The war gave the new factions the long wished-for opportunity. They seized it in Russia, in Germany, in Poland, in Britain, and other countries. But the opportunities created by the war are one thing, the opportunities of tomorrow will be different, and it is this contingency for which your leaders are not prepared. You will have to select men of vision who will judge events as they arrive, without regard to the distant future, which belongs to no man.
One of my greatest mistakes was in separating Protestant Prussia from the interests of the Catholics of South Germany.
The new radicalism is opposed to some things which are irrevocably linked with religious doctrine.
Without the Catholic Church all Europe would be in the throes of the Commune. The principal cause of our disintegration was that we sanctioned Protestant flirtation with modern materialism.
France is beginning to see that even a weak monarchy is better than a radical government without a God.
You may expect a return of the monarchy in more than one country.
Agnostics and Protestants, moved by fear on one side, and disgust on the other, will unite for a restoration as their last hope. There will be a repetition of historic events.
Bonaparte was ushered in by the French Revolution, and his advent was followed by three kings and one emperor.
The majority treat their rulers as children treat their toys: when the novelty wears off a change is demanded.
Political psychology and religious sentiment are not the same thing.
Nevertheless, they must be considered together. The Germans are now awaiting the hour when the inevitable change will be demanded. Events take crowns from some heads and place them on others. If the ex-Kaiser ever occupies the throne again a modern Nero will fiddle amidst the ruins of German imperialism, for you know he meddled with fiddle strings as well as with political wires.
You think it strange? The impossible is always happening. Never lose sight of the fact that an organized minority is more formidable than a disorganized majority. Three men brought about the coup d'etat that placed the outcast Louis Napoleon on the throne, one man started the Russian Revolution, I planned the overthrow of the Second Empire with the aid of Count von Moltke. The majority put their trust in numbers, but the bigger a thing grows the nearer it is to disintegration. An autocratic minority ruled in Germany, an automatic majority rules in France and England. Two men started the present rule in Moscow, both of them from the outside.
"God has been merciful to us," said Cavour, in the Italian Senate, "He has made Spain one degree lower than Italy." God has been merciful to Germany, He has made Russian communism more abhorrent than German socialism.
Nothing will be left undone by the French government to secure permanent occupation of the coal district of the Rhine.
Conditions will not remain long as they are. They are preparing decisive coups in Bavaria, Hanover, Austria and Hungary. New combinations will amaze your statesmen and diplomats, who are ignorant of the fact that changes and upheavals operate in cycles of three and seven. What they call chance is the working of law. Spiritual forces operate through the physical, and nature will take a hand in the reactions in Petrograd and Moscow. Cold, hunger and starvation will dissipate the hopes of the ruling minority. Untold numbers will be sacrificed.
During the French Revolution philosophers and thinkers were decapitated.
In Russia such men are killed by hunger, the difference being one of method.
Such conditions will be repeated in different countries until people learn that the spiritual cannot be separated from the material without pain and slaughter.
After all the long-winded conferences and shorthand reports nothing is left but a confusion of blots on the tissue paper of time.
I may say more on another occasion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
The happy-go-lucky humor of the day is no match for the cool calculation of European communists. English and American humorists do for the public what the court jester once did for blase kings.
In the sardonic temper of the Russian revolutionist, I see a return of the French temper of 1793.
Most of the sermons and speeches of the time are chameleon in character and tepid in feeling. English humorists developed a flagrant cynicism, spotted with a varioloid paradox, while French writers have halted between the isolation of the hospital and the insularity of the home.
The war brought Anatole France to his senses, the last of the Gallic wits, who possessed a greater charm than Voltaire without attaining his universal prestige. Prince Bismarck declares that the French have learned nothing since their defeat at Sedan. Yet French writers have learned more from the great war than the writers of any other country.
English humor is meant to entertain a public lost in the cynical buffooneries of materialism; American humor is meant to amuse a public lost in the mazes of extravagant pleasures and provincial inanities.
English humor has a certain seal; American humor a certain mark--the difference between sealing wax and a postage stamp. Both aim to fill the ghastly gap left by the doctrine of evolution since it caught the fancy of agnostic freebooters in 1870--forerunners of something grimmer than the Soviet symbols of a return of puritanism even now creeping into view as ivy creeps up the water spouts.
Laughter will vanish, since there will be nothing left to laugh at.
Dancing will cease, for curfew will ring at nine and people will begin work at five.
Remember that all the great modern movements had an obscure origin.
Spiritualism began in a country farm-house, Christian Science developed out of mediumship, prohibition was started in a village, woman's suffrage was started by a Quakeress, Theosophy began at a farm-house in Vermont, the Salvation Army was started by a group of obscure persons.
The new puritanism will start by a committee of persons unknown to the public, chosen from the ranks of the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. Grim determinists, they will ignore satire, sarcasm and irony, ignore party politics, ignore the opposition of luke-warm Christians, form committees, in which they will be aided by drastic reactions during the period of readjustment.
Centers will soon be formed in Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C.
What is causing so much crime? Not one, but many elements of decadence, all operating together, among which I can name rag, jazz, high balls, cabarets, free verse, neurotic art, sentimental optimism, cheap notions of progress, neutral sermons, automobilism, lack of child discipline, absence of fear among people under the age of forty--evils which you may apply to all English-speaking countries.
The licence of the cities dominates country life and country thought. The city minority rules the majority in the country, and it is in the country that the reaction will begin.
JOHN MARSHALL
(Second Message)
Many of the smaller nations, instead of being content with their liberty, have thrown it away for the licence that always goes with land grabbing.
For a nation is nothing more than an individual with a certain amount of collective ambition.
Much of the work of the League of Nations will have to be undone. But it will not be undone by any League. The nations will settle differences in accordance with the law that permits the more powerful to wield control commensurate with their geographical and intellectual importance.
All people have rights which ought to be respected, but some have privileges as well as rights, and the privileged will hold the upper hand as long as intelligence takes precedence of illiteracy, energy dominates over lethargy, and the power of organized numbers rules over minorities.
Your statesmen and your mediators will have to learn the distinction between rights and privileges. All are supposed to possess common rights under the common law, but it is wisdom, supported by poise and power, that constitutes privilege. David and Solomon were privleged. So were Alfred the Great, Washington and Lincoln.
A nation is temperamental like an individual. The temperament may be vascillating or it may be stolid; it may be logical or it may be commercial; or a combination of the Saxon and the Celt.
The nations that will hold the balance of power in the future will be the ones with the most will and poise, backed by number. Riches, alone, will not save. Wealth did not save Germany from disaster, nor did it help Nopoleon III to ward off the Prussian invasion in 1870. Wealth invites invasion and conquest. This is why England and America will now be the principal target for the ambitious and the discontented. This is why Japan seeks a firm foothold in China, and the Russians an entrance to India through Persia.
Without the prospects of loot there would be no war. When ambition and glory lure a nation on, the desire for loot supplies the motor force. When hunger forces a people to invade a nation, loot becomes a necessity.
What the wealthy of every nation refuse to understand, or even to consider, is that material force engenders vanity, individualism, rivalry and envy. All manifestations of force contain an element of disintegration. The type of a nation will always represent the policy and the trend of the nation.
The supreme blunder of the Peace Conference was made when the delegates, with Mr. Wilson at their head, refused to face the fact that no nation can rise above the ideals and idiosyncrasies of the national temperament, and that sudden liberation from restraint is as dangerous for a country as it is for an individual.
There is but one step between liberty and licence, and that step meant pandemonium for all classes in Russia. For other peoples it may mean political bondage and the total loss of a national spirit. For the Hindoos it will mean civil wars between the different native rulers, for China it has meant a series of revolutions and counter revolutions which may have to be suppressed by the drastic hand of a Japanese Bonaparte.
The League Conference at Versailles took no account of the working of natural law. Sentimentality was the key-note of Mr. Wilson's idealism, and commercial expansion the dominant idea of his opponents.