Victory Out Of Ruin Part 3

For what we have to remember is that the crowd is by its very nature and spirit capable of crimes such as the individual autocrat would shrink from in horror. You may think that fantastic, and imagine that a crowd consists, after all, of so many individuals, and that the spirit of the crowd can only be the aggregate of the individuals comprising it. But such a view is mistaken. The corporate spirit of the crowd is not that of the units composing it. The best ill.u.s.tration of this is the sudden reeling back into the jungle of a crowd when a panic seizes them. Let the cry 'Fire' be raised in a crowded building, and though the separate individuals be of the gentlest and most considerate, yet instantly the crowd becomes daemonic, a wrestling, writhing, struggling ma.s.s trampling the weak under foot, with no thought but self-preservation.

There are various explanations. One is the law of sympathy, by which an emotion is intensified in being shared. At the first cry of peril a wave of fear pa.s.ses through the crowd; and as each looks at the faces around him he sees fear in every eye. The emotion suddenly unloosed is like a river whose source is amid the silent hills, that gathers in its course a thousand rills, until at last it sweeps in mighty floods everything before it. Before the flood of terror generated by the crowd all the decencies of civilisation vanish, and man becomes once more the animal with but the one instinct--to fight for one's life.

And it is the same with anger. Let a skilled orator set himself to rouse the pa.s.sion of a crowd, and he will soon generate a spirit that utterly obliterates the individual. Let him depict the wrongs they suffer, and anger sweeps through the mult.i.tude, bending them to the spirit of the orator as the corn field bends before the wind. Though as individuals they may tremble in their shoes before their wives, now, fused by rhetoric into one glowing ma.s.s, they are ready to loot a city, pull down a Bastille, and level an absolutist throne with the dust.

But the great explanation of the spirit of the crowd as distinct from the individual is that in the surge of contagious emotion generated by the crowd the sense of personal ident.i.ty is lost. Each only lives in the crowd. And with the loss of ident.i.ty comes the loss of personal responsibility. I no longer stand alone to be judged for my acts; it is the crowd who will be judged. The brake of personal responsibility suddenly snaps. It is thus that a crowd will commit a crime that the individual afterwards remembers with horror. Only a crowd could have said: 'His blood be on us and on our children.'

In these last years the horrors that struck a chill into the heart of the world were committed by the crowd. Suddenly in a Belgian village the cry was raised, 'We are being sniped.' Instantly the soldiers were swept by one emotion, and there rose the cry for vengeance. Then the Mayor and the priest and a handful of village notables would be gathered and shot. It was the rage and panic of a crowd seeking its own safety through brutality.

It is plain, then, that the spirit of the crowd is something far other than that of the individual, and is capable of the greatest crimes. It was the crowd that compelled Socrates to drink the hemlock; it was the crowd that overbore that poor vacillating weakling, Pilate, with their monotonous chant, 'Crucify, Crucify'; it has always been the crowd that has turned the sanctuaries into the nesting-places of owls and bats; and the rock on which humanity may make shipwreck at last is just this--the crowd. The millions of the dead have made the world safe for democracy: the appalling question now is--Who will make democracy safe for the world?

II

It is, however, only when the crowd is organised that the crowd becomes a real menace. The horrors of war are unspeakable just because they are the horrors committed by the crowd perfectly organised. A crowd that has met for no purpose, and is a mere fortuitous concourse of atoms, can do neither good nor harm. In proportion to its organisation is the peril of the crowd. The power of the crowd that committed the greatest crime in the history of the world lay in the fact that it was perfectly organised. It was there in that chilly morning with only one purpose, to cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' Across all the mists of the centuries we can see the organisers at work moving among the crowd.

They whisper to one group: 'He struck you in your property, overturning the tables of your barter; if he lives you are ruined'; and to the other: 'Remember his blasphemies: what he called himself.' ... And in the trail of the organisers arose with intenser volume the cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' It was the organised crowd that nailed the Son of Man to the cross.

