organized reform on which you cannot so easily shut the door. It is the ideologue who rides the scheme to death. It is the doctrinaire who must form systems within systems and policies within policies. It is not enough that you have set out to suppress something or to encourage something. You must follow his particular way. He is in terror of compromise and sees profligacy in sweet reasonableness. He knows the tragic failure of other movements with vacillating policies. This one must be saved at all costs. 'Twere better to smash the whole movement than proceed along undesirable lines. He would scorn victory that came through avenues not recognized by him. Certain words and phrases have completely captivated his imagination. With them he fences heroically and causes a sufficiency of clatter and noise. He is in deadly earnest and will brook no rivals. Parties within parties are formed, and the energies which should be directed towards fighting opponents are absorbed in combat within the society.
There is another element of disaster which now and then gains ascendancy in the community of reformers. It is the professional agitator, the parasite who will speak for or
against a principle according to the economic advantage which one side or the other may offer. You may hold that such a man is not altogether undesirable, provided he can “organize” and persuade people that the society is worthy of support. You may think that he is no more blameworthy than the lawyer who pleads your views so eloquently and who handles the jury with such consummate skill, though his sole incentive is your fee and not your case. If you act on such a belief and allow your professional agitator to manage your society, you will certainly one day find your ideals turned to ashes and your organization for moral action turned into money-making machinery.
Whilst life teaches you that societies are frail human institutions and that conferences and congresses do not bring about the millennium, you are saved from despair if you keep ever fresh your sense of humour.
There are problems in the life of the reformer which the mountains never fail to put before me. I have so often come to them from the heat and turmoil of controversy. I have come like a soldier from battle, covered with mud and slightly wounded, yet exultant in the
spirit of the fray. The mountains speak to me, and lo! another self appears. They speak to me of beauty, of peace, of the infinite mystery of life; they give me broad effects of light and shade, and obliterate the small pictures which pursue me on the plains. Yesterday, in the stillness of Alpine midwinter, the moon shone clear and full on the glacier. I sat gazing at the outlines of the peaks trembling in the pale light of a perfect evening. The noisy mountain torrents were held captive in prisons of ice, but here and there the sound of an irrepressible rivulet threading its underground way through stones and earth brought to my ears a song of spring. I love the trees, the sky, the snow—all my senses respond to the call of the solitude of Nature. I felt free and happy; I sank into the state of bliss in which the soul is conscious of no desire. Surely this is better than the strife and the sordid cares of the camp; surely one may walk apart and enjoy the fruits of tranquillity? Our consciousness can admit but an infinitesimal part of that which is: let us then fill it to the brim with the joy of beauty, with the harmony of being at rest. Then I remembered the things which lay beyond my peaks and my
moonlight: a vision of prisons and shambles, of battlefields and slums, passed before my eyes. How can one forget! How can one enjoy peace and beauty! Duty bids us to descend, love bids us to share the suffering.
And yet are there not two ways of seeking perfection, two paths clearly defined and well trodden throughout the ages—reform of self and reform of others? What may at first sight appear as æsthetic or mystic egoism is perhaps the better way. The hermit who forsakes the world and renounces the social ties and burdens which most men count of value is bent on the purification of his own soul. Monasticism—with all its faults—recognized the essential need of self-examination and self-discipline. It bade us cleanse our souls, conquer our own temptations, by a rigid system of religious exercise. Our modern reformer is not always conscious of any need for self-reform. He lustily attacks the misdoings of others and remains happily ignorant of the Socratic rule, Know thyself. “Every unordered spirit is its own punishment,” says St. Augustine, and the disorder is not removed by assaulting the faults of others. We have, first and last, to be captains
of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early Christian monasticism held that as this world is the domain of the devil, the only safety lies in flight from it. Such a view precludes the possibility of social reform on a general and lasting basis. It has a radical consistency and a scientific precision which are only disturbed by the course of actual events. Supposing all humanity could be withdrawn, every precious brand snatched from the burning and the whole made into a vast monastery? The devil would be sure to slip in and cause a disturbance.
The social reformer assumes that the world is worthy of his care, and that we are here to make it as habitable as we can. He lives in the midst of sinful humanity and accepts the inheritance of earthly conventions. He