What do the clouds on the social horizon predict? Is Nature a book of fate? If so, is it sealed or open? Whoever understands the political actions of the past can foresee the reactions of the future.
Human nature is always the same.
The two things brought to the surface by great upheavals are extreme virtues and extreme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on the one hand, the vice of self interest on the other. Vice is flexible, cunning, adaptable.
You are living at a time when profiteers amaze by their cynical audacity, but profiteers have always existed. Before the war the nobles of Russia and Germany were profiteers in landed privileges and governmental perquisites. The tillers of the soil were free in name, serfs in practice.
In England two or three hundred lords and peers possess the land. In America food profiteering began during the Civil War. This national vice has never been attacked at the roots.
Your age is characterized by a high level of predatory ability and a low level of prophetic visibility.
The old hackneyed phrase, "This is a free country," has been applied in varying degrees according to the caprice of the individual with the most aggressive will.
New words, definitions, excuses, have been invented to meet the new conditions, but of all the words yet brought into use, "camouflage" is the only one that covers the cynical effrontery of predatory hypocrisy. It is a vocable of universal utility. It applies to the cock-pits of commerce as well as to the arena of bull and bear politics.
It depicts a Hindoo patience in the pulpit and a Hoodoo palsy in the pews.
The word "democracy" itself is the stripes painted on the sides of the old Ship of State in her zig-zag course to elude the torpedoes of the proletarian submarines.
A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow optimist who lives by the sweat of the low brow pessimist. The stretching process will cease suddenly like the snapping of a rubber string stretched beyond the limit.
The masses without a voice always find articulation in the unlooked-for man, the unlooked-for group.
The people without a mouthpiece are a mob, and no mob can run itself for more than a few days. It is the initiated who lead, and leadership requires time, patience, judgment.
In the world of genius there are no upstarts.
The great leader never rises suddenly. Bonaparte was a military graduate, Grant was a product of West Point, Lincoln was thirty years preparing for the Presidency, Lenine spent twenty years in the study of economics. All countries have the same experience.
Voltaire endowed the middle classes of France with a voice, united the disaffected of all classes, and peppered their indignation with pungent epigrams. He created an intellectual garden for lovers of liberty, and from the realm of the mind flung the thorns of ridicule in the face of titled imbeciles and crowned the heads of scholars with laurel.
The people of France were washed by Louis XIV, wrung by Louis XV, and dried in the back yard of tyrannical economics by Louis XVI.
But it was the orators and pamphleteers who ironed out the frills and furbelows of the old order.
Statistical facts may convince but they do not compel. Who knows how the French Revolution would have ended had Mirabeau, orator of the great and solemn days, survived to put into action the idealism of Rousseau?
Intellect alone never passes the halfway house. When intellect, reason and emotion are fused in one, the summit of achievement is attained.
PHILLIPS BROOKS
The time for discipline is approaching. Happy are those who, under Divine direction, consent to be led, for, in the words of Quintilian:--Nulla poena est nisi invito, or as Seneca expressed it, Fata volentum ducunt, involentem trahunt,--those who refuse will be dragged.
You must in some manner experience the ordeals common to other peoples, and you have seen from a distance what has overtaken many cities and nations, the inhabitants of which felt themselves as fixed as the rocks in the soil. Yet, all that is happening is in harmony with Divine law. You will find it in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The repetition is inevitable except for those who possess vision.
The time for appeals is past.
"The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth, the haughty people of the world do languish."
"When thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled, and when thou shalt make an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee."
Are the people astonished? Let them marvel at their own willfulness.
"The kings of the earth and all the inhabitants of the world would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy should have entered into the gates of Jerusalem."
Titus, with his army, destroyed the Holy City. The enemy entered the gates from without but your adversaries have long been entrenched within.
Mammon is heavily laden and will fall from the top. Material power is volatile.
In the day of trial, the retainer and the hireling will seek a refuge, every man for himself. They will melt like the wax image before the heat of the furnace. On that day humility will be as a precious gift and poverty as a peace offering.
Blessed is he who uses the spade and the hoe, for by the sweat of his brow he shall eat the bread of security.