Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT.D., LL.D.
1922
INTRODUCTION
For the course of lectures I am privileged to deliver at this time, I
desire to take, in some sense as a text, a prayer that came to my
attention at the outset of my preparatory work. It is adapted from a
prayer by Bishop Hacket who flourished about the middle of the
seventeenth century, and is as follows:
_Lord, lift us out of Private-mindedness and give us Public
souls to work for Thy Kingdom by daily creating that Atmosphere
of a happy temper and generous heart which alone can bring the
Great Peace._
Each thought in this noble aspiration is curiously applicable to each
one of us in the times in which we fall: the supersession of narrow and
selfish and egotistical "private-mindedness" by a vital passion for the
winning of a Kingdom of righteousness consonant with the revealed will
of God; the lifting of souls from nervous introspection to a height
where they become indeed "public souls"; the accomplishing of the
Kingdom not by great engines of mechanical power but by the daily
offices of every individual; the substitution in place of current
hatred, fear and jealous covetousness, of the unhappy temper and
"generous heart" which are the only fruitful agencies of accomplishment.
Finally, the "Great Peace" as the supreme object of thought and act and
aspiration for us, and for all the world, at this time of crisis which
has culminated through the antithesis of great peace, which is great
war.
I have tried to keep this prayer of Bishop Hacket's before me during the
preparation of these lectures. I cannot claim that I have succeeded in
achieving a "happy temper" in all things, but I honestly claim that I
have striven earnestly for the "generous heart," even when forced, by
what seem to me the necessities of the case, to indulge in condemnation
or to bring forward subjects which can only be controversial. If the
"Great War," and the greater war which preceded, comprehended, and
followed it, were the result of many and varied errors, it matters
little whether these were the result of perversity, bad judgment or the
most generous impulses. As they resulted in the Great War, so they are a
detriment to the Great Peace that must follow, and therefore they must
be cast away. Consciousness of sin, repentance, and a will to do better,
must precede the act of amendment, and we must see where we have erred
if we are to forsake our ill ways and make an honest effort to strive
for something better.
For every failure I have made to achieve either a happy temper or a
generous heart, I hereby express my regret, and tender my apologies in
advance.
CONTENTS
LECTURE
INTRODUCTION
I. A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS
II. A WORKING PHILOSOPHY
III. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
IV. THE INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM
V. THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY
VI. THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION AND ART
VII. THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION
VIII. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE
I
A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS
For two thousand years Christianity has been an operative force in the
world; for more than a century democracy has been the controlling
influence in the public affairs of Europe and the Americas; for two
generations education, free, general and comprehensive, has been the
rule in the West. Wealth incomparable, scientific achievements
unexampled in their number and magnitude, facile means of swift
intercommunication between peoples, have all worked together towards an
earthly realization of the early nineteenth-century dream of proximate
and unescapable millennium. With the opening of the second decade of the
twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in
an unquestioned evolutionary drama. Man was master of all things, and
the failures of the past were obliterated by the glory of the imminent
event.
The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein,
everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was
tried as by fire, and each failed--save the indestructible qualities of
personal honour, courage and fortitude. Nothing corporate, whether
secular or ecclesiastical, endured the test, nothing of government or
administration, of science or industry, of philosophy or religion. The
victories were those of individual character, the things that stood the
test were not things but _men._
The "War to end war," the war "to make the world safe for democracy"
came to a formal ending, and for a few hours the world gazed spellbound
on golden hopes. Greater than the disillusionment of war was that of the
making of the peace. There had never been a war, not even the "Thirty
Years' War" in Germany, the "Hundred Years' War" in France or the wars
of Napoleon, that was fraught with more horror, devastation and
dishonour; there had never been a Peace, not even those of Berlin,
Vienna and Westphalia, more cynical or more deeply infected with the
poison of ultimate disaster. And here it was not things that failed, but
_men._
What of the world since the Peace of Versailles? Hatred, suspicion,
selfishness are the dominant notes. The nations of Europe are bankrupt
financially, and the governments of the world are bankrupt politically.
