Victory out of Ruin

by Norman Maclean

CHAPTER IV

THE GREATEST OF TYRANNIES

The deadliest foe of humanity is the deadening power of custom. What we have seen from our earliest days has no power to stir our conscience or kindle the fire of indignation. It may be the case that when Lot went down to Sodom he was at first 'vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.' But he did not continue vexed very long. He got to like it. At last he sat at the gates of that city with great enjoyment. As he sank into the mire he became unconscious of the slough. Otherwise he would never have returned to it. When the great war of the five kings against four reached its consummation, and Lot was a prisoner going north with a halter round his neck, he often groaned, 'If I ever get out of this I'll never look near that filthy Sodom again.' Like a bolt from the blue came deliverance and victory and spoils—and back he went to Sodom and its filthy conversations as before. It is such a wonderfully modern story. In every age men get so accustomed to the filth that it no longer seems filth. The mud of their daily habit becomes their gold.

I

When we look back on the long road by which humanity has travelled and read of the things men once did in cold blood, we wonder how they could ever have had the heart to do them. The answer is—custom. To us it is incredible that men should once have trafficked in human flesh and blood. And yet to our forefathers of even recent years it seemed the most natural thing. Were there not slaves from the beginning, and naturally there would be unto the end! The captains of the slave ships would assemble their crews in their cabins for prayer meetings while the holds of their ships were filled with men and women dying in these gehennas! So far from experiencing any twinges of conscience, these slave captains regarded themselves as benefactors of humanity. Sir John Hawkins was not alone in priding himself on the fact that he brought so many of the heathen of Africa into Christian lands, where they might hear the Gospel. It is not so long ago when children of six years worked in factories from five in the morning to nine at night. We who play with our babes and build our brick castles in Spain while they shout for joy—think of it! What hearts they must have had—these fathers of ours—who took the babes by their thousands and harnessed them to the car of their juggernaut! And yet they were not any different from us. They were only blinded by custom.... Whoever has wandered over the hills of his native land will remember the leap of the heart when he has suddenly seen some fair valley open up before his amazed eyes. He can hear the song of the river that waters it, he sees the clouds playing on the slopes, his awestruck lips murmur with the great artist as he looked on Glen Feshie, 'Lord God Almighty!' But no human dwelling is there, only heaps of stones where the homesteads once stood; only the bleating of sheep where children once shouted at play. What became of the people? They were driven out. The will of one man or one woman drove the population of a parish into the Cowcaddens of Glasgow or exiled them beyond the seas. And the Church of Christ looked on silent. And the men who made the countryside waste prided themselves on the fact that they set the people, whom they drove forth, on the way of fortune! How could men do deeds like these? How could the Church be silent in the face of them? Again it was just custom. The ears had got so accustomed to phrases such as the 'sacredness of property,' the 'right of a man to do what he liked with his own,' that the heart forgot the sacredness of the Gospel and the rights of the people in the land of their birth. It is time we stopped mouthing about the cannon-fodder of war, and began to speak about the cannon-fodder of custom.

II

If poor, blundering, pitiful humanity had not been blinded by custom to the folly of war, it would have made an end of war long ago. But all the days of youth humanity has shut into dreary barracks, learning all sorts of foolish things. And the history it learns is just the history of war after war! At fourteen the centuries seem to a boy but a river of blood. He deems it an inevitable weapon in the progress of the world—this ceaseless killing! It is custom alone that prevents humanity from making an end of that horror. And strikes are only war in another form—the bludgeon of force! Kaiserism is not dead. World dominion for me or destruction for you has its counterpart in two shillings for me or ruin for you. The spirit is the same. If custom had not deadened us to the meaning of war and strike, we would shrink back in horror at the very sound of the words. But, instead of that, ere humanity has recovered from the woe of the one, we are plunged into the woes of the other.... It sounds a respectable sort of word! And the right of a man to stop working seems elementary—for we are not slaves. But humanity has learned there is a higher word than rights—and that is duty. We owe service to our brethren. We can pay too high a price for two shillings more a day if they mean starving women and perishing children. Life is more than livelihood; and if the endeavour to better livelihood means the destruction of life, then it is condemned. And that is what it means. Europe is perishing. Vienna is dying. All over the world Rachel is weeping for her children. What Europe needs is coal and raw materials, that it may have wherewith to buy food. And we go on strike. And ships can no longer carry food or cotton; and Europe will starve ... starving is a good discipline and I shouldn't mind ... but, God! the little children ... the babies.... 'Strike,' we shout, finding it easy through long custom. But our striking is only completing the work that Kaiserism began. And the little graves are dug faster and faster; and you can hear the falling of tears like soft rain.... What savages we are, unable through any disciple to learn that the world can only be saved by submitting to law and by ceasing to wield the bludgeon of force.... When one thinks of the poor suffering, quarrelling, dying slaves of custom; when one sees the world in one blinding flash convulsed in the death throes—Oh, God! if only there came a gale from Heaven—a sudden, rushing wind. Only that could save a world blinded like this.

III

You may imagine that I am exaggerating the power of this tyrant of whose despotism you are unconscious. But you have only to think and you will at once recognise that my words are but the words of soberness. Use your eyes as if for the first time—and what a world this is that surrounds us! I read the other day a paragraph in the morning paper that made my blood cold. A discharged soldier got his gratuity and spent his day in jollity. He came home at night and, in the presence of his children, trampled his wife to death, and not his wife only, but the unborn child—and in the presence of his children. That, in the most cultured city in Bible-loving and Christian Scotland. And every day the tale is much the same. Little children are perishing, mothers are broken-hearted, and the streets are strewn with human wreckage. The casualties of war pale in significance before the casualties of peace! But this does not move us: we are accustomed to it. These crowded, reeking public-houses, thirty to the half-mile, battening on the misery of the poor—we have seen them from our youth and they move us not. How many in our Circuses and Terraces and Places will even trouble themselves to so much as vote for the deliverance of their fellow-citizens? Very few in these particular places, if I mistake not. For they cannot shake themselves loose from the yoke of custom.