Francis Grierson

“ Some Members of Parliament have lost their reason, the majority have lost their wits, all are without vision.
Lloyd George presents the curious spectacle of a man of the people who observes them through the glasses of a Welsh Calvinist. He is a democrat with the demeanor of a lord, a radical who has fallen between the two stools of the middle-class and the landed aristocracy. Nonconformist sentimentality, on one hand, and titled wealth on the other, have blinded him to the imperative needs of the time and the dangers that confront the Empire. ”

“ The nations that will hold the balance of power in the future will be the ones with the most will and poise, backed by number. Riches, alone, will not save. Wealth did not save Germany from disaster, nor did it help Nopoleon III to ward off the Prussian invasion in 1870. Wealth invites invasion and conquest. This is why England and America will now be the principal target for the ambitious and the discontented. ”

“ If honesty, alone, is the best and only policy, our country would be safe, but honesty is only one of the qualities necessary in these days to carry a President through the mazes of a complex administration. Honesty does not always imply clear vision or even ordinary common sense. The faculties of diplomatic tact and political judgment are infinitely more important, and experience still more so.
In America the roles enacted by professional politicians remind one of a masquerade where everyone is trying to penetrate behind the masks and guessing is the rule. ”

“ The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen. And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters of impulse and confusion.
There is a will to power that is blind. ”

“ A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow optimist who lives by the sweat of the low brow pessimist. The stretching process will cease suddenly like the snapping of a rubber string stretched beyond the limit. ”

“ The Scotch, the Irish and the Welsh combine emotion and power with tenacity of purpose, and it is this Celtic element that keeps America in the front rank of nations.
What women have been opposing is the primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and commerce so primitive and so naive that Frenchmen are amazed when they visit America and note the striking difference between the culture of the women and the mentality of the average man. ”

“ The French and the English are repeating some of the blunders I made fifty years ago. They are counting on conditions which will never exist, like a bird sitting on a nest of mixed eggs from which the cuckoo will eventually oust all the other birds. ”

“ In the work done by women in the past fifty years in this country, the incentive has been of a higher quality than that shown by men.
While men introduced a coarse realism into the novel, women saved the situation by new ideals. I do not think there would be much left worth reading today but for woman’s taste and judgment.
In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a corresponding cause behind it. ”

“ Millions of people are under the impression that the United States can act independently of the conditions prevailing in the other great nations. This suggestion, coming, as it did, from a professional joker in England, has met with eager response from revolutionary emissaries now in your midst, supported by political fillibusters who are masking the truth.
If England ever starts such a war she will lose India. Her direction of the reins of civilization in many quarters of the world would cease on the day hostilities began. But I am speaking for America. ”

“ Without the prospects of loot there would be no war. When ambition and glory lure a nation on, the desire for loot supplies the motor force. When hunger forces a people to invade a nation, loot becomes a necessity. ”

“ Just as long as politicians are impelled by self-interest there will be found nations that will have to use force for the suppression of licence and the curtailment of liberty. In every country the people are getting what their thoughts and deeds create for them. ”

“ In France and Italy many business men are able to discuss art, literature and music on the same level with the masters. The Latin races and the Celtic races possess a culture that can be traced back for two or three thousand years, but Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the Saxon invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the mushrooms of our civilization. They were a stolid business people who lacked creative genius.
The outstanding intellect of England today is Celtic. ”

“ French people are under the illusion that Russia will meet the obligations undertaken by the late Czar. To expect such a thing shows the child-like illusions under which French fanatics are living. They are still wrapped in the swaddling clothes of politics.
We committed crimes that have brought civilization to the brink of chaos, but we are not capable of such naivete.
The logic of a Frenchman is no better than the mysticism of a Russian or the sentimentality of an Englishman. French people [Pg 65] learned nothing from the blunders of Napoleon III and the debacle of Sedan. ”

“ In the day of trial, the retainer and the hireling will seek a refuge, every man for himself. They will melt like the wax image before the heat of the furnace. On that day humility will be as a precious gift and poverty as a peace offering. ”

