Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

Knighthood is personal, and is for the lifetime of the recipient. Is there any value in an estate where status is heritable? If there is any validity in the theory of varying and persistent race-values, it would seem so, yet the idea of recognizing this excellence of certain families and the reasonable probability of their maintaining the established standard unimpaired, and so giving them a formal status, would no doubt be repugnant to the vast majority of men in the United States. I think this aversion is based on prejudice, natural but ill-founded. We resent the idea of privilege without responsibility, as we should, but this, while it was the condition of those aristocracies which were operative at the time of the founding of the Republic, was opposed to the Mediaeval, or true idea, which linked responsibility with privilege. The old privilege is gone and cannot be restored, but already we have a new privilege which is being claimed and enforced by proletarian groups, and the legislative representatives of the whole people stand in such terror of massed votes that they not only fail to check this astonishing and topsy-turvy movement, but actually further its pretensions. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" actually means the restoration of privilege in a form far more tyrannical and monstrous than any ever exercised by the old aristocracies of Italy, France, Germany and England. Much recent legislation in Washington exempting certain industrial and agricultural classes from the operation of laws which bear heavily on other classes, and some of the claims and pretensions of unionized labor, tend in precisely the same direction.

It is not restoration of privilege I have in mind but rather in a sense the prevention of this through the existence of a class or estate that has a fixed status dependent first on character and service and then on an assured position that is not contingent on political favour, the bulk of votes, or the acquisition of an inordinate amount of money. Surety of position works towards independence of thought and action and towards strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history of European culture and civilization.

After all, is it merely sentimentalism and a sense of the picturesque that leads us to look backward with some wistfulness to the days of which the record is still left us in legends and fairy-tales and old romance, when ignorance and vulgarity did not sit in high places even if arrogance and pride and tyranny sometimes did, and when the profiteer and the oriental financier and the successful politician did not represent the distinction and the chivalry and the courtesy and the honour of the social organism man builds for his own habitation? The idea of knighthood still stirs us and the deeds of chivalry and the courtesy and the honour of the social Knights of the Round Table, Crusaders and knights errant, the quest of the Holy Grail, rescue and adventure, the fighting with paynims and powers of evil, still stir our blood and arouse in our minds strange contrasts and antinomies. Princes and fair chatelaines in their wide domains with castle and chase and delicate pleasaunce, liege-men bound to them by more than the feudal ties of service. All the varied honours of nobility, vitalized by significant ritual and symbolized by splendid and beautiful costumes. Courts of Love and troubadours and trouvères, kings who were kings indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their courts—Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King Charles—above all the simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman," the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion. All these old things of long ago still rouse in us answering humours, and there are a few of us who can hardly see just why they are inconsistent with liberty and opportunity, justice, righteousness and mercy.

Somehow the last two generations, and especially the last ten years, have revealed many things hitherto hidden, and as we envisage society as it has come to be, estimating it by new-found standards and establishing new comparisons through a recovery of a more just historical sense, the question comes whether it is indeed more wholesome, more beautiful, more normal to man as he is, than the older society that in varying forms but always the same principle, had held throughout all history until the new model came in, now hardly a century ago.

I do not think this wistful and bewildered looking backward is particularly due to a new desire for beauty, that comeliness of condition that existed then and has now given place to gross ugliness and ill-conditioned manners and ways. Rather it seems to me it is due to a sense of irrationality and fundamental injustice in the present order, coupled with a new terror of the proximate issue as this already is revealing itself amongst many peoples. We resent the high estate, purchasable and purchased, of the cynical intriguer and the vulgar profiteer, of the tradesman in "big business," the cheap prophet and the pathetic progeny of "successful men" fast reverting to type. We know our city councils and our state legislatures and our houses of congress, we know our newspapers, their standards and the motive powers behind them, and what they record of the character and the doings of what they call "society men and women." Above all we know that under the ancient regime, in spite of manifold failures, shortcomings and disloyalty, there was such a thing as a standard of honour, a principle of chivalry, an impulse to unselfish service, a criterion of courtesy and good manners; we look for these things now in vain, except amongst those little enclaves of oblivion where the old character and old breeding still maintain a fading existence, and as we consider what we have become we sometimes wonder if the price we have paid for "democracy" was not too extortionate.

Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of our diminishing stock of social character. We tore down in indignant revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it. Perhaps we did well, at least we hardly could have done anything else; but now we are again in the position of our forefathers who saw things as they were and acted with force and decision. There are as many counts against our society of plutocrats, politicians and proletarians, mingled in complete and ineffective confusion, as there were against the aristocracies, so called, of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there are more, at least many of them are different, but the indictment is no less sweeping.

Our plan, so generous, so liberal, so high-minded in many ways, has failed to produce the results we desired, while it has worked itself out to the point of menace. It is for us to see these facts clearly, and so to act, and so promptly, that we may not have to await the destroying force of cataclysm for the correction of our errors.

IV

THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM

The solution of the industrial and economic problem that now confronts the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of once arid ground, or whether it is the Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey or the Constitution of the United States, and so working he partakes something of the divine power of creation.