The nemesis of mediocrity

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AN0OVEH-HARVARD THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY
M D C C C C K

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

THE NEMESIS
OF MEDIOCRITY

By

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

LITT.D., LL.D.

BOSTON
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY

MDCCCCXVII

JAN 28 1918

ANDOVER
THeOLUuiCAL SEMQlAlf

Copyrighty igiy
By Marshall Jones Company

All rights reserved

PRINTED BY
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, V. S.

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

the nemesis of
medick:rity

*'Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that
begat us. The Lord hath wrought ^reat glor^ by them
through his ereat power from the begmning. Such as did
bear rule in their kmgdomsy men renowned for their power,
giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring
prophecies. Leaders of the people by their counsels, and
by their knowledge of learning meet for the people; wise
and eloquent in their instructions. Such as find out
musical tunes and recited verses in writing. Rich men
furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habita-
tions': All these were honourea in their generations and
were the glory of their times." — ecclesiasticus: xliv.

A LREADY the revelations of war have cast
l\ their searching and mordant light
-^ ^ on all that was brought over to us
put of the last century, and nothing is as it
seemed in those far and half mythical days
when there was no war and we maintained
a serene content well grounded on its broad
base of solid accomplishment. It was a
proud, even an august possession, this hoard
of coined wealth such as men had never
gathered before, made up as it was of all
the broad and shining counters minted out
of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolu-
tion, and with this vast reserve our solvency

[I]

1

k

on

the

est,

.ead

with

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

seemed beyond suspicion. The touch of
war is like that of the magician in the
fairy tale, and enough of the bright counters
already have turned to dried and worthless
leaves to make us wonder if in the end a
single coin may remain to us, honest gold,
undipped and undebased.

Some day the count of these revelations
will be made up, but now the tale is not fully
told, and we wait, aghast, as each day some
old truism crumbles into folly, some dogma
shows thin and evanescent, some fundamen-
tal principle of modernism reveals itself as
a superstition as groundless as those we long
ago had cast away. Meanwhile " here we
have no continuing city;" the sands slide
under our feet, and we touch nothing tan-
gible as we reach out for support in a dark-
ness that shows no sign of breaking.

Amongst these revelations there is none
more unexpected, more baffling in the fact
of its existence or broader in its ramifica-
tions, than the loss of leadership. To-day,
when men cry aloud, as never before, for
guides, interpreters, leaders, there is none to
answer ; in any category of life, issuing out of
any nation. None, that is, that matches in
power the exigency of the demand. There

[2]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

are those that honestly try to lead; there
are those that increasingly lead under the
grim schooling of war, slowly, painfully
and towards an end still obscure and unde-
termined. Arduously they struggle to build
up a following, to see the insane life of the
moment and see it whole ; to keep ahead of
the whirlwind of hell-let-loose and direct an
amazed and disordered society along paths
of ultimate safety. And always the event
outdistances them, the phantasmagoria of
chaos whirls bewilderingly beyond, and
either they follow helplessly or are sucked
into the rushing vacuum that comes in the
wake of progressive destruction. In the im-
mediate necessity of war one august general
after another receives command, plays his
part for a day, and disappears, marked by
comparative failure if not by demonstrated
incompetence. Potential reputations break
down and are forgotten, in Mesopotamia,
Gallipoli, Galicia, Roumania, the Trentino,
the Carso, Champagne, the Argonne: on
the North Sea, in the Channel, through the
Mediterranean. The battle fronts east, west,
south, bury more than the bodies of dead
soldiers, for reputations are interned with
them in a quick and merciful oblivion.

[3]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

Still, fate is a whimsical arbiter, whose
operations are unaccountable, and any day
may appear the great leaders thus far coldly
refused to the desperate and death-locked
armies, but there is little hope for a like
mercy in statesmanship. The years just be-
fore the war were tumultuous with the petty
machinations of the degenerate political and
diplomatic successors of the masterly ma-
nipulators of destiny of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Noble or cynical, they were leaders,
these men of a dead generation: Metter-
nich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck, Glad-
stone, Gambetta, Lincoln, and they have left
few successors, either to their glory or their
infamy. Can there be honest comparison be-
tween the political leaders in Great Britain
to-day and Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, Dis-
raeli and Salisbury, between the flotsam and
jetsam of French parliamentary turbulence
and Thiers, Gambetta, de Freycinet? Con-
trast the men now controlling the destinies
of Italy with those of the epoch of the Lib-
eration; match the present politicians of
Germany with those to the front from 1870
to 1895; place in one column the members
of President Wilson's Cabinet, the leaders
in Congress, the Governors of the several

[4]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

States, and in the other the American politi-
cal forces from i860 on for the space of a
generation. Whether you like them all or
not, these men of an elder age, one thing you
must concede, and that is their capacity and
their dominance as leaders.

So one might traverse the fields of reli-
gion, philosophy, literature, art, education,
matching each man who claims or is ac-
corded priority, with those of the immediate
past whose historical place is now as assured
as was their acceptance during their lives.
Long after the contemporary list finds
" finis " written beneath, the other calendar
continues until its length is greater by ten-
fold. Not only this, but there is unques-
tioned difference in quality; as between
Harmsworth and Gladstone, Bryan and
Cleveland, Benedict XV and Leo XIII,
Wells and Emerson, Ornstein and Brahms.
The leaders that once were, found their fol-
lowing through comprehension of their own
force and dominance, those that are now,
faute de mieux, and because there are no
others to lead.

Inch by inch the valleys are being filled
and the mountains brought low. More ar-
duously the man stronger than another lifts

[5]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

above the level uniformity; a few still con-
tinue, lasting over from an earlier genera-
tion, but in a year or two they also will
pass, and few indeed are rising to take their
place. Meanwhile " the hungry sheep look
up, and are not fed," for the soul of sane
man demands leadership, and in spite of aca-
demic aphorisms on Equality, a dim con-
sciousness survives of the fundamental truth
that without strong leadership democracy
is a menace; without strong leadership
culture and even civilization will pass
away.

Now as always the great mass of men look
for the master-man who can form in definite
shape the aspirations and the instincts that
in them are formless and amorphous; who
can lead where they are more than willing
to follow, but themselves cannot mark the
way; who can act as a centripetal force and
gather into potent units the diffuse atoms of
like will but without co-ordinating ability.
So great is this central human instinct (which
was not only the foundation of feudalism
but harks back to the very beginnings of
society) , that when the great leader is not re-
vealed he is invented out of the more impu-
dent element of any potential group, assur-
[6]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

ance taking the place of competence ; or opti-
mistically assumed, the most available being
dragged from his obscurity and pitched into
a position, or burdened with a task, outside
the limits of his ability — as he himself only
too often knows.

