Towards the Great Peace Part 1

Towards the Great Peace.

by Ralph Adams Cram.

INTRODUCTION

For the course of lectures I am privileged to deliver at this time, I desire to take, in some sense as a text, a prayer that came to my attention at the outset of my preparatory work. It is adapted from a prayer by Bishop Hacket who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century, and is as follows:

_Lord, lift us out of Private-mindedness and give us Public souls to work for Thy Kingdom by daily creating that Atmosphere of a happy temper and generous heart which alone can bring the Great Peace._

Each thought in this n.o.ble aspiration is curiously applicable to each one of us in the times in which we fall: the supersession of narrow and selfish and egotistical "private-mindedness" by a vital pa.s.sion for the winning of a Kingdom of righteousness consonant with the revealed will of G.o.d; the lifting of souls from nervous introspection to a height where they become indeed "public souls"; the accomplishing of the Kingdom not by great engines of mechanical power but by the daily offices of every individual; the subst.i.tution in place of current hatred, fear and jealous covetousness, of the unhappy temper and "generous heart" which are the only fruitful agencies of accomplishment.

Finally, the "Great Peace" as the supreme object of thought and act and aspiration for us, and for all the world, at this time of crisis which has culminated through the ant.i.thesis of great peace, which is great war.

I have tried to keep this prayer of Bishop Hacket's before me during the preparation of these lectures. I cannot claim that I have succeeded in achieving a "happy temper" in all things, but I honestly claim that I have striven earnestly for the "generous heart," even when forced, by what seem to me the necessities of the case, to indulge in condemnation or to bring forward subjects which can only be controversial. If the "Great War," and the greater war which preceded, comprehended, and followed it, were the result of many and varied errors, it matters little whether these were the result of perversity, bad judgment or the most generous impulses. As they resulted in the Great War, so they are a detriment to the Great Peace that must follow, and therefore they must be cast away. Consciousness of sin, repentance, and a will to do better, must precede the act of amendment, and we must see where we have erred if we are to forsake our ill ways and make an honest effort to strive for something better.

For every failure I have made to achieve either a happy temper or a generous heart, I hereby express my regret, and tender my apologies in advance.

TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE

I

A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

For two thousand years Christianity has been an operative force in the world; for more than a century democracy has been the controlling influence in the public affairs of Europe and the Americas; for two generations education, free, general and comprehensive, has been the rule in the West. Wealth incomparable, scientific achievements unexampled in their number and magnitude, facile means of swift intercommunication between peoples, have all worked together towards an earthly realization of the early nineteenth-century dream of proximate and unescapable millennium. With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama. Man was master of all things, and the failures of the past were obliterated by the glory of the imminent event.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein, everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was tried as by fire, and each failed--save the indestructible qualities of personal honour, courage and fort.i.tude. Nothing corporate, whether secular or ecclesiastical, endured the test, nothing of government or administration, of science or industry, of philosophy or religion. The victories were those of individual character, the things that stood the test were not things but _men._

The "War to end war," the war "to make the world safe for democracy"

came to a formal ending, and for a few hours the world gazed spellbound on golden hopes. Greater than the disillusionment of war was that of the making of the peace. There had never been a war, not even the "Thirty Years' War" in Germany, the "Hundred Years' War" in France or the wars of Napoleon, that was fraught with more horror, devastation and dishonour; there had never been a Peace, not even those of Berlin, Vienna and Westphalia, more cynical or more deeply infected with the poison of ultimate disaster. And here it was not things that failed, but _men._

What of the world since the Peace of Versailles? Hatred, suspicion, selfishness are the dominant notes. The nations of Europe are bankrupt financially, and the governments of the world are bankrupt politically.

Society is dissolving into cla.s.ses and factions, either at open war or manoeuvering for position, awaiting the favourable moment. Law and order are mocked at, philosophy and religion disregarded, and of all the varied objects of human veneration so loudly acclaimed and loftily exalted by the generation that preceded the war, not one remains to command a wide allegiance. One might put it in a sentence and say that everyone is dissatisfied with everything, and is showing his feelings after varied but disquieting fashion. It is a condition of unstable equilibrium constantly tending by its very nature to a point where dissolution is apparently inevitable.

It is no part of my task to elaborate this thesis, and still less to magnify its perils. Enough has been said and written on this subject during the last two years; more than enough, perhaps, and in any case no thinking person is unaware of the conditions that exist, whatever may be his estimate of their significance, his interpenetration of their tendency. I have set myself the task of trying to suggest some constructive measures that we may employ in laying the foundations for the immediate future; they may be wrong in whole or in part, but at least my object and motive are not recrimination or invective, but regeneration. Nevertheless, as a foundation the case must be stated, and as a necessary preparation to any work that looks forward we must have at least a working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need redemption were brought about. I state the case thus, therefore: That human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came with the fall of cla.s.sical civilization and from which five centuries were necessary for the process of recovery. Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the c.u.mulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repet.i.tion of history. How has this been possible, what has been the sequence of events that has brought us to this pa.s.s?

It is of course the result of the interaction of certain physical, material facts and certain spiritual forces. Out of these spiritual energies come events, phenomena that manifest themselves in political, social, ecclesiastical transactions and inst.i.tutions; in wars, migrations and the reshaping of states; in codes of law, the organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.

In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.

Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this developed around the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of slavery: Persia, a.s.syria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves. All the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science, letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society, was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. But freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when the body is in bondage. The slaves of antiquity were free neither in body nor in soul, but with the coming of Christianity all this was changed, for it is one of the great glories of the Christian religion that it gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give freedom to the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire, and with the infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery gradually disappeared, and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real liberty existed as the product of Christianity and under its protection.

Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the n.o.bles, to the King, and so to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the lines of demarcation were fluid and easily pa.s.sed, and as through the Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind, and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were recognized, accepted and enforced.

This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to 1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile cla.s.s, now reduced to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a degree of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized status, the like of which had never been seen before. It was not a bourgeoisie, for it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan, craft, art, mechanic; a great free society, the proudest product of Christian civilization.

With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build up their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the rest of society; a servile cla.s.s, the proletariat, enormously increased in proportion to the other social components; and two new cla.s.ses, one the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically disappeared.

What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders, managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down and down in the ma.s.s of submerged proletariat, losing liberty, degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient ma.s.s, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself.

I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and its present catastrophe: the great, predominant, central body of free men during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie, and the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat. They are factors of great significance and potential force.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial revolution began. Within the s.p.a.ce of an hundred years came all the revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny, had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had wrecked the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the guiding and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear for a new dispensation.

What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.

To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be available in large quant.i.ties and freely subject to exploitation; that unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.

The conditions of the time made all these possible. The land-holding peasantry of England--and it is here that the revolution was accomplished--had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer gave employment to the ma.s.s of field labourers. The first blast of factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers, smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great ma.s.s of men, women, and children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.

Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue. The exploits of the "joint-stock companies" invented and perfected in the eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained, while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical inhibition against usury. The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of the triumphant achievements of the last century.

The question of markets was more difficult. It was clear that, through machinery, the exploitation of labour, and the manipulations of finance, the product would be enormously greater than the local or national demand. Until they themselves developed their own industrial system, the other nations of Europe were available, but as this process proceeded other markets had to be found; the result was achieved through advertising, i.e., the stimulating in the minds of the general public of a covetousness for something they had not known of and did not need, and the exploiting of barbarous or undeveloped races in Asia, Africa, Oceanica. This last task was easily achieved through "peaceful penetration" and the preempting of "spheres of influence." In the end (i.e., A.D. 1914), the whole world had so been divided, the stimulated markets showed signs of repletion, and since exaggerated profits meant increasing capital demanding investment, and the improvement in "labour-saving" devices continued unchecked, the contest for others'

markets became acute, and world-politic was concentrated on the vital problem of markets, lines of communication, and tariffs.

As for the finding or development of competent organizers and directors, the history of the world since the end of medievalism had curiously provided for this after a fashion that seemed almost miraculous. The type required was different from anything that had been developed before. Whenever the qualitative standard had been operative, it was necessary that the leaders in any form of creative action should be men of highly developed intellect, fine sensibility, wide and penetrating vision, n.o.bility of instinct, pa.s.sion for righteousness, and a consciousness of the eternal force of charity, honour, and service.