The fact that confronts us to-day is that the crowd is at last perfectly organised; so perfectly organised that all the industry and transport of three kingdoms can be stopped by the flash of an electric wire. The crowd knows what it wants, and it has organised itself to get it. But the crowd to-day is not an isolated handful such as that of old in Athens or Jerusalem. The crowd is now world-wide and international. What is shouted on the banks of the Volga in the morning, at noon is shouted on the Clyde, and at the setting of the sun in New York. For the cable and the telephone and the wireless have woven humanity into one web. From the rising to the setting of the sun, slowly but steadily on the forge the international crowd is being hammered into the unity of steel.

In the old days the crowd had to storm their way into the presence of their Pilates before they could cry 'Crucify.' But to-day the organised, super-national crowd has changed all that. Now the crowd can make itself heard across half the world. It a.s.sembles on the banks of the Ganges and formulates its demands. The Turk must stay at Constantinople! If not, well, there will be trouble. There in London or Paris or Washington the modern Pilate receives his message. The cry of the crowd hums in his ears across five thousand miles. 'What shall I do with the bleeding and persecuted?' asks he. 'What is that to us?'

answers the crowd on the Ganges. And expediency gains the day as it did in Jerusalem.... And fifteen thousand crosses arise with their bleeding, agonising victims in Anatolia.... The governors of this world have had but one rule in all the ages. Instead of fixing their eyes on the stars they have gazed at the streets and have listened to the crowd.... And the organised crowd can to-day make itself heard round all the world as it cries, 'Crucify, Crucify.'

III

There is to-day one other added element in the peril of the crowd, and that is the removal of the forces that formerly restrained and curbed.

The witness of history is that only one spirit can stand up against and cast out the spirit of the crowd, and that is the spirit of religion.

I am not speaking of Christianity merely, but of religion in its generic sense. There was only one force in Jerusalem on Good Friday stronger than the thirst for blood, and that was the feeling that they, the crowd, must not defile themselves ceremonially. Only one power, religion alone, can cut the claws of the tiger in man.... In the midst of the darkest deeds the thought of G.o.d's judgment-seat has ever and again pulled humanity up.

But it is gone now--that sense of the Unseen a.s.size. Two generations ago the international crowd of the learned (for crowds are of many kinds), having discovered they could explain some processes, took it for granted that n.o.body initiated these processes. With great congratulations on the delivery of humanity from superst.i.tion, they bowed the Creator out of His universe. In so doing they thought they were ushering in a new world, where man would find deliverance from all ill through the illumined brain.... Alas! for human hopes. The learned have now gone back to the old truth--that this world is organised spirit. But the sad thing is that though it is easy to bamboozle the crowd, yet, once they are bamboozled, it pa.s.ses the wit of man to debamboozle them again. The scientific crowd bowed G.o.d out a generation ago; but to bow Him in again is beyond them. And the spirit of the crowd is left to-day without curb or chain from Siberia to Cork.

IV

There are few sadder thoughts than this--to think how the Church has thrown away the power that once it knew how to use, the mesmeric instinct of the crowd. 'In our State,' said an American, 'the devil is fighting hard against the Church!' 'Ah! in Montana it is different,'

was the reply; 'there with us, the devil is running the Church.' It would look as if it were even so. Wherever there was a crowd waiting anywhere on the ministry of the Gospel, the devil set himself to break up that crowd. He did it in ways most skilful. Had his true personality appeared, he would instantly have been cast forth. It was therefore apparelled as an angel of light that he set about the work.

He never failed to mouth high-sounding phrases. His favourite watchword was principle. It did not matter much what the principle was if only thereby the crowd could be broken up. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the evangel of Jesus, that was committed to the winds of Galilee and to a handful of peasants, was intellectualised into a ma.s.sive system of propositions that was to be for all time the test of orthodoxy. One might smile if the fountain of tears lay not here. That religion, which is like the wind blowing where it listeth, was caught at last, and embodied in legal enactments and formulas--sheltered behind statistics! Whoever heard of wind blowing through legal doc.u.ments? Build shelters and there is no more wind!