And as the supply of leaders diminishes
the more reckless becomes the desperate
choice. It is perhaps not so much that men
now reject all leadership as it is that they
blindly accept the inferior type; the spe-
cious demagogue, the unscrupulous master
of effrontery. Men follow to-day as they
always have and always will, the difference
lies in the quality of those that are followed.
In default of the leader of the old type, the
man who first saw beyond the obvious and
drew others after him by force of vision and
will and personal quality, the group, and the
super-group which we call the mob, create
their leaders in their own image, and out of
their own material. Giolitti and Caillaux,
Ramsay Macdonald, Lenine and La Follette
are the synthetic product of a mechanical
process of self-expression on the part of
groups of men without leaders, but who must
have them and so make shift to precipitate
them in material form out of the undiffer-

[7]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

entiated mass of their common inclinations,
passions and prejudices.

It is because of this that religion is no
longer marked by the dominance of figures
like St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St.
Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, or even like
Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, but rather
by the uncouth flotsam of the intellectual
underworld or the obscurantist faquirs of a
decadent Orientalism. It is because of this
that no longer a Plato or an Aristotle, a St.
Thomas Aquinas, or a Duns Scotus, a Kant,
a Descartes, or a Herbert Spencer controls
the destinies of philosophy, but semi-con-
verted novelists, jejune instructors in psy-
chology, and imperfectly developed but
sufficiently voluble journalists. It is because
of this that salutary movements like social-
ism, trades-unionism and political reform
are betrayed by the leaders that, for lack of
better, have been pitchforked into pre-emi-
nence, and who, degraded and debased by
dulness, obliquity of vision and crude in-
competence, become not a benefit but a
menace.

The argument that we are too near the
present (since we ourselves are the present)
to estimate greatness or establish our stand-

[8]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

ard of comparative values, but that another
generation will find amongst our contempo-
raries what we have missed, has no validity.
I am speaking of leadership, and leadership
is not posthumous. We knew, those of us
who entered into the activities of life about
1880, that we were "surrounded by such a
cloud of witnesses," that the world was so
rich in leadership — either for wisdom or
folly — we lacked no possible followings for
our choice, but rather were confused by the
plethora of options. There was no doubt
then that there were great men around and
about us. We were all hero-worshippers
then, and there was sufficient reason for our
worship. I have made a list of the men who
were living in 1880, all of whom were great
captains, and who would be accepted by all
as leaders of men: there are sixty of them,
and I can add another hundred of only a
little less eminence, but whose claims some
might contest. All of these hundred and
sixty "immortals" had died before 1905,
and I challenge anyone to fill a tenth of
the places they left vacant with the names,
unknown in 1 880, of men whose claim can
be unquestioned.

A generation that contains such a group

[9]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

t

as Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Ar-
nold, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Bismarck,
Disraeli, Cavour, Wagner, Browning,
William Morris, Tourgeneff, Stevenson,
Leo XIII, Cardinal Newman, Karl Marx
and von Moltke is a generation that lacks
nothing in leadership, and when is added a
further century and a half of names, all
practically of the same grade and class, we
can only look back on those astonishing
years with admiration, and then around at
our own time, with the greatest issues in a
thousand years clamouring for solution and
almost none to lead in the solving, appalled
and despairing, while we reach out blindly
for some explanation of the cataclysm that
has occurred.

There are those who will claim that
the leadership has not been lost but only
changed in direction. They will say that
the leaders are now to be found in the ranks
of applied science, of industrial exploita-
tion and organization, of high finance and
economic " efficiency." They will offer as
their contribution Edison and Marconi and
Krupp; Sage, Rockefeller, Morgan, Car-
negie and the great Hebrew financiers of Eu-
rope. They will offer Ford, Harmsworth,

[10]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

Hearst; the packers of Chicago, the mill
magnates of New England, the coal and iron
barons of Pennsylvania. Their contention
may be admitted ; the leadership exists, and
it has changed direction; the point is, how-
ever, that this leadership, while it may con-
ceivably supplement that of an earlier day
in other fields, may, under no circumstance
whatever, be assumed to serve as a substitute.
Mr. Abraham Flexner may well be held
to contribute something (its essential value
is not for the moment in question) to the
idea of education as it was expounded by
Cardinal Newman or Arnold of Rugby;
Mr. Carnegie's vision of culture is not one
that came within the purview of Emerson
or Matthew Arnold or William Morris,
while the original and varied, if not always
edifying, religious cults of the last genera-
tion open up possibilities not indicated by
Dr. Martineau or Bishop Brooks or even
Cardinal Manning. Certainly there is some-
thing in vers libre and post-impressionism
and the products of the cubist sculptors that
escapes one in Browning and Burne-Jones
and Saint-Gaudens. Considered in a supple-
mentary sense these protagonists of modern-
ism may be an extension of the principles of

[II]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

their immediate precursors (even of all an-
tecedent creators and leaders during the en-
tire range of recorded history), but when it
is assumed that they take their place the
argument needs fortifying by something
other than either the dictum itself or their
own accomplishments.

In any case the day of great leaders has
passed. If we take the Cardinal of Malines
as a standard, as one man at least who meas-
ures up to the great controlling and direct-
ing agencies of the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, we shall find it hard to pick
others to place in his class. Certainly not
the successor of Leo XIII and Innocent III,
of Gregory VII and Gregory the Great;
nor any of the present College of Cardinals.
Honour and devotion, learning and piety
are not wanting, but where is the vision,
where the qualities of command and domi-
nation, where the power and the will that
mark the captains of men? Neither from
Rome nor Moscow nor Canterbury, neither
from the Episcopal Church nor from the
Protestant denominations, comes the high
call for men to rise up and follow along the
lines revealed by clear vision and under the
dynamic force of personal leadership. Halt-

[12]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

ing and hesitant, bewildered by opportu-
nism and expediency, dumb before a crisis
beyond their powers to meet, the shepherds
and pastors of flocks already more than dec-
imated, shake in their indecision, put the
great issue to one side, and while they wait
helplessly for a time more in scale with their
abilities, turn to the old round of theological
argument and disciplinary bickerings, leav-
ing the fate of their sheep to be determined
after a fashion they cannot control, and the
humbler clergy busy themselves with paro-
chial routine or, to their honour, find on the
blazing and thundering battle fronts of all
Europe opportunity for heroic service in the
trenches and often a glorious death.