Society is dissolving into classes and factions, either at open war or
manoeuvering for position, awaiting the favourable moment. Law and order
are mocked at, philosophy and religion disregarded, and of all the
varied objects of human veneration so loudly acclaimed and loftily
exalted by the generation that preceded the war, not one remains to
command a wide allegiance. One might put it in a sentence and say that
everyone is dissatisfied with everything, and is showing his feelings
after varied but disquieting fashion. It is a condition of unstable
equilibrium constantly tending by its very nature to a point where
dissolution is apparently inevitable.
It is no part of my task to elaborate this thesis, and still less to
magnify its perils. Enough has been said and written on this subject
during the last two years; more than enough, perhaps, and in any case no
thinking person is unaware of the conditions that exist, whatever may be
his estimate of their significance, his interpenetration of their
tendency. I have set myself the task of trying to suggest some
constructive measures that we may employ in laying the foundations for
the immediate future; they may be wrong in whole or in part, but at
least my object and motive are not recrimination or invective, but
regeneration. Nevertheless, as a foundation the case must be stated, and
as a necessary preparation to any work that looks forward we must have
at least a working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need
redemption were brought about. I state the case thus, therefore: That
human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at
any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came
with the fall of classical civilization and from which five centuries
were necessary for the process of recovery. Christianity, democracy,
science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand
years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history. How
has this been possible, what has been the sequence of events that has
brought us to this pass?
It is of course the result of the interaction of certain physical,
material facts and certain spiritual forces. Out of these spiritual
energies come events, phenomena that manifest themselves in political,
social, ecclesiastical transactions and institutions; in wars,
migrations and the reshaping of states; in codes of law, the
organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.
In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of
men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or
degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the
material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new
forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of
building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.
Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this
developed around the shores of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of
slavery: Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were
small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly
privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves. All
the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science,
letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and
civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society,
was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. But
freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when
the body is in bondage. The slaves of antiquity were free neither in
body nor in soul, but with the coming of Christianity all this was
changed, for it is one of the great glories of the Christian religion
that it gave freedom to the soul even before the Church could give
freedom to the body of the slave. After the fall of the Roman Empire,
and with the infiltration of the free races of the North, slavery
gradually disappeared, and between the years 1000 and 1500 a very real
liberty existed as the product of Christianity and under its protection.
Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the
guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so
to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the
lines of demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the
Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son
of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war
and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble
beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind,
and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were
recognized, accepted and enforced.
This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its
long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to
1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather
than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile class, now
reduced to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a
degree of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized
status, the like of which had never been seen before. It was not a
bourgeoisie, for it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan,
craft, art, mechanic; a great free society, the proudest product of
Christian civilization.
With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to
overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The
Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build up
their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been
completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the
quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the
rest of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased
in proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one
the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either
on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto
little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the
small land-holders, citizens, craftsmen and artists of fifty different
sorts, has begun rapidly to dissolve, has almost vanished by the middle
of the seventeenth century, and in another hundred years has practically
disappeared.
What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western
Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks
had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders,
managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down
and down in the mass of submerged proletariat, losing liberty,
degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and
wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient
mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself.
I must insist on these three factors in the development of society and
its present catastrophe: the great, predominant, central body of free
men during the Middle Ages, their supersession during the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a non-producing bourgeoisie, and
the creation during the same period of a submerged proletariat. They are
factors of great significance and potential force.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the industrial-financial
revolution began. Within the space of an hundred years came all the
revelations of the potential inherent in thermo-dynamics and
electricity, and the invention of the machines that have changed the
world. During the Renaissance and Reformation the old social and
economic systems, so laboriously built up on the ruins of Roman tyranny,
had been destroyed; autocracy had abolished liberty, licentiousness had
wrecked the moral stamina, "freedom of conscience" had obliterated the
guiding and restraining power of the old religion. The field was clear
for a new dispensation.
What happened was interesting and significant. Coal and iron, and their
derivatives--steam and machinery--rapidly revealed their possibilities.
To take advantage of these, it was necessary that labour should be
available in large quantities and freely subject to exploitation; that
unlimited capital should be forthcoming; that adequate markets should be
discovered or created to absorb the surplus product, so enormously
greater than the normal demand; and finally, it was necessary that
directors and organizers and administrators should be ready at the call.
The conditions of the time made all these possible. The land-holding
peasantry of England--and it is here that the revolution was
accomplished--had been largely dispossessed and pauperized under Henry
VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, while the development of the wool-growing
industry had restricted the arable land to a point where it no longer
gave employment to the mass of field labourers. The first blast of
factory production threw out of work the whole body of cottage weavers,
smiths, craftsmen; and the result was a great mass of men, women, and
children without defense, void of all rights, and given the alternative
of submission to the dominance of the exploiters, or starvation.
Without capital the new industry could neither begin nor continue. The
exploits of the "joint-stock companies" invented and perfected in the
eighteenth century, showed how this capital could easily be obtained,
while the paralyzing and dismemberment of the Church during the
Reformation had resulted in the abrogation of the old ecclesiastical
inhibition against usury. The necessary capital was forthcoming, and the
foundations were laid for the great system of finance which was one of
the triumphant achievements of the last century.
The question of markets was more difficult. It was clear that, through
machinery, the exploitation of labour, and the manipulations of finance,
the product would be enormously greater than the local or national
demand. Until they themselves developed their own industrial system, the
other nations of Europe were available, but as this process proceeded
other markets had to be found; the result was achieved through
advertising, i.e., the stimulating in the minds of the general public of
a covetousness for something they had not known of and did not need, and
the exploiting of barbarous or undeveloped races in Asia, Africa,
Oceanica. This last task was easily achieved through "peaceful
penetration" and the preempting of "spheres of influence." In the end
(i.e., A.D. 1914), the whole world had so been divided, the stimulated
markets showed signs of repletion, and since exaggerated profits meant
increasing capital demanding investment, and the improvement in
"labour-saving" devices continued unchecked, the contest for others'
markets became acute, and world-politic was concentrated on the vital
problem of markets, lines of communication, and tariffs.
As for the finding or development of competent organizers and directors,
the history of the world since the end of medievalism had curiously
provided for this after a fashion that seemed almost miraculous. The
type required was different from anything that had been developed
before. Whenever the qualitative standard had been operative, it was
necessary that the leaders in any form of creative action should be men
of highly developed intellect, fine sensibility, wide and penetrating
vision, nobility of instinct, passion for righteousness, and a
consciousness of the eternal force of charity, honour, and service.
During the imperial or decadent stages, courage, dynamic force, the
passion for adventure, unscrupulousness in the matter of method, took
the place of the qualities that marked the earlier periods. In the first
instance the result was the great law-givers, philosophers, prophets,
religious leaders, and artists of every sort; in the second, the great
conquerors. Something quite different was now demanded--men who
possessed some of the qualities needed for the development of
imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of
those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new
industrial-financial-commercial regime, the leaders must be shrewd,
ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and
avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and
vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the
Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle
Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection
always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort
as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. This
aristocracy was an accepted and indispensable part of society, and it
was always more or less the same in principle, and always the centre and
source of leadership, without which society cannot endure. It is true
that at the hands of Christianity it acquired a new quality, that of
service as contingent on privilege--one might almost say of privilege as
contingent on service--and the ideals of honour, chivalry, compassion
were established as its object and method of operation even though these
were not always achieved, but the result was not a new creation; it was
an institution as old as society, regenerated and transformed and
playing a greater and a nobler part than ever before.
Between the years 1455 and 1795 this old aristocracy was largely
exterminated. The Wars of the Roses, the massacres of the Reformation,
and the Civil Wars in England; the Thirty Years' War in Germany; the
Hundred Years' War, the Wars of Religion, and the Revolution in France
had decimated the families old in honour, preserving the tradition of
culture, jealous of their alliances and their breeding--the natural and
actual leaders in thought and action. England suffered badly enough as
the result of war, with the persecutions of Henry VIII, Edward VI and
Elizabeth, and the Black Death, included for full measure. France
suffered also, but Germany fared worst of all. By the end of the Thirty
Years' War the older feudal nobility had largely disappeared, while the
class of "gentlemen" had been almost exterminated. In France, until the
fall of Napoleon III, and in Germany and Great Britain up to the present
moment, the recruiting of the formal aristocracy has gone on steadily,
but on a different basis and from a different class from anything known
before. Demonstrated personal ability to gain and maintain leadership;
distinguished service to the nation in war or statecraft; courage,
honour, fealty--these, in general, had been the ground for admission to
the ranks of the aristocracy. In general, also, advancement to the ranks
of the higher nobility was from the class of "gentlemen," though the
Church, the universities, and chivalry gave, during the Middle Ages,
wide opportunity for personal merit to achieve the highest honours.
Through the wholesale destruction of the representatives of a class that
from the beginning of history had been the directing and creative force
in civilization, a process began which was almost mechanical. As the
upper strata of society were planed off by war, pestilence, civil
slaughter, and assassination, the pressure on the great mass of men
(peasants, serfs, unskilled labourers, the so-called "lower classes")
was increasingly relaxed, and very soon the thin film of aristocracy,
further weakened by dilution, broke, and through the crumbling shell
burst to the surface those who had behind them no tradition but that of
servility, no comprehension of the ideals of chivalry and honour of the
gentleman, no stored-up results of education and culture, but only an
age-long rage against the age-long dominating class, together with the
instincts of craftiness, parsimony, and almost savage self-interest.
As a class, it was very far from being what it was under the Roman
Empire; on the other hand, it was equally removed from what it was
during the Middle Ages in England, France and the Rhineland. Under
mediaevalism chattel slavery had disappeared, and the lot of the peasant
was a happier one than he had known before. He had achieved definite
status, and the line that separated him from the gentry was very thin
and constantly traversed, thanks to the accepted system of land tenure,
the guilds, chivalry, the schools and universities, the priesthood and
monasticism. The Renaissance had rapidly changed all this, however;
absolutism in government, dispossession of land, the abolition of the
guilds, and the collapse of the moral order and of the dominance of the
Church, were fast pushing the peasant back into the position he had held
under the Roman Empire, and from which Christianity had lifted him. By
1790 he had been for nearly three centuries under a progressive
oppression that had undone nearly all the beneficent work of the Middle
Ages and made the peasant class practically outlaw, while breaking down
its character, degrading its morals, increasing its ignorance, and
building up a sullen rage and an invincible hatred of all that stood
visible as law and order in the persons of the ruling class.
Filtering through the impoverished and diluted crust of a dissolving
aristocracy, came this irruption from below. In their own persons
certain of these people possessed the qualities and the will which were
imperative for the organization of the industry, the trade, and the
finance that were to control the world for four generations, and produce
that industrial civilization which is the basis and the energizing force
of modernism. Immediately, and with conspicuous ability, they took hold
of the problem, solved its difficulties, developed its possibilities,
and by the end of the nineteenth century had made it master of the
world.
Simultaneously an equal revolution and reversal was being effected in
government. The free monarchies of the Middle Ages, beneath which lay
the well recognized principle that no authority, human or divine, could
give any monarch the right to govern wrong, and that there was such a
thing (frequently exercised) as lawful rebellion, gave place to the
absolutism and autocracy of Renaissance kingship and this, which was
fostered both by Renaissance and Reformation, became at once the ally of
the new forces in society and so furthered the growth as well as the
misery and the degradation of the proletariat. In revolt against this
new and very evil thing came the republicanism of the eighteenth
century, inspired and directed in large measure by members of the fast
perishing aristocracy of race, character and tradition. It was a
splendid uprising against tyranny and oppression and is best expressed
in the personalities and the actions of the Constitutional Convention of
the United States in 1787 and the States General of France in 1789.
The movement is not to be confounded with another that synchronizes with
it, that is to say, democracy, for the two things are radically
different in their antecedents, their protagonists, 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."