The people have a startling way of getting, in the long run, the specific things they set their hearts on. And one may admit—without the slightest prejudice to his intellectual independence or the slightest abdication of his preferences—that the specific things the revolutionists of Paris and the world at large are striving for may sooner or later be theirs.
A successful social revolution, one day or another, is neither an inconceivable, an impossible, nor even an improbable event. The time may come, at least for all that we can reasonably affirm to the contrary, when there will be no more governments, no more great fortunes, no more private property, no more poverty, no more “marrying and giving in marriage,” no more wars, no more armies, no more patriotism, and no more diversity of tongues.
This is not saying that the individual life will be fuller, richer, and sweeter then than it has been and is, nor that the world will be enormously better and happier than it is and has been. Apples of the most golden seeming have been known to turn to ashes in the plucker’s hand; and, when the time comes—if it does come—that the revolutionists’ present cravings have all been satisfied, the millennium will still, in all likelihood, be as far as ever away.
Change, incessant change, is the law of the universe; but change, though inevitable, and hence never really bad and never really to be regretted, is not synonymous with progress,—not in the sense, at least, in which the latter word is generally understood.
“Partout de l’astre à l’étincelle, Partout la vie universelle, Se fond, tourbillonne, et ruisselle, Et tout passe, et rien s’en va.”
It is as big a piece of dogmatism to be cock-sure the world is growing better all the time and all along the line, simply because it is perpetually changing, as it is to be cock-sure it is constantly growing worse, and as big a piece of credulity to look forward confidently to a Golden Age in the future as to revert—unhumorously—to a Golden Age in the past. Every system of society which has existed thus far is now admitted to have had its qualities and its defects,—what is more, the defects of its qualities. Our period of machinery, universal suffrage, and diffused book-knowledge (factors from which our fathers expected miracles to spring) has its blemishes as well as the periods of illiteracy, blooded aristocracy, and hand labour. Our new woman—we are reminded every day—is as antipathetic and inept in some ways as she is charming and useful in other ways; and, while we cannot be sure that every future period will “depress some elements of goodness just as much as it will encourage others,” we have, alas! no adequate guarantee that it will not do so.
It may be that it is again to be the mission of France to redeem (or appear to redeem) the world by a sort of vicarious atonement. The cult of revolution is not dead there, and the impulse that demolished the Bastille has by no means spent itself. Or it may be that for Russia, where the provocation is greatest, or for America, where there is most initiative and the most accelerated rate of change, is reserved this fearsome rôle. But, wherever the Social Revolution begins and wherever it reaches, the well-balanced man, who has won through stress and travail to a sane outlook and to an enthusiasm for life; he who can say with Kipling’s “Tramp Royal,”—
“Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ‘ath done— Excep’ when awful long—I’ve found it good. So write before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’”—
will await its arrival with complete equanimity.