Part 10

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.

As for religion exerting any fundamental influence for peace and right thinking, it caused Protestants to fight Protestants and Catholics to fight Catholics, while German and Austrian cardinals did all in their power to aid in the invasion and conquest of Belgium and France, on one hand, and Italy, the stronghold of the Papal See, on the other; and all this in the face of the statement of the Kaiser that Catholicism must be destroyed. Nothing like it has been known since the dawn of Christianity.

The only apparent reason for the quiescent attitude of some of the smaller nations is that they are without the material means of waging war on their neighbors.