Such a substitute for civilization, however, is the opposite of a return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It presupposes the highest mastery of man over matter and social unity among all mankind co-operating as nation-states and federations of states.
As regards external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr. Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be the law of his own being unless he has lost his manhood's centrality. A crushing indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing during the twenty-six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths have become but items among the general products of industry and governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the British state, and the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of poetic hermits.
But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away, whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of trusts and monopolies to the general will of the community. In America you have changed your federal law and many of your state constitutions, in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise through any legal barrier to the full assertion of the mind of the common life.
So in every particular of his cure for civilization Mr. Carpenter's worship of savagery and barbarism is being rejected as fantastic. We may return to uncooked fruits and grains. But what a task for the most highly developed industrial state, to raise and distribute an adequate supply of grapes, apples, and nuts the year round for the 1,000,000,000 inhabitants of the globe! What a call for many wizards of California to produce new species of luscious edibles! It would seem to me that the curse of civilization has lain in the direction of too little of either cooked or uncooked food, instead of too much. If the common people are to come into their own, trade in every necessity and luxury must be more highly integrated. The difference of the new era as regards foreign commerce will chiefly be that nations as a whole by their governments will conduct it instead of private traders. In other words, foreign trade will be nationalized, in the way that social democrats have long demanded that land and capital should be. The community will own and control it through state agents for the common welfare. Nothing of good which civilization has brought forth will be lost, nor will the organization of wealth be relaxed.
Machinery will be multiplied a thousandfold. Like the human body itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this unity dominating a multiplicity of interests is attainable only through the entire mechanism of external government. And again, as the man resides in all the organs of the body, but is himself no organ, and as by the central unity of his life-energy is able to rush the white corpuscles to any part that is wounded or poisoned, so the general will, the community-self of the social democratic state, is beginning to direct all the healing agencies in the body politic to the rescue of the unfortunate. Such beneficence and benevolence, systematized and alert, is more than civilization. It is Christianity, it is the doing unto the least of one's fellow-men what self-interest prompts one never to do; but its power is equal to the redemptive goodness that inspires it. In motive and method it is not business, it is different from trade; for it is a progeny of pity. But nevertheless, it is socialized wealth and applied science and politics. It is government by the governed.
When civilization has been superseded by this democratic process, which in our century is advancing at such rapid gait, there will surely be in the sphere of religion no more return to Nature than in that of economics. There will be no more the worship of any one instinct or organ, or any external object or agent. How could Carpenter have so far forgotten his own definition of health as to applaud the primitive ritualistic worship of the glories of the human body and the procession of the stars? That ritual was itself the symptom of the break-up of man's character into multiplicity, and the insubordination of specific organs. Surely when man has gained centrality of health, he will worship the unifying will which is dominant whenever health prevails. He will adore the spirit which makes the many one. But men will never gain that centrality of health until they have established this worship of the one heart that beats in every human breast and, being inspired with religious passion for it, have brought the entire economic order into conformity with its behests.
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