Nor in philosophy is the condition very
different. There were not wanting, in the
immediate years before the war, men of
"light and leading," though apart from
Bergson, James and Chesterton (though it
may seem strange to name the last in this
connection) , they were hardly of the calibre
of their forebears. James is dead, Bergson
almost completely silent, while Chesterton,
perhaps under the compulsion of his grave
illness, fails to meet the standard of his ear-
lier period, except perhaps in "The Crimes

[13]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

of England " and " A Short History of Eng-
land." Dr. Jacks comes well to the fore on
occasion, and Dr. Figgis and March Phil-
lips, but Bernard Shaw has silenced his phil-
osophical cynicism and Wells alone insists
on his own narrow vision, brought over from
the ante-bellum epoch, with all its mechanis-
tic formulae and indeterminate determinism.
Of all the ruined sanctuaries, that of states-
manship is the most desolate. It was suffi-
ciently laid waste in the years just before
the war, when diplomacy, degenerate and
incompetent, toiled along the dishonoured
road that led from the Congress of Berlin.
Into the coil of cynicism and trickery, Ed-
ward VII and President Cleveland brought
some elements of honesty and good sense, but
the chancelleries of Vienna, Berlin, Paris,
London, Petersburg were united in one
thing, and that their devotion to the secret,
the serpentine and the oblique. The " Bal-
ance of Power," poisonous heritage from
the Treaty of Berlin, controlled all that was
thought or done, and under its malignant
spell considerations of honour, justice and
righteousness vanished from the secret de-
liberations of the various and ever-changing
groups of inferior conspirators. Since the

[14]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

opening of the war small men, pitched neck-
and-crop into big places, have struggled
against this legacy, and with scant success.
Government in France at the opening of
the first of the Seven Seals, was a tangle
of political corruption complicated by ter-
ror of what socialism would demand next;
the prolonged crisis has produced — Briand,
and no more, a small man, strengthened by
responsibility and opportunity, who bore
himself with firmness and honesty. He has
now been deposed through the machinations
of the still operative political cabals, to give
place to the venerable but neither stimu-
lating nor convincing Ribot, the colourless
Painleve and the superannuated Clemen-
ceau. England offered Asquith, a somewhat
sinuous and agile mediocrity now smashed
by an extraordinary journalistic phenome-
non who has also been largely responsible for
Lloyd George, another small man, essentially
the middle-class demagogue of the first dec-
ade of the century, who has also been forti-
fied and chastened by the compelling force of
anonialous circumstances. With him appear
men like Churchill, still bending under the
weight of tragic fiascos, Carson, whom the
war saved from becoming a rebel and an

[15]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

outlaw, together with a numerous clan of
financiers and industrial magnates, some of
whom had already exchanged their historic
Hebraic cognomens for others associated,
if not with their own genealogy, at least
with the Norman conquest. Italy, after
getting rid of her political hucksters and
demagogues, has produced none of even
moderate distinction to take their place. In
the Balkans Jonescu and the Cretan Vene-
zelos arrived with some heralding of trum-
pets, but neither has succeeded in accom-
plishing anything in particular, and both are
now relegated to the category of geniuses
"without the enacting clause." Leaping
suddenly into the Russian limelight come
Miliukoff, Count LvoflF and Kerensky; the
revolution is effected, the exaltation of the
"Oath of the Tennis Court" is repeated,
and at once, from far down amongst the sub-
merged majority, anarchy and insane folly
rise up, insistent, not to be denied, and al-
ready their power is in eclipse, extinguished
by the rising tide of nihilism and dishonour
— leaders who could not lead.

As for the Teutonic Empires, from Kaiser
to Scheidemann there is only mediocrity
masquerading in the tarnished regalia of

[i6]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

Bismarck and Andrassy, Precariously von
Bethmann, with phantasmal Austrian nobles,
insecure Hungarian magnates and Osmanli
pashas, struggles to meet increasingly im-
possible problems at home and abroad, and
the time is not far away when the final crisis
a Bismarckmight victoriously have met, will
show them thin and evanescent, pale futili-
ties who could not lead, neither could they
control. And America? Well, when the
war broke we had three potential leaders,
the President, Colonel Roosevelt and Mr.
Bryan, together with the untried forces of
Cabinet, Congress and the State and munici-
pal governments. What had been the result
on these varied personalities of the unex-
ampled -stimulus of a world in chaos if not
in dissolution? Thus far, apart from the
President, the three and a half years of uni-
versal liquidation have neither produced a
leader unknown before nor raised the stand-
ard of individuals or of the general mass of
politicians. On the whole the average has
been lowered. If on the one hand we have
the reliable honesty and ability of men like
Senators Lodge, Borah and Williams, with
the mysterious and promising figure of
Colonel House, we find on the other the

[17]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

ominous figures of Stone, Cummins, Gronna,
Clark, Vardaman, La Follette, together with
the depressing personalities that dominate
and give its colour to the Cabinet. Outside
administration circles the reader may pick
from the several States such men as he con-
siders measure up to the old standard of
effective leadership, or even to that of the
era just preceding the war. Of the three
conspicuous figures first named, one appears
to have forfeited the position open to him
of great constructive leadership while hon-
ourably refusing to follow up the sinister
opportunities revealed in the earlier days of
the war, and has retired into an oblivion
only broken in the beginning by sheer force
of ingratiating oratory. The second strove
for a renewal of that popular confidence and
to restore that popular following he so emi-
nently deserved, and failed, though in this
failure was less of discredit to him than to
a public somewhat defective in its powers of
perception and in its standard of compara-
tive values. And the third, the most august
figure of all? Here, if anywhere to-day, is
revealed the argument against the thesis I
adduce — perhaps as the exception that
proves the rule. The most astute politician
[i8]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

America has produced since Andrew Jack-
son (if not since Jefferson), with an infal-
lible sense for apprehending the unexpressed
will of a working majority, he pursued for
three years the standard method of contem-
porary politics, gauging this will by impec-
cable instinct, making it his own, and so
becoming the acceptable type of leader who
does not lead but obediently follows on
where the majority-will indicates the way.
Then almost insensibly this method changed ;
little by little as the inclusive incapacity of
the democratic method revealed itself it was
relegated to the background while a very real
and equally constructive leadership took its
place. Step by step the advance has been
progressive and explicit; miraculously the
nation as a whole acknowledges and accepts,
while the influence of this novel and reassur-
ing leadership daily reaches further and
further into the other nations of the earth.
It is a single leadersfhip : Cabinet and Con-
gress are granted little part therein and only
the mysterious influences of unofficial and
personal advisers shyly reveal themselves
from time to time. It is a real leadership,
of the old and almost forgotten type, and in-
creasingly is it bringing coherency out of

