But it is claimed in the case of all these societies for intimidation and cruelty that the main motive is something higher and better than this. A state of danger, social indiscipline, and slackness is alleged; a failure of the normal processes of law and police. The cruelties and filthy outrages that are the normal activities of these organisations are declared to be the acts of strong men resolute to restore peace, justice, and confidence to a disordered world.
There is something in this plea. It is not to be too lightly dismissed. The condition of Italy before the Fascista movement crystallised out was certainly very bad. The lawlessness of Italian life existed before the Fascists and will outlive them. After the war it expressed itself in terms of Communism; robbing took the name of expropriation, and the natural resentment of human beings at uninteresting and inferior work expressed itself in entirely mischievous strikes. The manifest injustices of the social system were made the plea for a multitude of outrages that did nothing to remedy them. There have been Communist murders and Communist outrages in Italy, though nothing to parallel the extensive systematic terrorism of the Fascista régime. The difference between Communist and Fascist is mainly this, that one conspires and does mischief and cruelty to bring about a state of order and justice that cannot exist, and the other to defend and sustain one that exists only in his imagination.
Moscow and Rome are alike in this, that they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorise criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness. Violent revolution and violent reaction are two aspects of one asinine thing, violent uncritical conviction. Neither recognises the enormously tentative quality of human institutions, and the tangled and scarcely explored difficulties in the path of social reconstruction. But they feel these things they will not recognise, these tangles and possible complications, as perverse opposition, and their impatient souls rebel. Your party Communist, like your Fascist, is neither hero nor criminal; he is an ignorant, immodest, impatient fool who wants to grab the glory of inaugurating an epoch that cannot yet possibly begin. The great future of our race will owe little to either of these current nuisances. The maker of that future is the unconvenanted scientific man who works on without hurry and without delay, dissolving problem after problem in the solvent of clear knowledge, insisting on plain speech and free publication, refusing concealment, refusing to conspire and compel, respecting himself completely in his infinite respect for his fellow-men.
At the present level of education in the world, progress is like pushing one’s way through a riot. The underlying fact in all these matters is that the common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and public affairs. He can work in no way better than his quality. He has not sufficient understanding to work in any other way. If there were no Fascism there would be something else of the same sort. The hope of the world lies in a broader and altogether more powerful organisation of education. Only as that develops will the vehement self-righteous and malignant ass abate his mischief in the world.
XLVI
THE RACE CONFLICT: IS IT UNAVOIDABLE?
19.7.24
The action of the United States in setting aside its gentlemanly understanding with Japan in the matter of immigration and excluding the Japanese altogether has greatly exercised the British mind. At this distance it strikes us as an altogether uncivilised thing to do. We believe that for all practical purposes the peace of the Pacific rests on the tripod, America, Britain, Japan; we attached immense importance to the Washington Agreement and the feeling of concord it developed; we abandoned the Anglo-Japanese alliance to American feeling and, after a struggle at home, the threat of the Singapore developments was withdrawn. Our dominant idea was the collaboration, mutual trust, and mutual forbearance of three great civilised Powers. Then, apparently as a move in the dismal party game that still rules American political life, in order to secure California for the Republican Party, Japan is smacked on the face good and hard, and most of this difficult and elaborate work of reassurance is undone.
It is not a question of excluding cheap labour or alien mass immigration; that has been fairly well done for some time. It is an intolerable assertion that individual educated Japanese are unfitted by race and culture for helpful participation in the high civilisation of the Pacific Coast. It implies that Japanese and Americans are for ever incompatible, are for ever two peoples; that for ever on this little planet their destinies are to be worked out parallel or apart—or to mingle only in a bitter conflict for exclusive survival.
These are immensely dangerous implications. It is impossible to believe that they express the real intelligence of the American public in this matter. But they do express a very widely diffused feeling, prevailing especially on the Pacific slope. That same reckless levity of the party politician, which in Britain in the “great days” of Gladstone and Disraeli, made the relations of Russia to Britain a mere party counter, has appealed to that feeling. We are forced to recognise that a great multitude of people in California and elsewhere are at a mental level from which it is possible to contemplate a future of pent-up races and cultures, each living in its own bit of the little planet and forcibly restrained from wandering or expanding beyond its boundaries.
Is such a future possible for mankind? It was, one must admit, a dominant idea in the past. More’s Utopia and most of the old Utopias were closed countries. Japan itself was a completely closed country for several centuries, and no one went into or came out of it. It was Americans who forced the closed door of Japan; they of all peoples have the least reason to complain of the Japanese spill-over into their world. But no country yet tolerates the free movement of peoples. Yet the secular force of human inventiveness fights against this system of pen and barrier.