Towards the Great Peace | Page 8

evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either
consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.
Not only did it deter men from realizing the ominous tendency of
events but, more unhappily, it minimized their power to discriminate
between what was good and bad in current society, and even reversed
their sense of comparative values. If man was indeed progressing
steadily from bad to good, and so to better and best, then the vivid and
even splendid life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its
headlong conquest of the powers of nature, its enormous industrial
development, its vast and ever-increasing wealth in material things,
must be not only an amazing advance beyond any former civilization
but positively good in itself, while the future could only be a
progressive magnifying of what then was going on. "Just as" to quote
Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr. Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a
litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of
the Inscrutable, it will some day be larger than an elephant...so we
know and reverently acknowledge that when any power in human
politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it
will go on until it reaches the sky."
Nothing but a grave inability to estimate values, based on a
pseudo-scientific dogma, can explain the lack of any just standard of
comparative values that was the essential quality in pre-war society.
Extraordinary as were the material achievements of the time, beneficent
in certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the
advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed
in value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image
which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There
were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had
poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real
things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so
obviously real that they were unreal became the object and the measure
of achievement.
It was an unhappy and almost fatal attitude of mind, and it was
engendered not so much by the trend of civilization since the

Renaissance and Reformation, nor by the compulsion and cumulative
influence of the things themselves, as by the natural temper and
inclinations and the native standards of this emancipated mass of
humanity that, oppressed, outraged and degraded for four hundred
years had at last burst out of its prison-house and had assumed control
of society through industrialism, politics and social life. The saving
grace of the old aristocracies had disappeared with the institution itself:
between 1875 and 1900 the great single leaders, so fine in character, so
brilliant in capacity, so surprising in their numbers, that had given a
deceptive glory to the so-called Victorian Age, had almost wholly died
out, and the new conditions neither fostered the development of
adequate successors, nor gave audience to the few that, anomalously,
appeared. It is not surprising therefore that the new social element that
had played so masterly a part in bringing to its perfection the
industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should have developed
an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its materialism, its
narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness and cynicism, on
the mind of a society where increasingly their own followers were, by
sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring a predominant position.
I am not unconscious that these are hard sayings and that few indeed
will accept them. They seem too much like attempting that which
Burke said was impossible, viz., to bring an indictment against a people.
I intend nothing of the sort. Out of this same body of humanity which
as a whole has exerted this very unfavourable influence on modern
society, have come and will come personalities of sudden and startling
nobility, men who have done as great service as any of their
contemporaries whatever their class or status. Out of the depths have
come those who have ascended to the supreme heights, for since
Christianity came into the world to free the souls of men, this new
liberty has worked without limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very
creations of the emergent force, industrialism and democracy, while
they were the betrayal of the many were the opportunity of the few,
taking the place, as they did, of the older creeds of specifically
Christian society, and inviting those who would to work their full
emancipation and so become the servants of God and mankind. By the
very bitterness of their antecedents, the cruelty of their inheritance, they
gained a deeper sense of the reality of life, a more just sense of right

and wrong, a clearer vision of things as they were,