The New Society | Page 4

be. In the land where there are no more rich there will be only poor,
only very poor, people.
Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of that,
is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
decide to put up with the pis aller; the responsible thinker is under the
obligation of investigating the land into which the people are being led.
We must know what it looks like, where there are no rich people and
where no one can have an income without working for it, we must
understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able to shape it
aright.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Von Kommenden Dingen, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
Fischer.]
[Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.]

II

The question is not very urgent.
As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that of the
sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the Bolshevist
disease dream that they can infect the world.
The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues of
events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their accidental
flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with explosives
from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one day be blown
up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a Monday, in the
morning or in the evening, or whether the left door post will be left
standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.
From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves for a
transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always find
when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed to
catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather suffered
it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid movement--think, for
instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall certainly experience, as the
first deep wave of the Revolution sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic,
and plutocratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and glitter of
the time of glory, a revolt against the spiritless, mechanical
philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard
intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid

agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed,
and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific economy; and
against the brutal and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we
shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration and bad imitation
of foreign pride and pomp, an arrogant individualism and a hardening
of our human feeling. The intellectual war profiteers, who are all for
radicalism to-day, will soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their
button-holes.
For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve
shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the scurrying
of the intellectual speculator from the position which has failed into the
position which has won, with the full intention of scurrying back again
if necessary, and always with the claim to instruct other people, is an
expression of the alarming fact that life has become not an affair of
inward conviction, but of getting the right tip.
The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable
of judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising,