He was a Christian, and he took the ground that democracy, in itself bad, had become impossible when the atheistic deism of the eighteenth century pervaded the minds of the voting masses and took the form of Hæckel’s materialism and that of his school of thinkers.
He claimed that, so far from indicating the spread of enlightenment, it was due to national decay, and had always preceded periods of national reconstruction, instancing Rome and Athens, and the America of a century ago, where democracy had become incompatible with free speech and assembly, an independent judiciary, and a broad and secure freedom.
Written for circulation among those opposed to the Sanson régime, it was a fervent prayer for the deliverance of the world. In it I gathered more of the meaning of the new civilization than I had learned from David.
I read that the War of the Nations was caused by one thing alone: the breaking down of Christianity in Germany, and the revival of the old pagan doctrines, with the ensuing challenge against all that humanity had built up during two thousand years.
But in that period of ferments only a few had seen this meaning. The challenge had been interpreted as one of aristocracy against democracy, largely because democracy, then in the saddle, was the creed of the loudest publicists. For this the writer Wells, known posthumously as “The Prophet,” a man whose penetrating judgment and synthetic mind were fogged by class consciousness, was largely responsible.
The hope of democracy was fair in those after-years, when nations, purged by their ordeal of blood, revived the noble hopes of liberty. Men would have sacrificed everything for their brethren during that first decade of peace. There was a splendid spiritual awakening among the nations. Democracy was the young, smiling god, the guardian of universal peace.
If only, the writer said, that spiritual enlargement had been joined to Christian faith. But the backwash of nineteenth century atheism swamped it. The doctrines of materialism were rooted in the masses. The German virus could not be rooted out without trained leadership and ideals. I recalled Sir Spofforth’s words when I read that. “It must not happen again!” all men had said, when at last peace triumphed. No, not if the spirit of Christ, governing all men, had drawn them into brotherhood. But what if insults had been heaped upon the German people? What hope of peace was there when hate such as this ruled in the mind of the leader of the new faith?
Instead of Christ, these blind philosophers set up their democratic god. They labelled war “dynastic,” and believed democracy would destroy it. Had they not used their eyes? Did they not know that war was the embodiment of hate? Had they never looked on a mob, shouting for war, or was human nature to be changed by education, and through prosperity, so that no nation would ever again gather to itself false doctrines, with hate, and scorn, and pride, and go forth to destroy?
As every century produced its dominant illusion, so now in the twentieth this singular delusion of a democracy progressing through graded virtue unto a perfect day possessed the race. And here the writer paused to draw another instance from America, not, as he was painstaking to explain, because her inhabitants were different from other men, but because they were the same.
He showed how decadence had spread exactly as democracy had spread. He told of the two counties of Ohio where investigation showed the inhabitants to have sold their votes universally—merchants and clergymen, professional men and laborers. Corruption radiated from the English-speaking centers. Law, principle, and integrity had gone first in New England and the South, in the withered branches of Anglo-Saxondom that had broken from the bough. One by one all the traditions of civic honesty had died; and if life was still tolerable in the early twentieth century, when justice was a byword and faith in public men had almost ceased, it was because the State was still largely an abstraction and people could still keep aloof from politics.