Yet these legal doc.u.ments became the test of that religion which is life and which is love. If any doubt was expressed about the use of shelters when men needed the fresh breeze from heaven--then the devil appeared and said that to abide by the shelter was a principle. n.o.body must touch or change that structure. If that be done, then those who were loyal must separate. By a discreet use of the principle of loyalty to confessions the devil broke up crowd after crowd of worshipping Christians. There was nothing that he could not use for that purpose. The doubt arose whether the all-loving Father could really send babes to everlasting torments or decree that the vast majority of mankind be tortured, for ever and ever. That was used to break up the Church. A hymn, a paraphrase, the form of a prayer, the posture at worship, a vestment--anything, everything, was good enough for the devil's purpose. By these he achieved his ends. The crowd was no longer to be found in one sanctuary. Here, where I write, in the days of my boyhood the folk a.s.sembled in the open air for their great Christian festival on the second Sunday of August. It was a moving spectacle to see a couple of thousand people in the hearing of the sea, with the hills brooding over them, raise a psalm to heaven. But that crowd has been broken up into four fragments. There is no longer a crowd. The devil has secured its overthrow. On the wave of an emotion generated by a thousand hearts no soul shall again be wafted heavenward in that green place. For the devil has seen to it that the thousand hearts shall be no longer there.

V

There is a hopeful side to all this if only Christians will learn wisdom. Instead of allowing the devil to break up congregations into fragments, as he has done for a hundred years, what the Church must do now is to provide the crowd which will exercise the powerful attraction of the herd-instinct on the side of righteousness. The spectacle presented in a poor and crowded district of a great city by competing missions--Primitives, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Salvation Army, and so on--each weak and ineffective--is heart-breaking. There are so many of them that there can be a crowd at none of them. The day of home-mission activities as now conducted is at an end.... At Pittsburg I was taken to a meeting in a great auditorium, seated for 8000 people, where Gipsy Smith was carrying on a mission. The place was crowded. There was a ma.s.sed choir of a few hundred voices. After a great volume of praise rolled heavenward, there came an atmosphere vibrant with the sense of the Divine as prayer was offered. I never heard Gipsy Smith before, and I was not prejudiced in his favour. But his simplicity, his directness, his power of speaking straight home to the heart, made me captive. Here was a master of crowd-psychology.

The Jesus whom this man preached was the elder brother, the lover of men, the saviour from self. When the preacher asked those who desired to follow and obey Jesus to stand up, they rose in hundreds. It almost seemed as if the whole congregation were on their feet. The difficulty when every force seemed to lift one up was in continuing to sit still.

This is the only mission that can to-day be effective--the mission in which the mysterious powers latent sub-consciously in man are directed heavenward. Instead of weak, isolated, compet.i.tive missions, if the churches would organise home-missions after this order.... There in Pittsburg, as in every city where men such as Gipsy Smith exercise their ministry, the first requisite is that the churches organise to provide the herd. Without the herd, the herd-instinct cannot operate.

First provide the crowd, and then the masters of crowd-psychology can turn their faces heavenward. It will be a poor ruined world if the crowd be left much longer as the monopoly of the devil. The laws of crowd-psychology, which can crucify a Christ and turn an ancient civilisation into carnage and animalism, can also shape humanity to the n.o.blest ends. By these same laws self-sacrifice, love, heroism, idealism can make their irresistible appeal. Along this line victory will come.

CHAPTER VII

LET US HAVE PEACE

It was to attend a Congress of Churches that I crossed the Atlantic, but it is not listening to speeches that gives a realisation of any country. It is when wandering about the streets, sitting in cafes, listening in a smoking-car, or talking to a man in a hotel lounge that one forms some impression of the atmosphere which Americans breathe.

It has been a.s.serted, doubtless with truth, that human aberrations are a misplaced worship. That happiness which men were created to find in fellowship with the Highest, they seek in base and sensual forms.

Drunkenness, on this theory, is a species of misdirected worship. If this be granted, then, Americans are of all nations the most devout.

They worship the vast in every form. At Pittsburg you could hear a man rolling out statistics of millions of tons of steel a year; of harbour dues, though the city is far from the sea, that put even London and Glasgow in the shade; and as he speaks you feel that he has a thrill approaching adoration. He is on his knees before the greatest he knows. It is the same in everything. A town of 14,000 inhabitants in 1840 is now a city of a million. He rolls the figures as if they were a mystic ritual. Everything with which he has to do must be the greatest on the earth.

