CHAPTER XXX
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book. The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost exclusively identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of tolerance” it was generally accepted that so and so had spent his life fighting the abuses of the Church and the tyranny of a professional priesthood.
Then came the war.
And much was changed in this world.
Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.
Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his fellow-men, we got a hundred.
And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of the horrors of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with the infinitely more painful manifestations of a paltry form of racial intolerance and social intolerance and a score of petty forms of intolerance, the existence of which had not even been suspected a decade ago.
This seems very terrible to many good people who until recently lived in the happy delusion that progress was a sort of automatic time-piece which needed no other winding than their occasional approbation.