[19]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

the debilitated confusion of democratic
methods and parliamentary incapacity that
have hampered our allies and imperilled
their cause since the beginning of the war.
And now opportunity opens before him;
opportunity not only national but world-
wide. If he wills he may become the
co-ordinating, the directing, and the con-
structive force in the world. Arbiter of De-
mocracy, re-creator of the true democracy of
ideal. The old tradition of politics, the sen-
sitive appreciation of a vacillating majority-
will and the subtle following thereof in all
its tergiversations, has been abandoned in
favour of a daring and therefore true leader-
ship prefigured by some of the finest verbal
pronouncements of high principle the Re-
public has thus far heard. The old days
when we were told of a " peace without vic-
tory," and that we as a nation had no quarrel
with the German people ; the days when we
were assured that the aims of Germany and
those of the Allies were apparently much
the same; the days of experimental adven-
tures in compromise are now very far away.
Does this mean that from now on the course
followed will be increasingly exalted, high-
spirited and courageous? It may well be;
[20]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

if so, and to that extent, the present lack of
world-leadership will be corrected.

Tested by every standard this leaders-hip
is now deficient both in quantity and quality.
To what are we to attribute this anomalous
condition? Why is it that our lack is not
only appalling when compared with those
periodical moments of the past when, as in
the eleventh century, every nation of Europe
was following leaders as amazing in number
as they were commanding in ability, but
even in contrast with the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. This was not an epoch
to which future generations will look back
with any notable degree of pride, yet it left
us a heritage of great names that, as I have
said before, reached the number of one hun-
dred and fifty, a count that could be in-
creased to two hundred if the arbitrary
quarter century I have chosen, during which
all were still living, were extended by ten
years before 1880 and by five after 1905.

The answer is simple, but it is an answer
that will be rejected with practical unanim-
ity. Democracy has achieved its perfect
work and has now reduced all mankind to a
dead level of incapacity where great leaders
are no longer either wanted or brought into

[21]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

existence, while society itself is unable, of
its own power as a whole, to lift itself from
the nadir of its own uniformity.

"The world must be made safe for de-
mocracy" is a noble phrase, but it is mean-
ingless without its corollary, "democracy
must be made safe for the world." This
latter condition does not exist. For exactly
one hundred years democracy has suffered
a progressive degeneration until it is now
not a blessing but a menace.

This categorical statement demands both
amplification and explanation. In the first
place the word " democracy " is used in its
current sense, as representing both the im-
plicit aim and the explicit result of individ-
ual and community life during the last two
generations in Great Britain, France and the
United States; and in all other countries
where any portion of the democratic system
has been put in practice, including the very
recent "republics" of Portugal, China and
Russia. It covers not only political agencies
and method's but all those other forms of ac-
tivity, such as organized religion, education
and social life, where democratic principles
and devices have been increasingly adopted.

It does not mean the real democracy,

[22]

THE NEMESIS OF MEPIOCRITY

which is the noblest ideal ever discovered
by man or revealed to him. True democ-
racy means three things : Abolition of Privi-
lege; Equal Opportunity for All; and Utili-
zation of Ability. Unless democracy
achieves these things it is not democracy,
and no matter how " progressive " its meth-
ods, how apparently democratic its machin-
ery, it may perfectly well be an oligarchy,
a kakistocracy or a tyranny. The three im-
perative desiderata named above may be
achieved under a monarchy, they may be
lost in a republic, the mechanism does not
matter. One of the chief faults with what
we call our democracy is our stolid failure
to understand that there is a democratic ideal
and a democratic method, that there is not
necessarily any connection between the two,
and that generally speaking the democratic
method (unstable, constantly changing its
form) is incapable of accomplishing the
democratic ideal.

That " democracy" for which the war is
to make the world safe is of course the de-
mocracy of ideal; it could not conceivably
be the democracy of method for this had
proved itself in the two generations before
the war corrupt, incompetent and ridicu-

[23]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

lous, while during the war it has revealed
increasingly its almost sublime incapacity in
all matters where it has had a part; from
Westminster to Rome, from Washington to
Petrograd. The only thing that has thus far
saved the Allies from the utmost penalty of
their common democracy of method ha«
been the process which has proceeded every-
where of eliminating the democracy and
substituting a pure and perfectly irrespon-
sible absolutism, whether of one man or a
very small committee.

Now for the last hundred years the world
has abandoned itself to an insane devising
of new mechanical toys for the achieving
of democracy: representative government,
the parliamentary system, universal suf-
frage, the party system, the secret ballot, ro-
tation in office, the initiative, referendum
and recall, popular election of members of
upper legislative houses, woman suffrage,
direct legislation. All have failed to obtain
abolition of privilege, equal opportunity
and utilization of ability, on the contrary,
they have worked in the opposite direction,
and so far as these three things are con-
cerned, the peoples are worse off than they
were fifty years ago, While during the same

[24]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

period government and society have become
progressively more venal, less competent
and further separated from the ideals of
honour, duty and righteousness. Mean-
while so obsessed have we become by our
pursuit of new devices for obtaining democ-
racy, and by our search for nostrums to cure
the ills of our constant failures, we have
now wholly forgotten in what democracy
consists.