I

It was, however, in New York that one came to the inner shrine of American idealism. I had stayed for two days in the academic calm of Princeton, had heard Lord Bryce lecture in iced and polished and cla.s.sic phrases on the age-long problem of Church and State; had spoken to two hundred theological students who might just be in Oxford or Edinburgh, for their eyes were just the same--the eyes of youth, who perennially believe that they at least were born to put this old world right. (That is the wonderful feeling that keeps pulpits filled--the feeling that however much the message has been spurned and others have failed, yet I cannot fail--glorious dream of youth!) From that atmosphere of reposeful idealism I was suddenly projected into the midst of New York. It was a bewildering experience. A friend who knew his way in the maze guided me to the Pennsylvania hotel, 'The biggest hotel in the world, with 2200 baths!' I found a room on the twentieth storey, served by an 'express' service of lifts. I could enter into the feelings of the countryman who, descending in one of those for the first time and seeing floor after floor flash past, murmured, 'Thank G.o.d, I am safe so far.' Having secured our 'baths' we went forth to see New York by night.

Straight as an arrow my friend brought me to the spots where the full blaze of the illumined streets burst into view. On every hand the street fronts blazed with multi-coloured lights. Rainbows of dazzling splendour spanned the avenues. Above every sky-sc.r.a.per, darkening the stars, letters of fire proclaimed 'The Greatest Boot Emporium in the World' or 'The Vastest Store in all the Universe.' St. John in his dreams of apocalyptic splendour in Patmos could never have dreamed anything weirder than this. Far as the eye could see down Fifth Avenue the quivering lights proclaimed to the silent stars: 'We are the people--the greatest on the earth!' But, after all, the world is but a tenth-rate little gutta-percha ball in the immensity of infinitude, and it was a comfort to think that the constellations were not impressed.

On our way back we rested in a 'Soda-Fountain' refreshment room where we sucked nectar through straws. 'This,' said my friend, 'was a notorious saloon before the war, and here are we, two douce parsons, drinking in all the phylacteries of respectability.' That, on the whole, was the most wonderful thing we saw that night in New York. But as I looked from the dizzy height of my room in the sky-sc.r.a.per, out on that city of glittering light, I seemed to realise what it meant. That building of monstrous height, these proclamations that darkened the heavens, making the stars but a background for vaunting--what are they but the pursuit of the ideal; the scaling of heaven by force; the soul laying hold on immensity by both hands. It is humanity on its knees before the wrong altar.

II

It is the same when the Great War is recalled, as it inevitably is every hour. To the American his share looms so vast that he is convinced he won the war. Among certain cla.s.ses 'We won the war' has become a watchword. 'My brother last year travelled through Italy and France and part of Germany,' a typical American will confide in you, 'and he met a German officer, and this German told him that they thought little of the English and less of the French, but that when the Americans came in they recognised their masters and quitted at once.'

Hereupon a quiet man in a corner begins to talk. 'We air a wonderful nation, sir, and that's a sure thing,' he nasalises; 'we had only 50,000 casualties, and you had a million, and the French a million and a half, and the Russians perhaps two millions, and the Italians half a million--say five millions in all among the Europeans. My friend says we won the war with 50,000 casualties! His idea seems to be that an American is worth a hundred of his brethren in Europe. It is the atmosphere here, sir. We air a great nation, sir.' Upon this the first eyes the second speaker askance. But a Canadian takes up the tale. 'There was an Englishman down in Florida this summer and he went bathing,' thus the Canadian. 'There was a poster forbidding bathing at a particular beach; but there the Englishman, having donned his bathing suit, plunged in. The watcher of the beach rushed to him on his return to sh.o.r.e and reprimanded him for disobeying orders. "Oh! I am all right, for I took precautions," was the answer. "What precautions?"

exclaimed the watcher, at once professionally interested. And the bather turned round and showed his newly-bought bathing suit. On one side it bore the stars and stripes and on the other the legend "We won the war." Pointing to these he said, "I was perfectly safe, for no shark that ever swam in the ocean would swallow that!"' ... The Canadian can beat the Yankee at his own game. He just p.r.i.c.ks the tube and you hear the wind whizzing. But in a few years n.o.body in the States outside the ranks of the learned will know anything about any one's sufferings and heroisms in the Great War except their own. Just as to-day it is a surprise to a German to learn that Wellington won Waterloo, so in the future it will be a surprise to an American to learn that Britain and France by rivers of their blood won the Great War. 'We won the war' has only begun as yet to run its course.

