the British government does what it

262 THE FATE OF MAN

is told ia Palestine, the Chosen People, we are told, will devote
themselves to preventing that consolidation. I think that is a very un-
happy suggestion indeed. It does no justice to the intellectual quality
of Israel. I doubt if any representative Jewish writer could be quoted
in support of it. But it is exactly what the Jews are accused of doing
by their worst enemies- My first reaction to it, until I realized that this
dream of vindictive sabotage was a purely Gentile invention, was
acute resentment and anger. I believe these two authors would be wise
to take that tactless and unjustifiable passage out of any further
editions of their well-intentioned book.

Note BA. "We Catholics acknowledge readily, without any
shame, nay with pride, that Catholicism cannot be identified simply
and wholly with primitive Christianity, nor even with the Gospel
of Christ, in the same way that the great oak cannot be identified
with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical identity, but an organic
identity. And we go further and say that thousands of years hence
Catholicism will probably be even richer, more luxuriant, more
manifold in dogma, morals, law and worship, than the Catholicism
of the present day. A religious historian of the fifth millennium
AJJ. will without difficulty discover in Catholicism conceptions and
forms and practices which derive from India, China and Japan, and
he will have to recognize a far more obvious 'complex of opposites/
It is quite true, Catholicism is a union of contraries. But 'contraries
are not contradictories/ . . . The Gospel of Christ would have been
no living gospel, and the seed which He scattered no living seed, if
it had remained ever the tiny seed of A,D. 33, and not struck root,
and had not assimilated foreign matter, and had not by the help of
this foreign matter grown up into a tree, so that the birds of the air
dwell in its branches." Professor Karl Adam, The Spirit of Cathol-
icism (1938).

For reasons I have made perfectly clear in this book, I do not
believe there will be any Roman Catholic Church at all in the fifth
millennium A.D., but (see 18) it is amusing to speculate how
the successors of Professor Karl Adam, long before then, would
have plaited into the Trinity that God of Male Sex Appeal from
whose left eye sprang the Sun Goddess, while he blew Susa-no-o,

NOTES 263

the dragon-slaying Susa-no-o, from his nose. It is, I agree, not at all
improbable, given the survival and continual growth of the Church.
Morgan Young, in the book I have cited in the text, tells that
the great assimilation prophesied by Professor Karl Adam has
already begun. The crude early Christians, still in the "acorn" phase,
preferred martyrdom to burning a pinch of incense to the Roman
God-Emperors, but the more catholic-spirited Church of today has
already established friendly relations with the Shinto faith, Japan
and Rome have exchanged envoys, and the Japanese Catholic bows
in the Shinto temples in acquiescence to the local supremacy of the
Emperor-Divinity over the Vatican.

Note 23 A. Sir Arthur's Epilogue begins: "Shall we never pluck
the best from fate and find the Golden Mean? Must we ever choose
freedom without order, or order without freedom? Must justice
and mercy bring always weakness in their train, and strength bring
tyranny?

"Shall Peace be never made between equals, but imposed always
by victor upon vanquished? Must every peace treaty sow the seeds
of future war? Shall the strong never be magnanimous and the
weak never secure justice? Must success always sap the will, and the
humiliation of defeat incite only to revenge? Shall wars with chang-
ing victors be for ever the dire fate of men?

"We, the free democracies of the world, have the virtues bred and
nursed in the pursuits of peace. That is not enough. We need also
the sterner virtues fortitude, daemonic energy, the will to act-
and to act together." (p. 385.)

". . . willing cooperation and the endurance which is only possible
to an instructed people who understand the purpose of their effort
and approve it." (p. 384.) Sir Arthur Salter, Security. Can We
Retrieve It? (1939).

END OP THE NOTES

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