W. Trotter

“ The small segment of the social process of which we have direct knowledge in the events of the day has no very encouraging appearance. Segregation has reasserted itself effectively; the dominion of the stable and resistive mind is as firmly established as ever, and no less dull and dangerous; while it is plain how far, in the atmosphere of relaxation and fatigue, the social inspiration of the common man has sunk from the high constancy of spirit by which throughout the long pilgrimage of war so many weary feet have been upborne, so many dry lips refreshed. ”

“ Let us consider the case of a person caught in one of those dilemmas which society presents so abundantly to its members—a man seized with a passion for some individual forbidden to him by the herd, or a man whose eyes have been opened to the vision of the cruelty which everywhere lies close below the surface of life, and yet has deeply ingrained in him the doctrine of the herd that things, on the whole, are fundamentally right, that the universe is congruous with his moral feelings, that the seeming cruelty is mercy and the apparent indifference long-suffering. ”

“ The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal, or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their souls full of a burning passion of service. ”

“ In his very flesh and bones is the impulse towards closer and closer union in larger and larger fellowships. To-day he is fighting his way towards that goal, fighting for the perfect unit which Nature has so long foreshadowed, in which there shall be a complete communion of its members, unobstructed by egoism or hatred, by harshness or arrogance or the wolfish lust for blood. That perfect unit will be a new creature, recognizable as a single entity; to its million-minded power and knowledge no barrier will be insurmountable, no gulf impassable, no task too great. ”

“ As long as the average man’s sense of possession in the state is kept so low as it is at present, as long as the sense of moral inequality between himself and his fellows is so vigorously maintained, so long will he continue to make his class rather than his nation the object of social passion, and so long will society continue to breed within itself a principle of death. ”

“ It can scarcely be questioned that the organization of a people for war tends to encourage unduly a type of individual who is abnormally insensitive to doubt, to curiosity, and to the development of original thought. With the enlargement of the unit and the accompanying increase in knowledge and resources, war becomes much more seriously expensive to the race. In the present war the immense size of the units engaged and their comparative equality in power have furnished a complete reductio ad absurdum of the proposition that war in itself is a good thing even for the individual nation. ”

“ The statesman will do well to carry the analysis a stage farther. The ravings of a maniac do not help us much in forecasting his behaviour, the howlings of a pack of wolves, equally irrational, equally harsh, even, in the original sense, equally lunatic, betray to us with whom we have to deal, betray their indispensable needs, their uncontrollable passions, the narrow path of instinct in which they are held, enable us to foresee, and, foreseeing, to lay our plans. ”

“ England has taken as her model the bee, and still lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a social integration of an {202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power. ”

“ Closing our small chapter, we also may look at large over the great expanse of the biological series in whose illimitable panorama the war that covers our nearer skies with its blood-red cloud is no bigger than a pin point. As we contemplate in imagination the first minute spot of living jelly that crept and hungered in the mud, we can see the interplay of its necessities and its powers already pushing it along the path at the end of which we stand. ”

“ A dog and a cat caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has done wrong, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him, while the cat’s sole impulse is to escape. The rational recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is the former only who understands {41} that he has committed a crime, who has, in fact, the sense of sin. ”

“ As is well known, the resistance to a new idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual objections, just or otherwise, being a secondary process in spite of the common delusion to the contrary. This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but also betrays itself in the deepest recesses of personality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some larger existence than his own, some encompassing being in whom his perplexities may find a solution and his longings peace. ”

“ Her society is irregular, disorganized, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success. She is no less bound by her fate than is Germany, and must continue her path until she reaches its infinitely remoter goal. ”

“ It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding with this biological difference is the striking difference in their history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of it upon the world. ”

“ We see man to-day, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief no less firm that his traditions and laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. ”

“ Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge either of affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality. Indeed, the mere absence of such seems to be an advantage; for originality is apt to appear to the people as flightiness, scepticism as feebleness, caution as doubt of the great political principles that may happen at the moment to be immutable. ”

“ Communism, again, is another doctrine which contains its core of psychological truth, namely, that individual property is an economic convention rather than a psychological necessity, and that social inequality is an infirmity of the state rather than its foundation stone. As it is exemplified in practice, however, communism is so deeply tainted by the belief in an inverted class segregation of its own, and by a horror of knowledge, that its elements of reality are wholly obscured and rendered useless. ”

“ Life has regained for him much of its old tameness, the nation in which he has lived vividly during the war is resuming its vagueness and becoming once more merely the state, remote and quasi-hostile. But the war has shown him what interest and moral vigour are in life, and he will not easily accept the absence of these; he has acquired the appetite for them, he has, so to speak, tasted blood. The tasteless social dietary of pre-war England is not likely to satisfy his invigorated palate. ”

“ If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we are to judge by the imperfect experience man has yet had of the same lofty passion, we must think of her consciousness, insignificant spark as it is, as a little fire ablaze with altruistic feeling. Doubtless, such {107} an attribution of emotion to the bee is a quite unjustified fallacy of an­thro­po­mor­phism. ”

“ To a gregarious species at war the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to true national unity. ”

“ An intelligent, educated, organized people, directed consciously towards a definite ambition, finds its path blocked by an enemy in chief. Surely there are two principles of action which should at once be adopted: first, to estimate with complete objectivity the true strength of the enemy, and to allow no national prejudice, no liking for pleasant prophesying to distort the truth, and secondly, to guard against exasperating the enemy, lest the inevitable conflict should ultimately be precipitated by her at her moment. ”

“ Of course, in each case it was possible for a class by a very easy process of rationalization to show that its interests were those of the nation at large, but this was merely the effect of the moral blindness to which class segregation inevitably leads. Since every one of us is classified somehow, it is not easy to grasp how completely class segregation obtains throughout our society, and how fully in times of peace it replaces national unity. ”

“ In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then sociology—but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science. Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude ”

“ If we limit our view to the historical scale of time and the exclusively human outlook, we seem almost forced to accept the dreadful hypothesis that in the very structure and substance of all human constructive social efforts there is embodied a principle of death, that there is no progressive impulse but must become fatigued, that the intellect can provide no permanent defence against a vigorous barbarism, that social complexity is necessarily weaker than social simplicity, and that fineness of moral fibre must in the long run succumb to the primitive and coarse. ”