Part 24 (2/2)
For a time democratic Athens was a veritable Bolshevist paradise. But when the ranks of the rich became depleted, when none cared longer to engage in any profitable industry, the public revenue fell until there was no money to support the happy idlers. The rich were tortured in the vain hope that they would produce hidden treasure; but the public treasury remained empty.
This period of riotous profligacy followed the happy conclusion for Athens of the Theban war. When the Athenian proletariat discovered that the state was about to pa.s.s under the yoke of Philip they hunted down the remnant of the wealthy cla.s.s that still remained, executed some, banished others and sold still others into slavery for ”betraying the Athenian state and leaving it helpless before its enemies.”
Shortly afterwards Athens came under the despotism of Philip, who speedily conscripted this proletariat for forced labor. For a hundred years afterwards, however, Athenian writers in bewailing their loss of liberty blamed the fall of Athens upon the ”rich,” who failed to arm and equip a force to fight Philip.
All the wisdom of her philosophers, all the art and learning whose loss the world still mourns, fell before the onslaught of this triumphant democracy. The culture of the few could not prevail against the greed of the many. Domestic conditions became so intolerable that a majority of the Athenians welcomed the stern but salutary rule of the tyrant. For they had learned that the tyranny of a despot is easier to be borne than that of universal poverty.
One does not have to interrogate the future to learn whither Russia under Bolshevism is tending; one has but to look to the past. Like causes cannot produce unlike effects. Under given conditions national eclipses can be predicted as surely as the eclipses of the planets.
_Los Angeles Times_, May 4, 1921.
NAPOLEON'S CENTENNIAL
The hundredth anniversary of the pa.s.sing of Napoleon centers attention anew on one of the baffling figures of all time--a man at once attractive and repulsive; a soldier of infinite courage who on at least one occasion acted the coward; a master strategist who, to the last, seemed never to fully grasp that strategy by which he almost recast a world.
He found Europe feudal and left it modern. He opened up new realms of knowledge to the servants; revolutionized military tactics; founded lasting industries; gave a new birth to French law; mocked and yet fostered freedom.
More volumes have been written regarding him than any other character in history--one excepted. Nevertheless, he still remains the most elusive, the most unsatisfying genius that the world has ever known.
His accomplishments have by this time been fully set forth and properly valued. We know that he stands practically alone as the greatest strategist of the ages. Cromwell, on a smaller scale and within a far more limited sphere, more nearly approaches him, perhaps, than does any other.
We know also that he was an adroit politician and a statesman on a scale rarely equalled in Europe. He was also an orator and an adept at coining phrases. He was an executive of immense power and a man of tremendous personal charm.
Of course, he was relentless, cruel, unscrupulous and all the rest of it, as we have been so often told. But, praise and blame aside, the question of the source of his power still remains the important thing.
Certainly he was not great because he was a brilliant student, for, all in all, he was not deeply read. It could hardly be claimed that he was of the electric, a.s.similative type, for he would listen to no one and held opinions of others in contempt. He was not even a strong reasoner as the term is generally used.
Wherein, then, lay that genius which makes him the outstanding Frenchman and one of the supreme personages of history? Apparently he was pre-eminent because, more than almost any man who ever lived, he had the power of harnessing his intuitive processes to his practical problems.
He, it seems, was able to tap that vast, hidden and unsung reservoir of knowledge which is the epitome of all that the human mind has grasped and which, though flowing through the subconscious mind of all, is available in its entirety to but few--and then in all too brief flashes.
The theory of the quality of the human mind, with its every-day, jerky reasoning powers and its submerged, smooth intuitions, finds its strongest support in such an individual.
The subliminal mind, psychologists tell us, reaches out into daily life when the normal intelligence is in abeyance--as in sleep or profound relaxation. This subliminal (below the threshold) mind is swifter than the conscious mind and over-reaches it in a flash. It is practically unerring. It is controlled by laws not yet grasped to any great extent.
It is hidden from life, yet rules it.
Mystics have the gift, in varying degree, of allowing their subconscious minds to engulf and enfold them. The real poets have written in words that live because, unknowingly, they have fallen back on and given expression to the acc.u.mulated hopes and visions of the mind of man. The prophets have simply been those with the power to make their instincts vocal. Genius, in all its phases, is seemingly but the measure of the extent to which men coordinate their two minds, their instinct and their reason.
Napoleon, in practically every crisis in which he functioned, struck those about him as being in a dazed and unnatural condition. He had those same periods of semi-stupefaction that characterized Caesar, Paul, Alexander, Goethe, Lincoln and other exceptional men at the time of or immediately following a terrific use of their mental machinery.
What, then, if, in the final a.n.a.lysis, it should be shown that Napoleon's greatness lay in the fact that he did not take his own mind or any other man's mind too seriously?
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