ideal: to set it off he offers a penetrating analysis of the past and makes the profound observation that the Treaty of Versailles, which he does not defend, is the almost complete result of the two forces of nationalism and democracy, the sacred ideals for which the noblest blood of a century has been fanatically sacrificed.
These are but four books: there will be four thousand, since the writing of books is one of the means to salvation. Even the brief summary must convey some sense of the bewilderment, the uncertainty, the malaise, finally, of these writers. This unhappiness in the politico-social predicament of the world is the psychological problem. We know only its symptoms; we should be concerned with its cause and cure.
The main cause is not hope too long deferred; nor is it the violent uprooting of men and women from the rich soil of their illusions. It is, if I mistake not, the conviction that the whole course of social action in the last century has been misguided and mistaken. Liberalism is dead not because it failed but because it succeeded: yet a little longer and we shall all be liberals. The demise of Liberalism is honourable: but the lingering on of Reform is a little indecent, since the distribution and not the abuse of power has become our pressing social question. With these aberrations has gone Utopianism, and the last concession is made to practical men. For no scheme of social betterment now current dares to offer Liberty as its prize and purpose. They are but differing degrees of enslavement.
That is the crux of the matter and it is not so far removed from the question of world politics as it seems to be. For centuries the world has defined progress in terms of emancipation, and is now cruelly hurt to find that in freeing men it has perforce set them free to enslave their fellows. It is to this that democracy has come: yet, so long as democracy walked arm in arm with capitalism it did offer the freedom to exploit, to tyrannize, and to conquer. At the end of it there rises out of Russia a rebellion against this democracy, not in the tyranny of the proletariat but in the subjugation of all men to the basic law that no man shall be free to exercise economic power over another. That is the theory, and it explains all our indignation, since the beast and the fool, the abysmal and the divine, which dwell in the soul of men, cry out against it. For it is the end of freedom; and freedom is the peace of God.
This is the dilemma in which the war has fixed us by dispelling
