I
THE WORLD TRAGEDY
We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman empire was so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it. Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it overwhelms our vision. Man had been going forward steadily, inventing and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole world had been transformed. Suddenly the entire range of invention is turned against Man. The machinery of comfort and progress becomes the enginery of devastation. Under such a shock, we ask, "Has civilization over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its maker?" The imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to see across the storm.
When the War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt the brunt of it. Even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of it. Nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the most important in the entire history of the world. It is probable that the future will look back upon them as the years determining the destiny of mankind for ages to come.
How this terrible fact of War falls across all philosophies! Complacent optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. The pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn to tatters. There is at least the refreshment of standing face to face with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened, while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one certainty is that an entirely new world is being born—what it will be, no one knows.
Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution Christianity and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effect on the thought life of the world will be even greater—vastly greater—than that of the French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the Athenian tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.
Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We Americans are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise. All across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion —if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for moral evils. It is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by legislation, but not to create virtue. Virtue can be developed only by conduct and education. You cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven with the whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road.
If our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age, into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental attitude of mind. Democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political forms, but a way of life.
Thus the War will be the supreme test of democracy. The question it will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally from the top? If they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will pass and be succeeded by some other social order.
That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we have entered it so late. As we look back upon the struggle of Athens and the other free Greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of Asia, at Marathon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for Europe and made possible the civilization of the Occident, so it is probable that the world will look back upon this colossal War as the same struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions employed, the struggle determining the future of democracy and civilization for generations, perhaps for all time.