Leacraft motioned to the chairs, and the three sat down, in the same order as they stood. The place obviously was Leacraft’s, or he exercised some sort of control over it. And it was Miss Tobit’s voice which next took up the thread of talk—it was noticeable that Leacraft turned eagerly and looked at her, though his earnest face betrayed no symptoms of possession, in truth, a contemplative sadness for a moment rested on his features, vanishing even with its dawn.
“Why give up old things? Why change and change and change? You call it progress. Is it anything but going around in a circle? You will come back to the very things you now reject, and some centuries hence the world will try the old experiments of Feudlism and Chivalry; and Kings by Divine Right will be as popular as elected Presidents—indeed, people may care some day as much as ever to say their prayers and go to church.”
Both Leacraft and Thomsen laughed, but it was Leacraft who retorted, and he leaned far back in the Morris chair, his eyes bent upon the visionary ring of the horizon now webbed with bluescent shades.
“I think there will be no returns, Mrs. Thomsen”—Ah! then Leacraft had lost again—“no Merry-go-round; our path, the path of humanity, is on and on and on, not always straight, not always level, and never final in its destinations. It was a physical chasm that separated the first colonies of this land from Europe. They brought with them traditions, customs, though luckily not of a very silly sort—but the lack of continuity with the whole antecedent history of England practically destroyed that history for them, and they began in untrammelled freedom to think for themselves and determine the essence of manhood, of worth, of liberty, of faith, of brotherhood, and their thinking throve upon nothing so much as the contemplation of the as yet, humanly speaking, unused world about them.
“And the vicissitudes of living, the peril, the undiminished levy made by necessity upon their inventiveness, their industry, their courage, expelled the remaining vestiges of fealty to humbug, the pretense of class, the arrogance of office. They had wrested a living from Nature, under circumstances of unabashed familiarity with the cruelty of the savage, the obduracy of climate, and the grudging responses of a sterile soil, and they estimated worth by the hardihood of men who worked.
“An American essayist has pointed out the emphasis laid by the northern, the Teutonic races, upon individual liberty. He says something like this: The Germanic race has been distinguished at all ages for its political capacity, and the possession of vigorous institutions of self-government; that there grew up among the nations of this race a well ordered system of government, based upon the right of the individual. And why was this? Because they knew of the hardships of living, and the fibre of liberty-loving natures were formed under the kneading strains of perpetual conflict. James McKinnon has pointed out the same thing in his History of Modern Liberty.
“Arbitrary and selfish rule was most quickly crushed in Central Europe. No! we shall not return to the old follies, because we shall not be permitted to return; because struggle with Nature will never cease.”
“Russia has been a cold country,” answered Thomsen; “and if the gauge of liberty is coldness, we should expect to have seen the fruits of popular government ripening, if you will permit the paradox, in its zero atmospheres; or if wildness and natural enemies—those that make housekeeping difficult, and a man’s skin a precious abode for his soul—why have not the negroes of Africa won over the images of rhetoric which have been wasted upon Greece and Rome—both, by-the-by, hot countries?”
“Rome and Greece never knew what Liberty was in the modern sense. Both were types of class government. Before Christianity, there could be no ideal of freedom in its holiest meanings. As for Russia, the germs of liberty are yet buried there, but it is understood; an accident has put the autocracy in power, and like all beneficiaries of a system, its members fight for their living; besides, Russia has not left off its barbarism. But nothing under Heaven will keep her from being free. As to the negro, he lies too far back, too near to the origins, and, in any case, the dangers of the jungle are met by craft, rather than by consecutive exertion and daring.”
“You regret that our new growth in the Pacific—the Australian England—has not put on the features of a republic, instead of preserving the heritage of the kingly and royal class institutions under which the old England flourished. Do you think that nations can safely try experiments, like children playing games, or chemists mixing solutions, which, in the latter case, may at any moment blow their heads off? I think not.”