If one does consider this civilisation, of which the sediment is the la:::::.aroni and the rabble of London, people who have turned back half-way and are returning to the condition of apes and lemurs, while on its peaks flourish the talentless Merovingians of all dynasties and the feeble Aztecs of all aristocracies-really, one's head begins to go round. Imagine this menagerie at liberty, without church, inquisition or lawcourt, without priest, Tsar or executioner!
The ancient strongholds of theology and jurispmdence Owen
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considered to be a lie: that is, an obsolete truth; and this i s comprehensible. But when under this plea h e demanded that they should surrender, he had forgotten the gallant garrison defending the fortress.
There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse : you can hit it, you can knock it t o pieces, but you cannot convince it. Besides, on our Olympus there sit not the complaisant, rakish gods of Greece who, when a message came, according to Lucian, while they were trying to devise measures against atheism, that the game was lost, and that it had been proved at Athens that they did not exist, turned pale, volatilised and vanished.21 The Greeks were simpler, both gods and men. The Greeks believed nonsense and played with marble dolls from a childish need for art; and we, for percentages, for profit, uphold the Jesuits and the old shop,22 to keep the people curbed and safely exploited. What kind of logic could get a hold of this?
This brings us to the question, not whether Owen was right or wrong but whether rational consciousness and moral independence are compatible with life in a State.
History bears witness that societies are constantly attaining a rational autonomy, but testifies likewise that they remain in moral bondage. Whether these problems are soluble or not is hard to say; they are not to be solved in a plain, blunt manner, especially not by mere love for men, or by other noble, warm emotions.
In all spheres of life we strike against insoluble antinomies, against those asymptotes which are always striving towards their hyperbolas and never coinciding with them. These are the extreme limits between which life fluctuates, advances and ebbs, touching now one shore, now the other.
The emergence of people protesting against social bondage and the bondage of conscience is no new thing; they have appeared as accusers and prophets in all civilisations that have been at all mature, especially when these were growing old. This i s the upper limit, the arresting personality, an exceptional and rare phenomenon, like genius, beauty or an extraordinary voice.
Experience does not show that their Utopias were realised.
There is a frightening example before our eyes. Within the 21 The Dialogues of Lucian: 'Zeus tragikos.' (A.S.) 22 'Old shop' (in English in the original) is H.'s version of 'the Old Firm,'
i.e., the Anglican Church. (R.)
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memory of man there has never been encountered such a confluence of fortunate conditions for the rational, free development of a State as in North America. Every impediment was absent which existed on the exhausted soil of history, or on soil which was quite untilled. The teaching of the great thinkers and revolutionaries of the eighteenth century without the militarism of France, English common law23 without its caste system, lay at the foundation of the life of their state. And what else? Everything that old Europe dreamt of: a republic, a democracy, a federation, autonomy for each patch of land, the whole lightly tied together by a common governmental girdle with an insecure knot in the middle.
Nov•;, what came of this?
Society, the majority, seized the powers of a dictator and of the police; the people themselves fulfilled the function of a Nicholas Pavlovich, of the Third Division and of the executioner; the people, who eighty years ago proclaimed the 'rights of man,' is disintegrating because of the 'right to flog.' Persecution and victimisation in the Southern States (which have set the word Slavery in their flag, as Nicholas once set the word Autocracy in his) in the form of their thought and speech are not inferior in vileness to what was done by the King of Naples and the Emperor at Vienna.
In the Northern States 'slavery' has not been elevated into a religious dogma ; but what can be the standard of education and of freedom of conscience in a country which throws aside its account-book only to devote itself to tables that turn and spirits that knock-a country which has kept in being all the intolerance of the Puritans and Quakers!
In milder forms we come across the same thing in England and Sweden. The freer a country is from government interference, the more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture-chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman. Can only a people which is incapable of inner freedom achieve liberal institutions?
Or does not all this mean, after all, that a State continually develops its requirements and ideals, which the better minds fulfil by their activity, but the realisation of which is incompatible with life in a State?
We do not know the solution of this problem, but we have no 23 'Common law' is in English in the original. (R.)
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right to consider it solved. Until now history has resolved 1t m one way, and certain thinkers-Robert Owen among them-in another. Owen believes, with the indestructible belief of the thinkers of the eighteenth ct-ntury (called the age of unbelief), that humanity is on the eve of its solemn investiture with the toga virilis. We think, however, that all guardians and pastors, all pedagogues and wet-nurses may calmly eat and sleep at the expense of the backward child. Whatever rubbish peoples demand, in our century they will not demand the rights of a grown-up. For a long time to come humanity will still be wearing turn-down collars a /'enfant.
There is a mass of reasons for this. For a man to come to his senses and see reason he must be a giant; and after all not even colossal powers will help him to break through if the way of life of a society is so well and firmly established as it is in Japan or China. From the moment when the baby opens its eyes with a smile on its mother's breast until the time when, at peace with his conscience and his God, he shuts his eyes just as calmly, convinced that while he has a short nap he will be carried to an abode where there is neither weeping nor sighing, everything has been arranged in order that he shall not evolve a single simple conception, shall not run up against one simple, lucid thought. With his mother's milk he sucks in stramonium; no emotion is left undistorted, undiverted from its natural course.
His education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallises the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning, theoretically legitimises the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions.