Towards the Great Peace | Page 6

their modes of operation and their objects. While the one was the aspiration and the creation of the more enlightened and cultured, the representatives of the old aristocracy, the other issued out of the same milieu that was responsible for the new social organism. That is to say; while certain of the more shrewd and ingenious were organizing trade, manufacture and finance and developing its autocratic and imperialistic possibilities at the expense of the great mass of their blood-brothers, others of the same social antecedents were devising a new theory, and experimenting in new schemes, of government, which would take all power away from the class that had hitherto exercised it and fix it firmly in the hands of the emancipated proletariat. This new model was called then, and is called now, democracy. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish between democracy of theory and democracy of method. Perhaps I should have used a more lucid nomenclature if I had simply distinguished between republicanism and democracy, for this is what it amounts to. The former is as old as man, and is part of the "passion for perfection" that characterizes all crescent society, and is indeed the chief difference between brute and human nature; it means the guaranteeing of justice, and may be described as consisting of abolition of privilege, equality of opportunity, and utilization of ability. Democracy of method consists in a variable and uncertain sequence of devices which are supposed to achieve the democracy of ideal, but as a matter of fact have thus far usually worked in the opposite direction. The activity of this movement synchronizes with the pressing upward of the "the masses" through the dissolving crust of "the classes," and represents their contribution to the science of political philosophy, as the contribution of the latter is current "political economy."
It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the case of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue of which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working out of these two great devices of the new force released by the destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why, when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further continuance.
A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate. Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of western Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity. Sooner here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial, commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of society, becoming partners with them and following their aims, conniving at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly "free" governments had become as identified with "special privilege," and as widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they failed consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and efficiency of operation.
For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican system until at last, during the same first decade of the present century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it, whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or republic, essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist, incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of society itself.
Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something