During the imperial or decadent stages, courage, dynamic force, the pa.s.sion for adventure, unscrupulousness in the matter of method, took the place of the qualities that marked the earlier periods. In the first instance the result was the great law-givers, philosophers, prophets, religious leaders, and artists of every sort; in the second, the great conquerors. Something quite different was now demanded--men who possessed some of the qualities needed for the development of imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new industrial-financial-commercial regime, the leaders must be shrewd, ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a n.o.ble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. This aristocracy was an accepted and indispensable part of society, and it was always more or less the same in principle, and always the centre and source of leadership, without which society cannot endure. It is true that at the hands of Christianity it acquired a new quality, that of service as contingent on privilege--one might almost say of privilege as contingent on service--and the ideals of honour, chivalry, compa.s.sion were established as its object and method of operation even though these were not always achieved, but the result was not a new creation; it was an inst.i.tution as old as society, regenerated and transformed and playing a greater and a n.o.bler part than ever before.

Between the years 1455 and 1795 this old aristocracy was largely exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the ma.s.sacres of the Reformation, and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the natural and actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty Years' War the older feudal n.o.bility had largely disappeared, while the cla.s.s of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. In France, until the fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily, but on a different basis and from a different cla.s.s from anything known before. Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership; distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage, honour, fealty--these, in general, had been the ground for admission to the ranks of the aristocracy. In general, also, advancement to the ranks of the higher n.o.bility was from the cla.s.s of "gentlemen," though the Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages, wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.

Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a cla.s.s that from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil slaughter, and a.s.sa.s.sination, the pressure on the great ma.s.s of men (peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower cla.s.ses") was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy, further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling sh.e.l.l burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an age-long rage against the age-long dominating cla.s.s, together with the instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.

As a cla.s.s, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved definite status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure, the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however; absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him. By 1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle Ages and made the peasant cla.s.s practically outlaw, while breaking down its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling cla.s.s.

Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force of modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities, and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the world.

Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed in the personalities and the actions of the Const.i.tutional Convention of the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.

The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically different in their antecedents, their protagonists, their modes of operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same _milieu_ that was responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at the expense of the great ma.s.s of their blood-brothers, others of the same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in new schemes, of government, which would take all power away from the cla.s.s that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the hands of the emanc.i.p.ated proletariat. This new model was called then, and is called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish between democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I should have used a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply distinguished between republicanism and democracy, for this is what it amounts to. The former is as old as man, and is part of the "pa.s.sion for perfection" that characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the chief difference between brute and human nature; it means the guaranteeing of justice, and may be described as consisting of abolition of privilege, equality of opportunity, and utilization of ability. Democracy of method consists in a variable and uncertain sequence of devices which are supposed to achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a matter of fact have thus far usually worked in the opposite direction. The activity of this movement synchronizes with the pressing upward of the "the ma.s.ses" through the dissolving crust of "the cla.s.ses," and represents their contribution to the science of political philosophy, as the contribution of the latter is current "political economy."

It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the case of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue of which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working out of these two great devices of the new force released by the destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why, when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further continuance.

A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate.

Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of western Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity. Sooner here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial, commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of society, becoming partners with them and following their aims, conniving at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly "free"

governments had become as identified with "special privilege," and as widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they failed consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and efficiency of operation.

For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican system until at last, during the same first decade of the present century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it, whatever its outward form, whether const.i.tutional monarchy, or republic, essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist, incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of society itself.

Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law; through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life, the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very highly developed animals to experience and environment, it had given weighty support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy both in theory and in act.

Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by education; hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as between man and man because of past discrepancies in environment, opportunities, and education) could be equalized by a system of teaching that aimed to furnish that mental and physical training hitherto absent.

Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very shortly this became the firm conviction of the great ma.s.s of men, and the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized, state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between one man and another.

In another respect, however, the superst.i.tion of mechanical evolution played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the rocket rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures, even so must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood, or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable, unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to incipient or crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain dream of manifest destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of the primary gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking in its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers that threatened it then and now menace it with destruction.

When, therefore, modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July, 1914, we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry, commerce, and finance, expressing itself through highly developed specialists, and dictating the policies and practices of government, society, and education; on the other, a democracy of form which denied, combated, and destroyed distinction in personality and authority in thought, and discouraged constructive leadership in the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic spheres of activity. The opposition was absolute, the results catastrophic. The lack of competent leadership in every category of life finds a sufficient explanation in the two opposed forces, in their origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.

In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical system of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human progress, and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world. The plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events though both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise. The impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the unfortunate effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.