“Making the world safe for democracy,” said Peter. “That isn’t quite it. If democracy means that any man may help who can, that school and university will give every man and woman the fairest chance, the most generous inducement to help, to do the thing he can best do under the best conditions, then, Yes; but if democracy means getting up a riot and boycott among the stupid and lazy and illiterate whenever anything is doing, then I say No! Every human being has got to work, has got to take part. If our laws and organization don’t insist upon that, the Old Experimenter will. So long as the world is ruled by stale ideas and lazy ideas, he is determined that it shall flounder from war to war. Now what does this democracy mean? Does it mean a crowd of primitive brutes howling down progress and organization? because if it does, I want to be in the machine-gun section. When you talk of education, Nobby, you think of highly educated people, of a nation instructed through and through. But what of democracy in Russia, where you have a naturally clever people in a state of peasant ignorance—who can’t even read? Until the schoolmaster has talked to every one for ten or twelve years, can you have what President Wilson thinks of as democracy at all?”
“Now there you meet me,” said Oswald. “That is the idea I have been trying to get at with you.” And for some minutes the palatial dimensions of the lost Valedictory loomed out. Where he had said “peace” overnight, however, he now said progress.
But the young man on the couch was much too keenly interested to make a good audience. When presently Oswald propounded his theory that all the great world religions were on the side of this World Republic that he and Peter desired, Peter demurred.
“But is that true of Catholicism for instance?” said Peter.
Oswald quoted, “I am the Vine and ye are the Branches.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “But look at the Church itself. Don’t look at the formula but at the practice and the daily teaching. Is it truly a growing Vine?” The reality of Catholicism, Peter argued, was a traditional, sacramental religion, a narrow fetish religion with a specialized priest, it was concerned primarily with another world, it set its face against any conception of a scheme of progress in this world apart from its legend of the sacrifice of the Mass.
“All good Catholics sneer at progress,” said Peter. “Take Belloc and Chesterton, for example; they hate the idea of men working steadily for any great scheme of effort here. They hold by stagnant standards, planted deep in the rich mud of life. What’s the Catholic conception of human life?—guzzle, booze, call the passion of the sexes unclean and behave accordingly, confess, get absolution, and at it again. Is there any recognition in Catholicism of the duty of keeping your body fit or your brain active? They’re worse than the man who buried his talent in a clean napkin; they bury it in wheezy fat. It’s a sloven’s life. What have we in common with that? Always they are harking back to the thirteenth century, to the peasant life amidst dung and chickens. It’s a different species of mind from ours, with the head and feet turned backward. What is the good of expecting the Pope, for instance, and his Church to help us in creating a League of Nations? His aim would be a world agreement to stop progress, and we want to release it. He wants peace in order to achieve nothing, and we want peace in order to do everything. What is the good of pretending that it is the same peace? A Catholic League of Nations would be a conspiracy of stagnation, another Holy Alliance. What real world unity can come through them? Every step on the way to the world state and the real unification of men will be fought by the stagnant men and the priests. Why blind ourselves to that? Progress is a religion in itself. Work and learning are our creed. We cannot make terms with any other creed. The priest has got his God and we seek our God for ever. The priest is finished and completed and self-satisfied, and we—we are beginning....”
§ 9
There were two days yet before Peter went back to his work in London. Saturday dawned blue and fine, and Joan and he determined to spend it in a long tramp over the Hertfordshire hills and fields. He meant to stand no nonsense from his foot. “If I can’t walk four miles an hour then I must do two,” he said. “And if the pace is too slow for you, Joan, you must run round and round me and bark.” They took a long route by field and lane through Albury and Furneaux Pelham to the little inn at Stocking Pelham, where they got some hard biscuits and cheese and shandygaff, and came home by way of Patmore Heath, and the golden oaks and the rivulet. And as they went Peter talked of Oswald.
“Naturally he wants to know what we are going to do,” said Peter, and then, rather inconsequently, “He’s ill.