The specialization of our modern mechanical civilization has caused a submergence of the individual into the group or class. Man is fast ceasing to be the unit of human society. Self-governing groups are becoming the new units. This is true of all classes of men, the employer as well as the employee. The true justification for the American anti-monopoly statutes, including the Sherman anti-trust law, lies not so much in the realm of economics as in that of morals. With the submergence of the individual, whether he be capitalist or wage-earner, into a group, there has followed the dissipation of moral responsibility. A mass morality has been substituted for individual morality, and unfortunately, group morality generally intensifies the vices more than the virtues of man.
Possibly, the greatest result of the mechanical age is this spirit of organization.
Its merits are manifold and do not require statement; but they have blinded us to the demerits of excessive organization.
We are now beginning to see—slowly, but surely—that a faculty of organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is not an unmixed good.
Indeed, the moral lesson of the tragedy of Germany is the demoralizing influence of organization carried to the _n_th power. No nation was ever more highly organized than this modern State. Physically, intellectually and spiritually it had become a highly developed machine. Its dominating mechanical spirit so submerged the individual that, in 1914, the paradox was observed of an enlightened nation that was seemingly destitute of a conscience.
What was true of Germany, however, was true—although in lesser degree—of all civilized nations. In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his nobler self.
This may explain the paradox of so-called "progress." It may be likened to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented catastrophe. As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.
Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind. It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact—mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress—but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would propel man forward.
A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass. Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra.
One can see the tragedy of the time, as a few saw it, in comparing the first Locksley Hall of Alfred Tennyson, written in 1827, with its abiding faith in the "increasing purpose of the ages" and its roseate prophecies of the golden age, when the "war-drum would throb no longer and the battle flags be furled in the Parliament of Man and the Federation of the World," and the later Locksley Hall, written sixty years later, when the great spiritual poet of our time gave utterance to the dark pessimism which flooded his soul: