CHAPTER I

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

Ir is only lately that the Government of England has fallen into the hands of the uneducated. There was in English political life a certain tradition of cultivation; it was neither profound nor professional, being the product of Oxford rather than of Göttingen; but it was sufficient to enable our politicians to avoid the more blatant forms of vulgarity, sentimentality and superstition.

The Prussian doctrine of efficiency frightened us out of what may be called our Etonian instinct for "good form," and we hastened to modernize and Germanize our institutions by placing them in the energetic hands of tactless middle-class business men. It is not surprising that such men, groping in a fog of unforeseen and inexplicable events, endeavour to mitigate our impatience by lighting little torches of borrowed wisdom and loudly asserting that they are leading us towards the light. The tag-ends of misapplied philosophy, the reactionary origins of

which they are completely unaware, are presented to us as the complete fabric of knowledge. In such fashion we are told that the old world has passed away under the stress of war, and that a new one is about to spring fully-armed from the brains of the Welsh wizard. Aladdin, assisted by Sir Eric and Sir Auckland, the twin genii of the lamp, is going to build us overnight, not anything so anything so humdrum as a cottage, but the brand new palace of a new world. The modern Nero, who found civilization made of brick, is going to take advantage of a late unfortunate conflagration and build it up again of marble. Rousseau is, of course, the uneugenic parent of this intellectual sophistry; he loved to leave the sickly offspring of his brain on the door-step of posterity, to be picked up and nursed, like cuckoos in the social nest, by the Karl Marxs and Lloyd Georges that came after him. The idea that the world was, or ever could be, a schoolboy's slate washed clean for any fool to write upon, might seem to have been exploded by the bloodthirsty actions of the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror. But it was a temptation to Karl Marx to maintain the existence of the clean slate, and putting the blame on Robespierre for what he wrote upon it, to cover it with his own oracular conceptions. Mr. Lloyd George appears to share these philo

sophic delusions, though he is probably ignorant of their origin. Such half-baked notions appeal to that love which men have for a fresh start, which prompts them at the end of the month to cook their accounts and draw the double lines of finality beneath a fraudulent balance. They like to believe that on some definite 31st of December they can cut themselves free from the ignoble and harassing past and begin a new life under the ægis of carefully tabulated resolutions.

The kindly shade of Darwin rises up to dispel these idle dreams. I do not mean the polluted stream of Darwinian theory after it had emerged from the minds of German philosophers, after it had been used to manufacture the Frankenstein super-man of Nietzsche, and to justify the military super-state of Treitschke. I mean by Darwin the true unpolitical man of science, thoroughly English in his refusal to erect an organized system out of the results of his own experimental investigations. Only the naïve egoism of the Prussian could derive from the theory of evolution his own pre-eminent right to exist and survive. Only the exact and efficient German mentality could extract from Darwin an immediate political value, so that he could be placed side by side with Captain Mahan as an instrument of propaganda on behalf of the morality and "biological neces

sity" of war. Evolution cannot solve for us our political problems, but it is a mental guide, which should prevent us prevent us from sharing the vain imaginings that appear to obsess the somewhat clouded minds of our contemporary politicians.

The upheaval of war has been great; how great we are too close and too affected accurately to measure. The extent of the catastrophe may be as great as the fall of Babylon or Rome; it may be as comparatively small as the fall of Carthage or Napoleon. But whatever it may be, it is foolish to imagine that the continuity of human life has been definitely broken. The roots of civilization are deeply imbedded in the past and cannot be shaken by the ephemeral actions even of German professors. We cannot so easily rid ourselves of our vast historical inheritance. The men who attended the Peace Conference may have had a superficial belief that the slate was clean for them to write upon, but when they began to write it was obvious enough that it was only a new chapter of an old book. We have learnt from Darwin only the mere fact that we do evolve we have to find out for ourselves the direction in which we are moving, or ought to move. Such discovery is the business of the statesman. To discover what we shall become, he must understand that what we are is the result of