In the year before the war the govern-
ment of the great democracies — Great
Britain, France and the United States —
was illogical, inefficient, and widely severed
from the one object of obtaining for all men
justice and the rule of law. It was pro-
foundly cursed by the incubus of little men
in great office, by chaotic, selfish and unin-
telligent legislation, dull, stupid and fre-
quently venal administration, and by par-
tial, unscrupulous and pettifogging judicial
procedure. Everywhere the bulk of legis-
lation increased to preposterous propor-
tions as its quality degenerated. Superfi-
cial, doctrinaire, and engendered by selfish
personal interests, it ceased to command re-
spect or even obedience in proportion as it
became vacillating and insecure. Legisla-

[25]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

tive decrees, subject to sudden abrogation
or reversal, took the place of laws. With
the party system dominant (now severed en-
tirely from fundamental principle and be-
come simply the engine of spoils), demo-
cratic administrative machinery became the
obedient agency of a partizan and irrespon-
sible committee, maintaining itself through
purchased "honours," and exemption
from well-deserved penalties, in England;
through alliances with secret and equally
irresponsible cabals whose object was plun-
der of one sort or another, in France;
and through deals, spoils and "pork," in
the United States. Everywhere the standard
of personal ability sank lower and lower,
until all manner of ignorant, incapable and
frequently venal men, without culture, tra-
dition or principle, forced up from the sub-
merged strata of society, entered into the leg-
islative and executive and administrative
departments of government and took pos-
session! The kind of men rife in the
Chambre des Deputes and in the short-lived
ministries were of the same type found in
the provincial mairies, ignorant, doctrinaire,
self-sufficient, with the insolence of power
clouding even what flickerings of native in-
[26]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

telligence or honour they may have pos-
sessed. The full story of what happened in
England between the death of Gladstone
and the triumph of Lloyd George has not
yet been written, but the facts are known if
unavowed. Autocracy in its worst form, in
Byzantium, the Renaissance or the eight-
eenth century, contains no more sordid ex-
amples of base trafficking in honours, emol-
uments and privileges, while never was the
personal quality of the beneficiaries so radi-
cally unworthy and so malevolent in its in-
fluence on the State.

During the Middle Ages, when the ideal
of democracy was at its highest point, and
v/hen it was most nearly achieved, it was
held as incontrovertible that the purpose of
political organization was primarily ethical
and moral, and that its function was the
achievement of righteousness and justice.
Authority was from God, and the power
also to enforce that authority, but both were
operative only when they were used for
right ends. ^^ La dame ne le sire n'en est
seigneur se non dou dreit." Equally un-
questioned was the fact that law was not
made, but was the concrete expression of that
morality, right and justice that had grown

[27]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

with the life of the community, exactly ex-
pressing the needs of society, and with the
moral sanction of communal life behind it.
" There is no King where will rules and not
law" was the Mediaeval conviction as op-
posed to the absolutism of the Renais-
sance first expressed in theoretical form by
Macchiavelli. Finally the Middle Ages
asserted that Government was a solemn con-
tract between ruled and rulers, to be broken
by neither without the abrogation of the
contract. Treason on the part of the sov-
ereign was then as clearly recognized a pos-
sibility as treason on the part of the people.
This great ideal, the noblest man has yet
conceived in the realm of civil law, was com-
pletely destroyed by the Renaissance, and
absolutism took its place. This, having
made itself intolerable, was in its turn de-
stroyed in the latter part of the eighteenth
and the first quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, when once more the old ideals of Me-
diaeval freedom came to the front though
in a somewhat different verbal guise. The
Oath of the Tennis Court, the Declaration
of Independence, the Reform Laws of Eng-
land were all assertions of the true prin-
ciples of the real democracy, but they were
[28]

-^ -

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

destined either to fail of fulfillment or to
only a brief duration of power, partly be-
cause of the s'hattering of the sense of right
and wrong by Calvinism and other Protes-
tant phenomena, partly because their birth
coincided with an industrial development
that blotted out for the time all considera-
tions except those of material benefit and of
selfish advancement. Here and there, for
brief periods of time, righteous impulses
made operative a true democracy, but by the
middle of the century the battle had been
lost: materialism, omnipotent in its power,
invincible through its self-created energies,
was everywhere supreme, and from then on
was recorded only the progressive develop-
ment of a conscienceless material imperial-
ism, the incessant invention of new and al-
ways unsuccessful machines for the obtain-
ing of the old democratic ideals, the growth,
through rage and impotence at the solemn
mockery, of violent and revolutionary prop-
aganda along nihilistic, anarchistic or so-
cialistic lines, and finally the* apotheosis of
inefliciency, injustice and unrighteousness
that held the democracies of the world when
the Teutonic Powers made their desperate
but perfectly logical attempt to establish the

[29]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

hegemony of Europe under the dominion of
efficiency, materialism and force.

That very wise Frenchman, Emile
Faguet, has said, "The sum and substance
of the Revolution was to substitute for
'Votre Majeste' 'Votre Majorite.'" The
absolutism and the tyranny remained, only
its habitat and its personality were changed.
Something however was lost, and that the
possibility that legislation and the execution
of the laws might sometimes approach in-
telligence and efficiency. In another place
the same author says : " Our examination of
modern democracy has brought us to the
following conclusions. The representation
of the country is reserved for the incom-
petent and also for those biassed by passion,
who are doubly incompetent. The rep-
resentatives of the people want to do
everything themselves. They do every-
thing badly and infect the government and
the administration with their passion and
incompetence."

Democratic government for the last
twenty-five years has neither desired nor
created leaders of an intellectual or moral
capacity above that of the general mass of
voters, and when by chance these appear

[30]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY .

they are abandoned for a type that is not of
the numerical average but below it, and the
standard has been lowering itself steadily
for a generation. The strong man, strong
of mind, of will, of moral sense, the man
born to create and to lead, now seeks other
fields for his activity, or rather one field
alone, and that the domain of "big busi-
ness " and finance. Here at least he finds
scope for his force and will and leadership,
even if the opportunities to use his moral
sense to advantage leave something to be
desired. The world no longer wants or
knows how to use statesmen, philosophers,
artists, religious prophets and shepherds,
but rather " captains of industry," directors
of "high finance," "efliciency experts,"
shrewd manipulators of popular opinion
through journalism, or of popular votes
through primaries, political conventions,
and the legislative chambers of representa-
tive government. Here also the demand
creates the supply.

Tributary to this demand is the current
system of popular education, probably the
worst ever devised so far as character-mak-
ing is concerned. Secularized, eclectic, vo-
cational and intensive educational systems

[31]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

do not educate in any true sense of the word,
while they do not develop character but
even work in the opposite direction. The
concrete results of popular education, as this
has been conducted during the last genera-
tion, have been less and less satisfactory both
from the point of view of culture and that
of character, and the product of schools and
colleges tends steadily towards a lower and
lower level of attainment. Why anything
else should be expected is hard to see. The
new education, with religion and morals
ignored except under the aspect of archae-
ology; with Latin and Greek superseded,
and all other cultural studies as well ; with
logic, philosophy and dialectic abandoned
for psychology, biology and "business ad-
ministration"; the new education with its
free electives and vocational training, and
its apotheosis of theoretical and applied sci-
ence (a glory and a dominion mitigated
only by the insidious penetration of semi-
professional athletics) — this new educa-
tion was conceived and put in practice for
the chief purpose of fitting men for the sort
of life that was universal during the elapsed
years of the present century, and this life
had no place for pre-eminence, no use for

[32]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

leadership, except in the categories of busi-
ness, applied science and finance. It did its
work to admiration, and the result is before
us in the shape of a society that has been
wholly democratized, not by filling in the
valleys and lifting the malarial swamps of
the submerged masses, but by a levelling of
all down to their own plane.

