Part 7 (2/2)

A great financier, the elder J.P. Morgan, once said of an existing financial condition that it was suffering from ”undigested securities,” and, paraphrasing him, is it not possible that man is suffering from undigested achievements and that his salvation must lie in adaptation to a new environment, which, measured by any standard known to science, is a thousandfold greater in this year of grace than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century?

No one would be mad enough to urge such a retrogression as the abandonment of labour-saving machinery would involve. Indeed, it would be impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and in large part attributable to, a new mechanical invention.

But suppose the development of labour-saving machinery should reach a stage where all human labour was eliminated, what would be the effect on man? The answer is contained in an experiment which Sir John Lubbock made with a tribe of ants. Originally the most voracious and militant of their species, yet when denied the opportunity for exercise and freed from the necessity of foraging for their food, in three generations they became anaemic and perished.

Take from man the opportunity of work and the sense of pride in achievement and you have taken from him the very life of his existence. Robert Burns could sing as he drove his ploughshare through the fields of Ayr. To-day millions who simply watch an automatic infallible machine, which requires neither strength nor skill, do not sing at their work but too many curse the fate, which has chained them, like Ixion, to a soulless machine.

The evil is even greater.

The specialization of our modern mechanical civilization has caused a submergence of the individual into the group or cla.s.s. Man is fast ceasing to be the unit of human society. Self-governing groups are becoming the new units. This is true of all cla.s.ses of men, the employer as well as the employee. The true justification for the American anti-monopoly statutes, including the Sherman anti-trust law, lies not so much in the realm of economics as in that of morals. With the submergence of the individual, whether he be capitalist or wage-earner, into a group, there has followed the dissipation of moral responsibility. A ma.s.s morality has been subst.i.tuted for individual morality, and unfortunately, group morality generally intensifies the vices more than the virtues of man.

Possibly, the greatest result of the mechanical age is this spirit of organization.

Its merits are manifold and do not require statement; but they have blinded us to the demerits of excessive organization.

We are now beginning to see-slowly, but surely-that a faculty of organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is not an unmixed good.

Indeed, the moral lesson of the tragedy of Germany is the demoralizing influence of organization carried to the _n_th power. No nation was ever more highly organized than this modern State. Physically, intellectually and spiritually it had become a highly developed machine. Its dominating mechanical spirit so submerged the individual that, in 1914, the paradox was observed of an enlightened nation that was seemingly dest.i.tute of a conscience.

What was true of Germany, however, was true-although in lesser degree-of all civilized nations. In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his n.o.bler self.

This may explain the paradox of so-called ”progress.” It may be likened to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented catastrophe. As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.

Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind. It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact-mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress-but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would propel man forward.

A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the ma.s.s. Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Ca.s.sandra.

One can see the tragedy of the time, as a few saw it, in comparing the first Locksley Hall of Alfred Tennyson, written in 1827, with its abiding faith in the ”increasing purpose of the ages” and its roseate prophecies of the golden age, when the ”war-drum would throb no longer and the battle flags be furled in the Parliament of Man and the Federation of the World,” and the later Locksley Hall, written sixty years later, when the great spiritual poet of our time gave utterance to the dark pessimism which flooded his soul:

”Gone the cry of 'Forward, Forward,' lost within a growing gloom; Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and s.p.a.ce, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?”

Am I unduly pessimistic? I fear that this is the case with most men who, like Dante, have crossed their fiftieth year and find themselves in a ”dark and sombre wood.”

My reader will probably subject me to the additional reproach that I suggest no remedy.

There are many palliatives for the evils which I have discussed. To rekindle in men the love of work for work's sake and the spirit of discipline, which the lost sense of human solidarity once inspired, would do much to solve the problem, for work is the greatest moral force in the world. But I must frankly add that I have neither the time nor the qualifications to discuss the solution of this grave problem.

If we of this generation can only recognize that the evil exists, then the situation is not past remedy; for man has never yet found himself in a blind alley of negation. He is still ”master of his soul and captain of his fate,” and, to me, the most encouraging sign of the times is the persistent evidence of contemporary literature that thoughtful men now recognize that much of our boasted progress was as unreal as a rainbow. While the temper of the times seems for the moment pessimistic, it merely marks the recognition of man of an abyss whose existence he barely suspected but over which his indomitable courage will yet carry him.

I have faith in the inextinguishable spark of the Divine, which is in the human soul and which our complex mechanical civilization has not extinguished. Of this, the world war was in itself a proof. All the horrible resources of mechanics and chemistry were utilized to coerce the human soul, and all proved ineffectual. Never did men rise to greater heights of self-sacrifice or show a greater fidelity ”even unto death.” Millions went to their graves, as to their beds, for an ideal; and when that is possible, this Pandora's box of modern civilization, which contained all imaginable evils, as well as benefits, also leaves hope behind.

I am reminded of a remark that the great Roumanian statesman, Taku Jonescu, made during the Peace Conference at Paris. When asked his views as to the future of civilization, he replied: ”Judged by the light of reason there is but little hope, but I have faith in man's inextinguishable impulse to live.”

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