III

It was, however, at Mount Vernon, sixteen miles south of Washington, that I seemed to be nearest to the soul of America. It was with a quiet thankfulness that I left the city behind and went on pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. There the scenes amid which the Father of his country moved and had his being are unchanged.

In the city, the Washington monument, a shaft of white marble rising to a height of '555 feet 5 1/8 inches,' confronts one's eyes at the end of every vista. But here no monument challenges the world by its height.

The plain, wooden building, painted to resemble stone, with a piazza extending along the whole front, consisting of two storeys and an attic with dormer windows, surmounted by a small cupola and an ancient weathervane, is just as it was when Washington lived and died. In these rooms with the tables and chairs and bed and pictures, and the books (duplicates mostly), just as they were a hundred and fifty years ago, there were dreamed dreams that have changed half the world. Out of this farm-house came the impulse and the power wherewith 'The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world.'

There could be found few spots on earth in which one could better muse on the mutability of earthly affairs than in these rooms tenanted by ghosts. Here in the main hall is the key of the Bastille, sent by Lafayette from Paris as a gift to Washington after the capture of the prison in 1789. 'Give me leave, my dear General,' wrote Lafayette, 'to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted country, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.' No nation ever owed so great a debt for its liberty as the United States owed to France. George Washington won the War of Independence because half the people of Britain sympathised with him, knowing that he was fighting their battle for liberty as well as his own; but mainly because France espoused his cause on sea and land, and sent him money, and men, and leaders such as Lafayette. But in the realm of international politics grat.i.tude has no place. When France in 1914 faced the menace of overwhelming and final destruction; when Belgium, to whose independence the United States was a signatory at the Hague Convention, was overrun, the Government at Washington did not even enter a protest, and the President still addressed the Kaiser as 'great and good friend.' While France that won her liberty for America was for three years in Gethsemane, the States were 'too proud to fight.' As late as 1917 there was the famous speech about 'peace without victory.' It was only when a Presidential Election was gained by 'the Man who kept us out of the war,' and when the interests of the States on the high seas were threatened with ruin, that the Americans at last entered the fray. If Britain had acted as the States did, France to-day would have been the conscript appendage of Germany. When the American Amba.s.sador in London declared in a candid moment that America came into the war for 'her own interests,' the resolutions pa.s.sed and the speeches made disowning him were amazing. That key of the Bastille there in Mount Vernon is a monument of international ingrat.i.tude. There is no reason to narcotise ourselves into believing that poor humanity has been changed for ever in this year of grace at Washington.

IV

To-day Mount Vernon is a shrine, and a sky-sc.r.a.ping monument dominates Washington, but George Washington learned in his own day the lesson that in politics there is no grat.i.tude. The founder of the great Republic did not escape the common fate. He was accused as President of drawing more than his salary, of aping at monarchy; there were hints of the guillotine being needed; until at last the scurrilous attacks drove Washington to declare at a Cabinet meeting in 1793 that he would rather be in his grave than in his present position. It is said that at the end he would have preferred to seek reunion with Britain. (An American lecturer was howled down in New York two years ago for venturing to refer to that!) This at least is sure, that Washington was glad to end his days in the peace of Mount Vernon. If this may seem incredible one has only to think of the fate of Clemenceau, of Venizelos, or of Woodrow Wilson. There is to-day in Washington a living monument of national ingrat.i.tude. Whatever may be thought of many of the acts of President Wilson, of his leaving France to her fate until he won his election to the second term of office by the help of the anti-British and pacifist votes, yet posterity will undoubtedly acclaim him as Lincoln now is acclaimed. It was he who not only, with the dreamers of all the years, dreamed the dream of perpetual peace, but by his unbending will-power forced the nations of Europe to place that dream, materialised in the League of Nations, in the forefront of the Treaty of Versailles. That was one of those epoch-making events on which the history of the world turns. It is idle to think that the coming generations will not place the man who did that among the greatest of the human race. And yet to-day his own countrymen can find no words strong enough to express their contempt and dislike. There is no more pathetic figure in all the world. A shattered body gains him no respite from abuse. When the broken man drove for the last time from the White House to his own home--the burden at last laid down--a demonstration organised by the League of Nations Union cheered him at his gate. They would not go away until he spoke. He was taken to a window, and after saying a few words he pointed to his throat, in token that he could not further reply to the ovation. History can scarcely parallel that tragedy. But Woodrow Wilson can comfort himself with the thought that the hosannas will rise in chorus when he is dead. George Washington has now a monument 555 feet high; a hundred years hence Woodrow Wilson will have a monument 666 feet high. The generations of those who garnish tombs never fail. 'I tremble for my country,' said President Jefferson, 'when I remember that G.o.d is just.'