The disappearance of religion as a vital
force in human life and society, during the
last century, has been a very potent agency
in urging political, educational and in-
dustrial democracy towards its final tri-
umph, and in fixing the manacles of capital-
ism and industrial slavery on the world.
Since the Reformation religion has been
only a dissolving tradition, without any real
force or potency in and over society. For
individuals it has, from time to time, pos-
sessed all its old energy: over them it has
exerted all its old influence, and just as great
saints, confessors and even martyrs have shed
their glory over the last century as at any
time in the past. But since the Reformation
religion has gone back to the catacombs
whence Constantine had drawn it fifteen
centuries ago: it is now the precious pos-
session of the individual, hidden, cloistered,

[33]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

fearful of coming to the light. As a domi-
nating influence over states, as a controlling
power in diplomacy, business, politics, phi-
losophy, education, art, or over communi-
ties as such, it is now, and has been for a
long time, a negligible factor.

This is true as well of Catholicism as of
Protestantism. For generations at a time
it has been the effective moral and spiritual
guardian of nations, and while this was true
civilization flourished as neither before nor
since. The Renaissance destroyed the claim
of the Church, as it was then, to such moral
and spiritual leadership, and the Reforma-
tion and Revolution destroyed the fact. For
a time, as a result of the Counter- Reforma-
tion, something of the old leadership was
restored in all its plenitude, where Protes-
tantism had not taken effect, but little by
little it surrendered to the new spirit in the
world, until now it is not only impotent
amongst the nations, it is as well conditioned
by the same considerations of materialism
and opportunism and a false democracy, as
Protestantism, industrialism and the capi-
talistic-scientific state. The Church still
carries in petto all that was ever her pos-
session, including infinite possibilities of

[34]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

beneficent iaction and influence; at present,
however, this is inoperative, and with the
rest of the world she stands hesitant and
difl[ident, rejected by the majority of men,
ignored by states and denied even the form
of leadership.

Democracy in government and democ-
racy in education have each played their
part in the destruction of leadership and
the establishing of the reign of mediocrity.
There is yet a third aspect, or rather result,
of the same force, which may perhaps prove
in the end the most significant of all, and
that is the democratization of society by the
breaking down of the just and normal bar-
riers of race, first through the so-called
"melting pot" process, second through the
substitution of the mongrel for the product
of pure blood by reason of the free and reck-
less mixing of incompatible strains. From
the beginning of modern democracy it has
been with its adherents a cardinal point of
faith that a "free country" should set no
limits to immigration of any race, class or
degree of cultural development. It is
equally a dogma that under a true democ-
racy there is no discrimination possible be-
tween individuals on the score of difference

[35]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

in race, blood or status, and that therefore
no restrictions should be recognized or es-
tablished which would control or limit
absolute freedom of union in marital rela-
tions and the legal procreation of children.
The nineteenth century superstition,
erected by the doctrinaire protagonists of
" evolution," that human progress was both
automatic and constant, through the acqui-
sition of new qualities by education, the
force of environment, and "natural selec-
tion," has been the scientific justification
for the supposedly " democratic " principle
of free immigration and free mating. Were
the theory demonstrably true it would indeed
negative the chief arguments for the scrupu-
lous recognition and preservation of race
values both in marriage and control of im-
migration. If character is determined by
education and environment, and is trans-
mitted in substance generation after genera-
tion, the question is manifestly only one of
enough education, of the right kind, and dis-
tributed with sufficient generality. Mongol
and Slovak, Malay and Hottentot stand on
the same plane with Latin and Saxon and
Celt, for it is merely a question of educa-
tion, environment and continued breeding;

[36]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

good is cumulative, automatically trans-
mitted, and time is the answer to all.

On this superstition has been erected the
great modern system of universal state
education. With a mechanical exactness it
has failed to produce appreciable results.
State education, secularized, standardized,
compulsory, has left native character un-
touched, furnishing only a body of faculties,
used to good ends if such was the character-
predisposition of the individual, for base
ends if this race or family predisposition so
determined. Nor is there any evidence
whatever that what the father acquires the
son inherits. It is a commonplace of sociol-
ogy that the American-born son of the for-
eign-born immigrant of a decadent race or
inferior blood who himself had reacted to
the stimulus of a new environment and un-
precedented educational opportunities, is
not in general an advance over his progeni-
tor either in character or capacity, but rather,
however great his educational acquirement,
a retrogression and a return to type.

Empirical "science" of the nineteenth
century yields to the more exact science of
the twentieth century, and it is now ad-
mitted that acquired characteristics are not

[37]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

heritable. That which persists is some in-
delible quality of blood or of race, modified
by the conjunction of two germ plasms in
generation; while new species are not the
result of the building up of one characteris-
tic added to another by inheritance and the
process of " natural selection " and the " sur-
vival of the fittest," but of some cataclysmic
action the nature and source of which no
scientist has determined or dared to assume.

With the breakdown of this once popular
theory, the factor of blood becomes no longer
negligible and the doctrine of the omnipo-
tence of education and environment falls
to the ground, yet we still continue debauch-
ing race by free movement of peoples
through immigration, and by unrestrained
mating amongst men and women of alien
racial qualities. In large sections of Amer-
ica society is now completely mongrel, and
the same is true of portions of Europe
where the process is of increasing force.
Through uncontrolled alliances the same
thing is happening in blood, and appar-
ently the whole world is about to repeat
what already has happened in Russia, the
Balkans and Central America.

