sufficient for everyday purposes, and acts as an admirable stimulus in the Camp of the Challengers.
Who can deny that reformers are more interesting than preservers? They vibrate with life and creative energy, they defy impossibilities, they carry enthusiasm aloft on their banners of assault on the existing order of things. Our preservers seem tame and stale indeed. They hobble about the borders of the well-cultivated garden of custom and propriety, they find admirable shelter against the fierce winds of revolt in the offices of bureaucracy. Officialdom is their divinity and respectability their key to life. They may be necessary—as buffers—but they depress us by their dulness.
Reformers can be dull too, but they are redeemed by the homage which they pay to spiritual adventures. They are narrow-minded, but their narrow-mindedness is relieved by intensity of purpose. They are not seldom aggressive, argumentative, unpleasant, but they refresh the dry world by being thoroughly alive. It seems, indeed, as if life were only made tolerable through the ferment of the desire to reform. Even the most stagnant
pools of the human soul are sometimes stirred by the breeze of change. We all hope, we all look forward, we all grope for a future which will be better than the present. In some the hope is firmly rooted to earth and man-made conventions, in others it soars to other-worldly perfection.
The world teems with causes and movements that rouse the imagination and press human lives into the service of the future. The genesis and development of causes show similar features wherever and whenever they appear. A soul is astir with an idea, a resentment, a call for change. Others heed the message, respond to the cry for action, feel that this idea, this one idea, is the most important in the world. Societies and leagues are formed, opposition is encountered, and the leader becomes sanctified through abuse and resentment. The idea is embraced by hundreds and thousands; it becomes a doctrine, a creed, a mental atmosphere in which men live and have their being. Fierce battles take place between the adherents of the idea and the opponents. Blind prejudice and hatred are encountered. Martyrs are made. The crusade is hallowed by suffering and sacrifice.
It becomes an impelling spiritual necessity, an expression of religion. Gradually the forces of the opposition are weakened. Concessions and compromises are offered. There are signs of the contagiousness of the idea even in the house of the adversaries. The triumph comes with time, and the turbulent waves of controversy recede into gentle ripples of approval. And for many a cause for which men have suffered and died, posterity has but a yawn. “Just think of it—all that fuss and all that turmoil over something so obvious.”
Seen superficially, this is a fairly accurate account of the fate of movements for the reform of some glaring injustice, some hoary cruelty of the past. But is it true? Is the world slowly but surely getting better—are the monsters of ignorance and tyranny slain one by one by our great reformers and laid to rest for ever in a grave of ignominy? We accept the axiom that slavery has been abolished. Of all causes that commanded devotion, struggle, persistency, the anti-slavery movement stands forth as a moral protest of supreme import. Wilberforce and Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Clarkson fought for a principle which may well be regarded as the very soul of
civilization. The Civil War brought the ideals of human rights and equality into bloody conflict with the forces of oppression and commercial exploitation. The new consciousness
of human fellowship made white men lay down their lives for the freedom of black men. A worthy cause, a sublime offering, a task to which we would like to say “Done, done, once and for all time!” But is it done? Slavery is not only inherent in every savage and barbaric race, it is not only paramount in the mind of the Arab trader. Once the social bulwark of the ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, and India, of Greece and Rome, it persisted in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and survived as serfdom of one kind or another through centuries of advancing culture. The desire for power over fellow-beings, for opportunities to control their lives and exploit their labour, is apparently irradicable. Slavery is still amongst us in a hundred forms and under new names. All military conquest involves the ancient practices of serfdom. The conquered nations become slaves of the invader; by obedience they live, by disobedience they die. The persistence of slavery seems, then, to be a demonstration
of the unchangeability of human nature and of the ultimate hopelessness of idealist causes. In every reform accomplished the practical application is local, transitory, dependent on racial and geographical conditions. There is obviously a great change in our penal methods. We do not mutilate our criminals or scalp them for the preservation of their souls, and we have lost confidence in the rack and the thumb-screw. But we need only transport ourselves to other lands and study other people's views of judicial necessities, and we shall find that the punitive systems of the thirteenth or the eighteenth centuries are still with us. Theoretically the blood of the black and the white man is of the same good quality, and yet very little provocation is needed for the outbreak of race riots. Negroes and negresses who have given offence to white people need harbour no illusions concerning the restraining influences of our Western civilization.