Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed equality between men "on the strength of their manhood alone," the sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality, are "fond things vainly imagined" which must be radically modified before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the great purgation of war.

That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since race-values, both of blood and of the gens enter in to establish differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which are practical considerations with society. If we could still hold the old Darwinian dogmas of the origin of species through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and if the equally august and authoritative dogma of the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics were longer tenable, then perhaps we might invoke faith, hope and patience and continue our generous method of imperilling present society while we fixed our eyes on the vision of that to come when environment, education and heredity had accomplished their perfect work. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—science is rapidly reconsidering its earlier and somewhat hasty conclusions, and the consensus of the most authoritative opinion seems to be that we must believe these things no longer. Failing these premises, on which we have laboured so long and so honestly and so sincerely, we are again thrown back on the testimony of history and our own observation, and with this reversal we also are bound to reconsider both our premises and the constitution of those systems and institutions we have erected on them as a foundation.

The existence of a general law does not exclude exceptions. The fact that in the case of human beings we have to take into consideration a powerful factor that does not come into play in the domain of zoölogy and botany—the immortal soul—makes impossible the drawing of exact deductions from precedents therein established. This determining touch of the divine, which is no result of biological processes, but stands outside the limitations of heredity and environment and education, may manifest itself quite as well in one class as in another, for "God is no respecter of persons." As has been said before, there is no difference in degree as between immortal souls. The point is, however, that each is linked to a specific congeries of tendencies, limitations, effective or defective agencies, that are what they have been made by the parents of the race. These may be such as enable the soul to triumph in its earthly experience and in its bodily housing; they may be such as will bring about failure and defeat. It is not that the soul builds itself "more stately mansions"; it is that these are provided for it by the physical processes of life, and it is almost the first duty of man to see that they are well built.

Again, the soul is single and personal; as it is not a plexus of inherited tendencies, so it is not heritable, and a great soul showing suddenly in the dusk of a dull race contributes nothing of its essential quality to the issue of the body it has made its house. The stews of a mill town may suddenly be illuminated by the radiance of a divine soul, to the amazement of profligate parents and the confusion of eugenists; but unless the unsolvable mystery of life has determined on a new species, and so by a sudden influx of the élan vital cuts off the line of physical succession and establishes one that is wholly new, then the brightness dies away with the passing of the splendid soul, and the established tendencies resume their sway.

The bearing of this theory on the actions of society is immediate. Through the complete disregard of race-values that has obtained during the last two or three centuries, and the emergence and complete supremacy in all categories of life of human groups of low potential, civilization has been brought down to a level where it is threatened with disaster. If recovery is to be effected and a second era of "dark ages" avoided, there must be an entirely new evaluation of things, a new estimate of the principles and methods that obtained under Modernism, and a fearless adventure into fields that may prove not to be so unfamiliar as might at first appear.

Specifically, we must revise our attitude as to immigration, excluding whole classes, and even races, that we have hitherto welcomed with open hands from the disinterested offices of steamship companies: we must control and in some cases prohibit, the mating of various racial stocks; finally we must altogether disallow the practice of changing, by law, one race-name for another. This process is one for which no excuse exists and unless it can be brought to an end then, apart from certain physical differentiations on which nature wisely insists, we have no guaranty against the adulteration that has gone so far towards substituting the mongrel for the pure racial type, while society is bound to suffer still further deception and continued danger along the lines that have recently been indicated by the transformation of Treibitsch into "Lincoln," Braunstein into "Trotsky" and Samuels into "Montague."

For its fulfillment, then, and its regeneration, the real democracy demands and must achieve the creation and cooperation of a real aristocracy, not an aristocracy of material force either military or civil, nor one of land owners or money-getters, nor one of artificial caste. All these substitutes have been tried from time to time, in Rome, China, Great Britain, the United States, and all have failed in the end, for all have ignored the one essential point of character, without which we shall continue to reproduce what we have at present; a thing as insolent, offensive and tyrannical as the old aristocracies at their worst, with none of the constructive and beneficent qualities of the old aristocracies at their best.

That race-values have much to do with this development of character I believe to be true, but of far greater efficiency, indeed the actual motive force, is the Christian religion, working directly on and through the individual and using race as only one of its material means of operation. Democracy has accomplished its present failure, not only because it could not function without the cooperation of aristocracy, but chiefly because, in its modernist form, it has become in fact isolated from Christianity. All in it of good it derives from that Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages which first put it into practice, all in it of evil it owes to a falling back on paganism and a denial of its own parentage and rejection of its control. I shall deal with this later in more detail; I speak of it now just for the purpose of entering a caveat against any deduction from what I have said that any natural force, of race or evolution or anything else, or any formal institution devised by man, ever has, or ever can, serve in itself as a way of social redemption. I am anxious not to overemphasize these things on which the development of my argument forces me to lay particular stress.

For those who can go with me so far, the question will arise: How then are we so to reorganize society that we may gain the end in view? It is a question not easy of solution. Granted the fact of social differentiation and the necessity of its recognition, how are we to break down the wholly wrong system that now obtains and substitute another in its place? It would be simple enough if within the period allowed us by safety (apparently not any too extended at the present moment) a working majority of men could achieve, in the old and exact phraseology, that change of heart, that spiritual conversion, that would bring back into permanent authority the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and that sense of right values in life, which together make almost indifferent the nature of the formal devices man creates for the organization of society. Certainly this is possible; greater miracles have happened in history but, failing this, what?

One turns of course by instinct to old models, but in this is the danger of an attempt at an archaeological restoration, a futile effort at reviving dead forms that have had their day. In principle, and in the working as well, the old orders of chivalry or knighthood strongly commend themselves, for here there was, in principle, both the maintenance of high ideals of honour courtesy and noblesse oblige, and the rendering of chivalrous service. Chesterton has put it well in the phrase "the giving things which cannot be demanded, the avoiding things which cannot be punished." Moreover, admission to the orders of knighthood was free to all provided there were that cause which came from personal character alone. Knighthood was the crown of knightly service and it was forfeited for recreancy. Is there not in this some suggestion of what may again be established as an incentive and a reward, and as well, as a vital agency for the reorganization of society?