Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander said:

"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you. That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you before you can adequately receive——"

You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It is old, older than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts. There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good for the part; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for the first thought, not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so established in this conviction that its actions are automatically founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true world-fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of life.

Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a patriot. It is not my country that is of interest, but humankind. America's political interests, her trade, all her localisations as a separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action invariably follows the thought.

Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.

The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took pen in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of the very act of getting out from under European influence.

England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble of war. War in this century is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you received letters from friends in England or Germany or France during the war—friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen—you were struck by the dulness and misery of the communications, the uncentred points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you read the newspapers and periodicals of those countries, you required no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.

Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony is one.

The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each nation bringing his labour.

If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time there is war to the death.