It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic and political equality.
Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of industrial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the freedom of the seas during times of peace. The aeroplane and the airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the meek of the earth to rush together to one another's rescue; and wireless telegraphy, as soon as it is established universally, will sound to them the alarum in the twinkling of an eye. All the new inventions are, as it were, God's detectives for the exposing of the subtle and disguised crimes of the great; or they are God's captains for the mobilization of the scattered forces of the meek when the plot of an oppressor has been unearthed. The people need only to realize that the new inventions are by their very nature breakers of power-monopolies, in order to find in them an irresistible incentive to rise and act in the cause of world-wide democratic initiative. High explosives, the gas-engine, the giant gun, sheets of flame, deadly gases, all these are within the reach of Christ's little ones to encircle their kingdom-that-is-coming against the attacks of inhuman humans. The new inventions are humanity's destructors to annihilate civilization's destroyers.
I have specified some of the twentieth century's inventions to show that, like the compass and the printing-press, they will be scatterers of privileges to the masses. I might go on indefinitely adding to the list, but I will cite only one more. It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that a new way of making cheap paper was discovered—so cheap that it became possible to sell great dailies for one cent. But this practice was not established until the twentieth century. And it was only a few years ago that the greatest newspaper of the world—and a very stronghold of upper-class monopoly—was able, or driven, to reduce its price from threepence (six cents) to a penny. But I specify the case of the London Times because, like a miracle of divine healing, but entirely due to the cheapness of paper, is the change of its policy from that of brutal imperialism to the democratic one of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states. Now that the Times has been converted, we may be sure that the universe itself has come round to the side of the right, and has taken up the cause of the poor. By the pricking of my thumbs I know that something better than civilization this way comes. Dull indeed must be that man whose blood does not tingle with anticipation. Yet the physical inventions of the twentieth century are not to be compared in pregnancy of good with its less palpable, its spiritual, novelties.
XX. AGAINST THE MATERIALISTIC VIEW OF HISTORY
Before passing, however, from the physical inventions to the new moral ideas and mental contacts, I must interpolate a comment to save myself from misunderstanding. Generally, those who trace to mechanical utilities new epochs in the development of mankind proceed upon the materialistic theory of history. But this theory I have in no wise committed myself to, for I count it to be false. It is true that I have traced all the great steps in human advancement to physical inventions, but I have in no word implied that the inventions themselves were caused by anything material whatsoever. And if they themselves were, as I believe, the result of man's mental and spiritual activities reacting against events, then my tracing of human advancement to them implies no belief in the materialistic theory of history. Every effect of the inventions must be set down ultimately not to them, but to their causes; and their causes were mental. Casually I have said as much, in remarking several times that they took place by a happy chance, or by a stroke of insight on the part of some rare genius, or by the reaction of some mediocre person's intelligent volition against some extraordinary experience which made the idea of the invention so obtrusively evident that even a mind not unusually gifted could scarcely have avoided lighting upon it.
The only phrase I have used by which I cannot absolutely stand is the expression "by a happy chance"; for I believe that the mental productions of each person are due not to uncaused chance, or to accident, but to trends of the social mind that have been set in motion by mental exigencies arising out of current events. As primitive peoples, however, have left no record of their mental sequences, we cannot say with confidence what were the exact experiences that led to the idea of using fire, or to any other device that transformed the relation of human beings to one another or to their material habitat. I only repeat that whatever caused the inventions caused all the remote effects of these, and that if the causes of the inventions were mental and spiritual, then an interpretation of history is not materialistic merely because it traces advancement to mechanical utilities. That I am right in tracing these to mental and spiritual causes is proved at least in the case of recent inventions. For we know that their causes were psychic; we know the mental atmosphere, and how it arose, that brought forth the telephone and aeroplane and submarine. We know that these were not due to physical necessities or to any material causes. They arose from the brooding of creative imaginations disciplined in a method learned by reflection upon former successes in discovery. We also know in what main particulars this modern atmosphere differs from that of former centuries. But such questions are not germane to my central theme, and so I pass them over lightly. Let me then return without further delay from this digression which has been made in the interests, not of my argument, but of my self-respect as a student of social facts.
XXI. CONTACT OF PEOPLES
Consider, for instance, that at the beginning of our century, for the first time in more than fifteen hundred years, the Christian nations came into contact with a mighty pagan power, and were compelled to acknowledge it as not only a political, but a moral, equal. Whoever knows the magical effect in the quickening of intellectual and spiritual life due to new contact with a contrasting type of national culture will agree that the meeting thus of Christendom with the so-called "heathen" world is a fact of prime significance in the history of man.
Nor is it simply the contact of heathen and Christian on terms of moral equality. There is another aspect to Japan's ascendancy and her recognition by the West. The East and the West meet at last. The psychic invasion of each by the other must be epoch-making and in the direction of the completeness and unification spiritually of all mankind in a brotherhood of nations and nation-states. The new contact of heathen and Christian, and of white and colored, of East and West, means that the exploitation of the dark races by nations more highly organized on a basis of self-interest is about to cease forever. With the humanization of the West will come the salvation of those tribes who never divided themselves so absolutely into the "haves" and the "have-nots," or who never attained a high mastery over the physical universe.
Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many in Old England thought—that there is nothing new under the sun? Then I would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative political and social equality, of immigrants from some fifty-one different nations of the Old World. These people will mix their blood, their temperaments, and their traditions, and not only will a new variety of human being emerge, but the mixing of opposites in idea and temperament will quicken self-consciousness and heighten mental power and speed up its activity. The opportunity of the blond beasts of prey has lain in the torpor and inactivity and ignorance of the multitude. But I find no torpor in California. And where there is no one that will allow himself to be preyed upon, even blond beasts take up the new enterprise of co-operation among equals. This is an inevitable result of the contact of many varieties of unlikes, the unification, not of equals, but of supplementary equivalents. When such psychic conditions have prevailed for a century or more, it is inconceivable that trade can continue to consist of competition between individuals and the permission of the successful to amass and hoard fortunes. Either production and distribution will become communal, or the community will tax large fortunes into the state and national treasury.