The appeal of the eugenist to biology and

[38]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

the testimony of botany and zoology is dan-
gerous when carried too far — as it gener-
ally is — for it leaves out of account the ele-
ment of the soul, which is a factor that
enters into the human consideration and is
not operative in the case of plants and beasts.
For those who deny its existence except as
a biological product of the working of
purely physical forces, the democratic prin-
ciple of the free movement, intercourse and
mating of peoples of every known blood,
race and status can only appear the blackest
and most imbecile crime in the human cal-
endar. Continued for another generation
or two the result can only be universal mon-
grelism and the consequent end of culture
and civilization. Cross-fertilization and
the producing of special and higher types
thereby is a perfectly artificial process, and
however brilliant the result in the first in-
stance the tendency of reversion to type is
inexorable. Either the result is a hybrid
without power of propagation, or a precari-
ous phenomenon tending inevitably towards
a retrogression that in a few generations
comes back to the normal type.

Nor is the situation much better when re-
garded from the standpoint of those who

[39]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

postulate of each individual a spiritual fac-
tor that is not the product of biological proc-
esses but is something of a different nature
added thereto. This element in the human
entity works towards the negativing or
amelioration of the conditions consequent
on the predispositions determined by hered-
ity — race factors, blood tendencies, new
inclinations that are the result of the com-
bining of two different sets of parental char-
acteristics — and towards the utilization of
the possibilities inherent in education and
environment. It is, however, not omnipo-
tent; it is conditioned by the nature of the
various forces with which it deals, and it
can rise superior to them only when it calls
into play the energy of those kindred spirit-
ual forces that exist, are universally avail-
able, and are the only sure instrument of
victory over the gravitational pull of a pre-
determined natural handicap. Recognition
of, and reliance on, these remedial factors
decrease in inverse ratio to their necessity,
and thi-s is true both of the individual and
the community as a whole. The time comes
for both when the power of the degenerative
forces becomes so great through poverty of
blood, hybridization of race and depravity

[40]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

of status, that the energy of the spiritual fac-
tor is negatived, and the individual or the
community or the race declines, completes
the final surrender, and fails, disappearing
in ignominy and oblivion. There is no
tragedy greater than that of the human soul
full of the promise and potency and desire
of good things, imprisoned in the forbid-
ding circle of mongrel blood, inimical
inheritance and pernicious environment
against which it desperately rebels, but from
which there is no possibility of escape ex-
cept through the power of supernatural
assistance on which it no longer possesses
the impulse or the will to call.

Democracy of method then, not democ-
racy of ideal, has not only failed to attain
the supreme objects for which, in its protean
forms, it has been devised, it has as well
brought into existence a system that has
practically eliminated sane, potent and con-
structive leadership and has therefore be-
trayed society, involving it in a profound
mediocrity which now confronts that fate
which always follows identical progress in
other categories of the organic world, —
reversion to type and ultimate sterility.

And so we stand to-day where the Great

[41]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

War has revealed us, peoples without lead-
ers; helpless, inefficient and, barring the
miracle of redemption through bitter chas-
tizement, hurrying on to anarchy or slavery
as the fortunes of war may determine. The
true democracy of St. Louis, Edward I
and Washington is forgotten and a false
democracy has taken its place, ertiploy-
ing the old shibboleths but ignoring the
thing itself, while inventing one new device
after another to serve as a red herring drawn
across the trail pursued implacably by the
ever-increasing numbers of those who see
the inefficiency and deceitfulness of it all,
and maintain their pursuit so that in the end
they may establish what is to them democ-
racy pure and simple, but is in fact its
reductio ad absurdum.

Whatever the issue of the war there is for
the world neither release from intolerable
menace nor yet a proximate salvation. The
war that is redeeming myriads of souls
leaves the organic system of society, both ma-
terial and spiritual, untouched. Were peace
to come to-morrow, after a brief period of
readjustment life would go on much as
before, with industrialism supreme and
capitalism versus proletarianism the condi-

[42]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

tioning clauses of its unstable equilibrium;
with the parliamentary system still in vogue,
and all this means of incapacity, opportu-
nism and the political survival of the unfit;
with religion in a condition of heresy against
heresy and all against a thin simulacrum of
Catholicity; with philosophy still clinging
to the shreds and tatters of evolution or re-
modelling itself on the plausible lines of an
intellectualized materialism; with the mon-
grelizing of blood and community going
steadily forward, and with education prowl-
ing through the ruins of scientific determin-
ism, and struggling ever to build out of its
shreds and shards some new machine that
will make even more certain the direct ap-
plication of scholastic results to the one prob-
lem of wealth production — with educa-
tion failing as before to produce leaders to
fill a demand that no longer exists.

The best that one can say, if peace really
comes again and man returns once more to
his old ways of life, is that this return will
be for the briefest of periods. The war is
only the first of a series, for one war alone
cannot undo the cumulative errors of five
centuries. Either after a year or two for
the taking of breath, or merging into it with-

[43]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

out appreciable break, will come the second
world-wide convulsion, the war for the revo-
lutionizing of society, which will run its long
and terrible course in the determined effort
to substitute for our present industrial sys-
tem of life (in itself perhaps the worst man
has devised) something more consonant
with the principles of justice. And the
third, which may also follow immediately
after the second, or merge into it, or even
precede it, will be the war between the false
democracy, now everywhere in evidence,
and whatever is left of the true democracy
of man's ideal. From these three visita-
tions there is no escape. The thing we have
so earnestly and arduously built up out of
Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution,
with industrialism and scientific determin-
ism as the structural material, is not a civili-
zation at all, and it must be destroyed in
order that the ground may be cleared for
something better. At first it seemed that
one war might do the work, when we con-
sidered the glorious regeneration of France
and the heroism and self-sacrifice of all our
allies. We know better now. We can see
that the war has not touched the industrial
problem at all, nor the religious nor the

[44]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

social nor the political. Capitalist on the one
hand, proletarian on the other, when they
stop to think of themselves in either capac-
ity, are just of the same old kidney as before,
and the problem of final solution only hangs
in abeyance. The same is true of govern-
ment in France, England, America. Patri-
otism and devotion, genuine as they are in
many cases, serve only as a costume easily
laid aside, and underneath is just the same
old politician, learning nothing, forgetting
nothing. Nothing is added to the issue by
rotund phrases about the warfare for uni-
versal democracy. When nations are
blindly and half unconsciously fighting for
the last shreds of honour and liberty left
over from ah old Christian civilization,
their case is not fortified by suggestions that
they really are struggling to preserve and
extend representative government, univer-
sal suffrage or direct legislation; rather
something is taken away from a holy cause.
Great leaders could not have averted the
war, and when Lloyd George declares that
if Germany had been a democracy the war
could not have occurred, he is simply in-
dulging in the standard type of political
jargon. The issue was too great to be set

[45]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

aside by a change from imperialistic effi-
ciency to democratic incapacity.

