The Unpopular Review Vol. I / January-June 1914

PUBLISHED QUARTERLY
VOL. I
JANUARY-JUNE
1914
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1913, 1914, by HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun—which statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.
The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be as long as life is worth living in it—and longer. There was one between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery. Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy, order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.
That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by those in front enslaving those behind—the minority enslaving the majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization—as we regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot were getting on the other leg—the majority trying to enslave the minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times, however—say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe, and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and letters and the arts—when in two instances these men were legislated away from powers and immunities granted to others.