What a light is thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in the museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little knowledge we possess of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must believe, humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could almost believe the moon had a greater pull in those years.
"No more secret diplomacy!" historians tell us was one of the cries of the soldiers as they went to battle. There is considerable ground, too, for accepting the amusing traditional tale that even at the end of the war the then President of the American Republic (mainly confined at the time to the Western Continent), declared the first point for the guidance of the Peace Conference must be an open discussion of the covenant. And the first thing to happen when the war ended was the closing of the door of the council room by the peacemakers, who, naturally, were the very men with no other interest till that moment but the full pursuit of war; yet nobody noticed the door was shut, though nobody could hear what was going on inside the room. The faith in their politicians held by the natives of the backyard communities into which Europe was then divided—on the very eve, we see now, of the full continental control of international man-power by consolidated finance—was the measure of their annoyance when, too late, naturally, the fact that the old shackles from which they had been promised freedom were noticed to be riveted upon them several links tighter.
But it is not their faith, so happily youthful, which so reveals their ingenious minds as their resultant annoyance. That resentment illuminates the essential fact for us in studying their mentality as social animals. They really did accept without question, with open and receptive mouths and eyes shut, what was considered pleasing enough to fortify them in the trials of warfare. They were, difficult though it is for us to understand it, too vacant and generous to realize that the "Objects of the War" were but figments nicely calculated to get them busy. The figments—we must give credit to the leaders of the time-were indeed not un-imaginatively conjured up. Those inducing visions worked. They were accepted readily, and even with delight. It was sincerely believed that the pleasing dreams were substantial, that those chromatic vapours evoked by gifted statesmen were veritable promises of divine favor for meritorious endurance.
From that we can the more easily go with understanding to a study of the consequences of that attractive faith of undisciplined peoples so difficult to grasp for modern students, who witness daily the admirable submission of our own uniform herds to the divine ordinances of the High Priests of the Sacred Entity the State. Why, we even learn that the survivors of the not inconsiderable armies returned from the battlefields of 1918 with the innocent conviction that the gentlemen of England would keep a bond as faithfully as common soldiers! The hardest tasks of the statesmen of those days arose out of such extraordinary expectations, out of the ruinous supposition of the childish-minded that the honoring of a bond, the fulfilment of a promise in return for benefits received, is equally incumbent on everybody!
With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their statesmen. A careful computation shows us that in England, where indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with them, even when ordered to do so by the police. They behaved indeed, those ex-soldiers, as though it had been their war. Such a state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It is rather like trying to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has a right to decide upon its own affairs.
Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable than liberty; and uniformity is impossible without compulsion. A man with a free and contentious mind is a danger to the community, for he destroys its ease. He compels his fellows to active thought, if only to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening of the structure of the State. It is historically true that a few men with ranging and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in form and nature.
It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of the truth than they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests of the State. They preferred to die rather than surrender the out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.
This, we are sadly aware, took time; for the brightly-colored hopes sent skyward so long ago as 1914, and the vistas discovered as a consequence by young men whose eyes till then had been resting safely on the ground, and the daring and lively questioning that was aroused by the incessant nudging of sleeping minds, coincided, as it unluckily happened, with the beginnings when the "Great War" ended, of mass-production and international finance, so developing problems of government, the solving of which could not be reconciled with any admission of individual liberty and personal right. It was, therefore, the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 onwards.
Gradually the true social morality has been evolved—that one citizen should be so like all other citizens that his only distinguishing characteristic is his number; that the right ideal of citizenship, plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a gathering of his fellows will rouse no more curiosity than a glass of water. Obviously so desirable a similarity of mind and character, making disputation impossible, and preventing all dislike of the ordinances of the Sacred Entity, or Cabal of Inviolable Dispensers, a uniformity in which war and peace become merely the national output of a vast machine controlled by the Central Will, has been developed only through ages of Press Suggestion, popular education with a bias that was designed but was scarcely noticeable, the seizing and retaining of opportunities by legislators whenever public opinion was sufficiently diverted, and a development of chemical science and aeronautics which has been encouraged by the enlightened directors of the major industries.
The war which began in 1914 showed quite clearly, for example, the value of the Censorship. The instituting of this office was never questioned, for it was based on man's first impulse of obedience to superiors when faced by a sudden danger, caused by his fear of the unknown. More than that, the English were in a lucky state of exaltation at the time, and were ready to sacrifice everything to save from destruction what they were told was the ancient, exquisite, and priceless civilization of France. They did save it; but in the prolonged and costly process they learned more than they had known before of that civilization, as well as of their own; and so much of their fear of losing either was evaporated. By that time, anyhow, criticism was useless, because the Censorship then was empowered to deal even with a derisive cough when Authority was solemnly giving orders. Once the office of the Censor was set in its place unnoticed in a time of public nervousness and excitement, the rest was easy, for it became possible to bring all criticism within a law which was elastic enough to be extended even to those figments which merely worked on the timidity of unbalanced minds.