On the other hand, it is true that men com-
petent to see clearly, capable of thinking
constructively, and with will to lead ca-
pably, might, at this juncture, make this
the last war and avert the grim terror of the
two others to come. " Mene, Tekel, Uph-
arsin " is on the wall in words of fire and
blood, and the Belshazzars of modernism
can neither understand them, nor, which is
worse, find their interpreter, therefore they
and we go on to our predestined fate.

Democracy, without the supreme leader-
ship of men who by nature or divine direc-
tion can speak and act with and by author-
ity, is a greater menace than autocracy.
Men and nations have been what they have
been, either for good or evil, not by the will
of a numerical majority but by the supreme
leadership of the few — seers, prophets,
captains of men; and so it always will be.
When, as now, the greatest crisis in fifteen
centuries overpasses the world, and society
sinks under the nemesis of universal medi-
ocrity, then we realize that the system has
doomed itself, since, impotent to produce
leaders, it has signed its own death warrant

[46]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

What we confront through democracy as
it is interpreted to-day is a degradation of
the human potential through a double dissi-
pation of energy. With no defensible stand-
ard of comparative values, all the spiritual
and mental force in men is turned towards
the realization of the unimportant, to which
accomplishment it is given with a prodigal-
ity hardly equalled in the Middle Ages
when it was lavished on the realization of
the essential. Simultaneously man has been
dissipating the stored-up energy of the
world through his mastery of thermo-
dynamics and his precarious dominion over
electrical forces, at such a rate that physical
potential has been degraded in a hundred
years more than in the preceding hundred
centuries. Of what becomes of this fabu-
lous force, what the permanent contribu-
tions may be to human life, he cares little.
It is sufficient for him to realize that he is
the arbiter of this gigantic power, and if it
is exploited and dissipated, with nothing of
lasting value to show, he cares no more than
any other type of spendthrift.

As Henry Adams has said, with cold
irony, "Neither historians nor sociologists
can afford to let themselves be driven into

[47]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

admitting that every gain of power — from
gunpowder to steam, from the dynamo to
the Daimler motor — has been made at the
cost of man's and of woman's vitality." Yet
the fact remains that this is true, and our
present deplorable estate is partly the result
of this very degradation and dissipation of
energy, which has been lavished on activi-
ties totally unproductive so far as lasting
benefits are concerned, and spread out over
a vast area where it disappears without
results.

It would seem that there is in the world
at any one time only a certain amount of
available spiritual energy, which may be
preserved and made effectively operative
through concentration, or lost through dissi-
pation, while the physical energy, stored up
out of endless ages, is limited in its original
quantity, and only added to, if at all, in a
very small degree. At the beginning of
each new era this spiritual force is precipi-
tated in the form of great leaders who trans-
late it, and transmit it in available form (and
directed toward productive ends) to the
general mass of men. Later, the specific
era having reached its meridian, the leaders
pass as the prophets before them, and the

[48]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

force once concentrated in them, and made
operative, spreads thin and ineffective, and
at last is dissipated through the general
mass of men. At the end the prodigal ma-
jority, having wasted its inherited substance
in riotous living, falls into puerile contests
and finally destroys itself, and another era
takes its place in history to the accompani-
ment of war and anarchy. So Greece lost
its leaders and squandered its intellectual
heritage; so Rome dissipated its Imperial
force and succumbed to barbarism; so Me-
diaevalism played fast and loose with its
spiritual capital, and so modernism is now
wasting all it had inherited from these three
antecedent periods, and prepares to take its
place with antiquity.

From the earliest Renaissance, great men
in whom were concentrated the dynamic
force of a crescent era, built up the impos-
ing and consistent thing called modernism.
Great men transformed this into the terms of
industrial civilization, when they had given
their commanding abilities to the discovery
and the utilization of the latent physical
forces inherent in the world, hitherto un-
touched by antecedent generations. Then
they ceased, almost by a cataclysmic cutting-

[49]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

off, and little men, little in spirit and crafty
rather than creative, took into their hands the
carrying out of the last phase of epochal de-
velopment — the establishing of the hegem-
ony of the world on a basis of physical and
intellectual force from which the last ele-
ments of morality had been purged away.
Little men, blinded, puzzled and appalled,
met the crisis as best they could, and for
three years the world has been plunged in
carnage and destruction, while military,
political and psychological blunders have
.followed each other in a witches' sabbath
of incapacity.

And now the victory of the shrewd, cyni-
cal and definitely immoral forces, so long
held impossible even in thought, is more
clearly indicated than at any time since the
Battle of the Marne. The exploits of
Russia in its efforts to make the " world safe
for democracy" may very well prove the
determining factor. A miracle is of course
possible, but at present not predicable. A
Napoleon there, a Charlemagne in France,
a Washington here, even a Cromwell in
England, migfht avert the nemesis of medi-
ocrity, but a Kerensky, a Painleve, a Lloyd
George does not fill the bill. With a Ger-

[50]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

man victory and a German peace, modern-
ism, supreme over all the world, may es-
tablish a regime of mechanistic efficiency.
Imperial, Godless, temporally superb, but
without real leaders, it can only prove an
interlude of plausibility, a preface to sud-
den degeneration, and the chaos of the end
of the century, when the world-slavery of
Teutonistic modernism goes down to its
final ruin, will leave the record of the
present war as that of a mere rehearsal.

And if the miracle happens; if the leader
comes who can shatter the Brumagem eflSi-
ciency of Prussia, and so the world is saved
from a fate it richly deserves, can we say
that we have a better hope? Yes, if with
victory comes realization of what the war
means, and why it came upon us. For this
realization one of two things is necessary:
either such a spiritual regeneration of the
great mass of people, through suffering and
sorrow and privation and the bitter school-
ing of the trenches, that they will follow up
their victory over the enemy in the field by
an even greater victory over the enemy at
home in religion, philosophy and society,
purging a chastened world of the last folly
and the last wickedness of modernism; or

[51]

THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY

the coming once more of the great prophets
and captains of men who alone can lead as
their predecessors have always led, and so
build up a new life on the ruins of an old
that has passed in blood and flame and
dishonour.

If none of these things happens, if there is
a German peace, or an inconclusive " peace
through negotiation," or a victory in the
field for the Allies that is followed by no
attainment of a new vision ; if in the end the
world returns to the same system, the same
basis of judgment, the same standard of
comparative values that held before the
war — what then?

Russia already has given the answer.

[52]

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