All the while there existed the same pitiable belief that this democracy would some day become honest, all-good, all-wise; but this was democracy and the fruits of it, and nowhere had it had a fairer chance to inaugurate the millennium. And the same mob that ran blindly after its blind leaders, responsive to every prejudice, to the old Moloch of race-hatred and the old Mammon of dishonesty, would, had it been allowed, have followed an ideal with its fund of inexhaustible loyalty and self-sacrifice.
Men had not changed. The Amazon and Congo valleys were drenched with the blood of murdered natives, and democracy yawned, just as the blood of Polish women and children, massacred by State troops, cried from the Colorado mining camps. In former days Christian orders arose to uphold justice and to keep down the devil in man. When Christendom was one, labor guilds had arisen under Catholic auspices whereby all men could live in freedom; now the Pope, impotent, could only issue an encyclical against that oppression of labor which, in its turn, begot hatred and war. The sword of Justice had been snapped in the scabbard.
Was this the hope of the world, he asked, this barren, Christless democracy? How many hearts had it broken? How many idealists had sacrificed themselves before this idol, dying with blind faith in a deity that devoured its votaries? Was there no higher hope? Were millions of colored men and women in America to be born forever, black cattle without hope, and die without a part in life? Had not the race at last turned on itself, when the eugenics madness thrust the sword into the heart of every family and made life a more loathsome slavery than any the world had known? What a sinister end to human hopes!
The persecutions of the mob always struck to degrade humanity. And when England developed, in proportion to her democracy, the same corruption as the United States, the same lack of loyalty and public sense, the same violence and the same vindictiveness, that was suspected which happened afterward—that the same types of men would rise to leadership, and her faithful, loyal heroes vanish like smoke in a gale.
And all the time the remedy was at hand; no Moloch of hate, no stock-farm theory of human bodies, but the principles of Christ, imposed to save the world by leaders who had abdicated their responsibility. The mob could never understand the need of abstract justice nor subordinate greed to duty. But for some ideal, however dimly seen, it could obey and sacrifice itself with matchless zeal, even to death.
Truly the Prophet Wells had prophesied of the years to come: “Not only will moral standards be shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound menages of very variable status, but also vice and depravity, in every form that is not absolutely penal, will be practiced in every grade of magnificence, and condoned.”
A shadow fell across the book. I looked up and saw David. He had been glancing over my shoulder as I read, unconscious of him; and he had reached these words with me.
His eyes flashed, he shook his fist in vehemence of passion. “No, Arnold!” he cried. “We’ll fight as long as we live to remain something better than the beasts; if life is a lie, or a dream, we’ll fight for that!”
CHAPTER X
THE DOMED BUILDING
“Arnold! Arnold!”