Attacked, abused, execrated, we begin to sympathize with those dead nobles, who were perhaps as honest, as well-meaning, as we feel ourselves to be; who were as disgusted, as scornful, as little convinced by our arguments as we by those who accuse us in our turn of being greedy, idle feeders upon the sweat of others. Perhaps to him the established order of things seemed as just and eternal as it does to us. We begin to have more comprehension of that dead aristocrat.
For a hundred years now democracy has had a free hand for testing its faiths and ideals. Let us reckon up the results of this reign of liberty, equality, fraternity.
Out of the triumphant bourgeoisie has grown a class proud and dominant as the nobles of old days. They have wealth, luxury, and power, such as those nobles never dreamed of. Capital is organized into vast, incredibly potent aggregations. Labour in its turn has organized for itself a despotism far-reaching, unescapable, which the old régime would never at its haughtiest have ventured upon. The two are arrayed against one another in struggles of ever-increasing intensity.
The Brotherhood of Man is still a dream. The continent of Europe is dominated by two autocratic sovereigns, who overawe others by the consistent and continuous policy only possible to a despotism. The republics of France and of South America are the prey of a horde of adventurers who only alternate despotisms; the armaments of the world are so pretentious that each fears to wield so terrible a weapon. The great nations are dividing the weak among themselves as lions do their prey. All nations are exaggerating their barriers and differences. Russia is repudiating the Occidental languages and civilizations which she at first received so gladly. Hungary has abandoned the German tongue, and the Hungarians, Czechs, and Bohemians, held together by the bond of Austria, are restive and mutually repellent. The Celt revives and renews his hatred of the Saxon, and in Ireland and in Wales the aboriginal tongues and literatures are being disinterred and taught as a means of destroying the corporate nationalism of the British Isles. The Bretons disclaim their part and interest in France. The Spanish empire has fallen into jealous and unsympathetic fragments. The Hindus are clamouring for an India for the Indians. All are rivals; envenomed, and seeking domination. And America,—America, the supreme demonstration of the democratic ideal,—what of her? America has embarked upon imperial wars: refuses sanctuary to the poor and oppressed as inadmissible paupers, and laughs at the claims to brotherhood and citizenship of any man with a yellow skin.
The church, which is most opposed to individual liberty of thought, has been reconquering great territory in the very citadels of free conscience. One large body of Protestants is repudiating its protests against irresponsible authority, and basing its claims rather upon appeal to ancient precedent.
Science has one by one torn in pieces and scattered the iridescent bubbles of democracy's sentimental visions. The Ghetto is open, but the Jews are still persecuted. A Calas is no longer sacrificed to bigoted churchmen, but an intolerant army make possible the Affaire Dreyfus. Zola, after a century of democracy, is called upon once more to take up the work of Voltaire. Woman is still waiting for political equality with man. But perhaps the most surprising result is man's change in his attitude towards himself. Man, who spelled himself with reverent capital letters, who pictured the universe created solely for his needs,—who imagined a Deity flattered by his homage and wounded by his disrespect—Man, who had only to observe a respectable code of morals to be received into eternal happiness with all the august honours due a condescending monarch, had fallen to the humility of such admissions as these....
"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;— ... Poor soul here for so little, cast among so many hardships filled with desires, so incommensurate and so inconsistent; savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives, ... infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down to debate of right or wrong and the attributes of the Deity; rising up to battle for an egg or die for an idea.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy, the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency to which he would rise if possible, a limit of shame, below which if it be possible he will not stoop.... Not in man alone, but we trace it in dogs and cats which we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster and the louse, of whom we know so little"—
Alas, Poor Yorick! How a century of liberty has humbled him. It is thus the successors of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of the believers in the perfectibility of man, speak—saying, calmly, "The Empire of this world belongs to force"—and that "Hitherto in our judgments of men we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imaginations and the imperious suggestions of our hearts. We have bound ourselves by the partiality of religious divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines by our instincts and our vexations.... Science at last approaches with exact and penetrating implements ... and in this employment of science, in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover them."
We must not forget to consider a little the amusing change our century has seen in the alteration of its heroic ideals. For the sentimental rubbish, the dripping egotism of a Werther, of a Manfred, in whom the young of their day found the most adequate expression of their self-consciousness, we have substituted the Stevenson and Kipling hero—hard-headed, silent, practical, scornful of abstractions, contemptuous of emotions, who has but two dominant ideals, patriotism and duty; who keeps his pores open and his mouth shut.
The old democratic shibboleths still remain on our lips, are still used as if they were truisms, but in large measure we have ceased to live by them, we have lost all our cocksureness as to their infallibility. We give frightened sops to our anarchical Cerberus. We realize that despite all we so proudly decreed the strong still rule and plunder the weak, and weak still impotently rage and imagine a vain thing of legislation as a means of redressing this endless inequality.