V

The world has raised a chorus of rejoicing over the results of the Conference at Washington. While we rejoice at the prospect of reducing the number of battleships, we can only rejoice with trembling. (It is America, who had the j.a.panese navy on the brain, that has the greatest cause to rejoice.) But agreements and treaties are not going to save us. The crucial question is not the form and context of a treaty, but rather whether there is among men sufficient truth and righteousness to fulfil its terms. The warfare of the future will be a warfare of chemistry. (According to a statement ascribed to Edison, the whole population of London can in the future be wiped out in eight hours by poison gas!) Is there a possibility of restricting laboratories and the ma.s.sing of deadly germs? The men who will release the energy in an atom will be able to destroy a world. If we look at facts we shall not be drugged by oratory. 'Rhetoric,' said Theodore Roosevelt, 'is a poor subst.i.tute for the habit of looking facts resolutely in the face.' The facts confronting us are ominous enough. Twice recently one of the greatest of nations has thrown over the signature of its Supreme Head and its Secretary of State. The United States repudiated its President and refused to ratify the League of Nations; and not only that, but refused also to ratify the Agreement made with France and Britain to secure France against future aggression. The present misery and unrest in Europe are largely due to the failure of one hundred and ten millions of the English-speaking race to honour the signature of their Chief. The best of them bewail it, and say that it is the fault of their political system. Under the worst system of European government such events would be impossible.

But though the failure to ratify treaties be grievous, yet the failure to observe treaties duly ratified is still more grievous. And the history of our relations with the States is largely the history of broken treaties. There was the famous Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 regarding the Panama Ca.n.a.l; it was repudiated in 1880, and its history since is a history of broken agreements. There have been so many conferences, so many agreements, so many treaties since the days of the Holy Alliance to the days of The Hague, and the end has always been the same. In 1916 Mr. Elihu Root made a speech in the American Senate, the echoes of which will ring round the world in the coming years. The burden of his sorrow was shame for his country's repudiation of their obligation to protect Belgium. Here are some sentences:--

'Wherever there was respect for law, it revolted against the wrong done to Belgium. Wherever there was true pa.s.sion for liberty, it blazed out for Belgium. Wherever there was humanity it mourned for Belgium....

The law protecting Belgium was our law and the law of every civilised country.... We had played our part, in conjunction with other civilised nations, in making that law.... Moreover, that law was written into a solemn and formal Convention, signed and ratified by Germany, and Belgium and France, and the United States.... When Belgium was invaded, that Agreement was binding, not only morally, but strictly and technically, because there was then no nation a party to the war which was not also a party to the Convention. The invasion of Belgium was a breach of contract with us for the maintenance of a law of nations.... The American Government failed to rise to the demands of a great occasion. Gone were the old love of justice, the old pa.s.sion for liberty, the old sympathy with the oppressed, the old ideals of an America helping the world towards a better future, and there remained in the eyes of mankind only solicitude for trade and profit and prosperity and wealth.'

Yes, humanity might mourn for Belgium, and the States stand aloof in spite of its plighted word, but what of that when an election had to be won and the Irish vote conciliated! The world being what it is there can be no hope of deliverance along the road of treaties. There can be no salvation by parchments. You cannot make a treaty when there is no sense of truth and honour. You cannot make a treaty with paganism.

There is no truth or honour there for a treaty to rest on. And the world is still overwhelmingly pagan. Europe may have been baptized and America also, but Asia still dreams that its day will return. j.a.pan is haunted by the dreams of Potsdam, and the hunger of empire is in her eyes. China, India, Africa, and the Turk are not yet even baptized!

And yet people think that we have arrived at last within sight of the millennium. The characteristic of humanity is its credulous simplicity. Men cannot rid themselves of the fond belief that they can reform the jungle by manicuring the tiger's claws.