Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing with things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the inner lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance; makes fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an engine of oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a zealot, a promoter of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of uplift, who disregarding individual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier to produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he claims to seek.
The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism was the discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the bedrock of our political philosophy. Human slavery was assuredly an indefensible institution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not make a black man a white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking to control the food and drink and dress of the people make men better men. Danger lurks and is bound to come with the inevitable reaction.
The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The leaders of feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimist answers what easier than the demolition of a sexless world gone entirely mad? How simple the engineries of destruction. Civil war in America; universal hara-kiri in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself in self-indulgence. Then a thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay’s Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the last word of science, reason and common sense?
Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most do congregate the words of Watts’ hymn have constant application:
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at the seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats. Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what many of them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveys the scene can scarcely think so.
But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto cars dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the contrasts of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the Régime Ancien? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection?
V
One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since “Adam delved and Eve span”—if they ever did—in the Garden of Eden, “somewhere in Asia,” to the “goings on” in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike’s Peak—the earth we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness—but surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the space-writer says, more “dramatic”; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so “picturesque and interesting.”