VI
Gradually the various processes in the social life merge, like the confluents of some mighty Amazon, into a definite and confined stream of tendency. A more perfect, a better coördinated unity develops in the baronial class, and the measure of its control is heightened and extended to a golden mean which insures supremacy with peace. The under-classes settle in their appointed grooves, and the professional intermediaries definitely and openly assume their dual function of advisers to the barons and of interpreters to the people of the baronial will and ways. Laws, customs, the arts,—all the institutions and social forces,—change with the industrial transformation, and attain a finer harmony with the actual facts of life. All except literature, be it said, for this has outdistanced its fellows in the great current and already reflects the conditions, the moods, and ideals of the society of to-morrow. Here, at least, the force of nature can no farther go, and no change is to be anticipated for the present. But the other institutions and social forces are gradually transformed, and when the full coalescence of all the factors is attained, our Benevolent Feudalism, without a shock, without so much variance as will enable any man to say, “It is here,” passes to its ascendency, and the millennium of peace and order begins.
Peace and stability it will maintain at all hazards; and the mass, remembering the chaos, the turmoil, the insecurity of the past, will bless its reign. Peace and stability will be its arguments of defence against all criticism, domestic or foreign. An observant visitor from some foreign State may pick a defect here and there; but the eloquent defender of the régime will answer: Look upon the tranquillity that everywhere prevails, and reflect upon the inquietude and anarchy of the past. The disturbances of labor have ceased, and sedition, though occasionally encountered, is easily thwarted and put down. The crudities and barbarities of other days have given way to ordered regularities. Efficiency—the faculty of getting things—is at last rewarded as it should be, for the efficient have inherited the earth and its fulness. The lowly, “whose happiness is greater and whose welfare is more thoroughly conserved when governed than when governing,” as a twentieth-century philosopher said of them, are settled and happy in the state which reason and experience teach is their God-appointed lot. They are comfortable, too; and if the patriarchal ideal of a vine and fig tree for each is not yet attained, at least each has his rented patch in the country or his rented cell in a city building. Bread and the circus are freely given to the deserving, and as for the undeserving, they are merely reaping the rightful rewards of their contumacy and pride. Order reigns, each has his justly appointed share, and the State rests in security, “lapt in universal law.”