“ A woman of spiritual culture who marries a commercial man has married a shadow. A woman of high ideals who marries a professional politician has hitched her motor car to a meteor. A romantic woman married to a multi-millionaire whose world is bound in liberty bonds loses her liberty. A metaphysical woman who marries a financier is handicapped by the physical.
A union of spiritual functions with material formulas is impossible, for there is no way in which mere sensation can be made to harmonize with the higher emotions. ”

“ You are living at a time when profiteers amaze by their cynical audacity, but profiteers have always existed. Before the war the nobles of Russia and Germany were profiteers in landed privileges and governmental perquisites. The tillers of the soil were free in name, serfs in practice. In England two or three hundred lords and peers possess the land. In America food profiteering began during the Civil War. ”

“ What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts. Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a plane with the quality of the incentive. ”

“ Men, as a rule, speak of emotion as a weakness, and they confuse it with impulse—a very different thing. Impulse is often the result of weak nerves, uncontrolled by the will; but we must not confuse it with the emotional quality which underlies all great achievement in art, literature, philosophy and personality. The more impulsive the individual is, the more primitive the reasoning faculty. ”

“ The Liberal Party was made up of men using Nonconformity as an instrument of advancement. They placed opportunity above the truth, position above principle, power above progress. We were all intellectual automatons, set in motion by springs wound up by leaders who were themselves automatons. ”

“ The modern intellect has been organized without considering the moral meaning of its activity. This has caused the delusion that the crowning glory of European culture is the dreadnaught. Ninety per cent of all modern inventions are for bodily destruction or bodily comfort. While the body lolls in luxury, the spirit is soused in lethargy. ”

“ The licence of the cities dominates country life and country thought. The city minority rules the majority in the country, and it is in the country that the reaction will begin.
[Pg 74]
JOHN MARSHALL (Second Message)
Many of the smaller nations, instead of being content with their liberty, have thrown it away for the licence that always goes with land grabbing. For a nation is nothing more than an individual with a certain amount of collective ambition. ”

“ Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are, more than any other factor, calculated to develop and foster an element of national unrest. Its deliberations are beyond the intelligence of many and above the interests of the majority. ”

“ The impossible is always happening. Never lose sight of the fact that an organized minority is more formidable than a disorganized majority. Three men brought about the coup d’etat that placed the outcast Louis Napoleon on the [Pg 68] throne, one man started the Russian Revolution, I planned the overthrow of the Second Empire with the aid of Count von Moltke. The majority put their trust in numbers, but the bigger a thing grows the nearer it is to disintegration. An autocratic minority ruled in Germany, an automatic majority rules in France and England. ”

“ You must in some manner experience the ordeals common to other peoples, and you have seen from a distance what has overtaken many cities and nations, the inhabitants of which felt themselves as fixed as the rocks in the soil. Yet, all that is happening is in harmony with Divine law. You will find it in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The repetition is inevitable except for those who possess vision. ”

“ It appalls the normal mind to stop and consider the criminal blunders made by the educated Prussian and the educated Englishman prior to 1914. No statesman had the vision to see what was going to happen to the man-made world.
Since it is a question of intuition and feeling versus cold reason and business logic, let us see which side is the more vital and all-enduring. Let us consider for a brief space what it is that influences people. Let us consider the influence exerted by the arts. What is music? Emotion created by sound vibrations. What is dramatic acting? ”

“ All people have rights which ought to be respected, but some have privileges as well as rights, and the privileged will hold the upper hand as long as intelligence takes precedence of illiteracy, energy dominates over lethargy, and the power of organized numbers rules over minorities. ”

“ The longer you wink at anarchy in Europe the greater will be the menace of social chaos at home. The worship of shibboleths cannot be kept up beyond a point where the majority grow tired of hocus-pocus politics and academical agnosticism. ”

“ Viewed in the light that shines on the White House, there is no difference between a man from Ohio and a gentleman from Indiana.
Men from the pumpkin pie districts think and feel alike, judging world politics by the yard-stick method that prevailed in their villages when they were young men. ”

“ People seem to be similar and equal but they differ according to their functions. If we take a philosopher, a hangman and a sailor who appear to be equal as human beings we shall see that in their functions there is nothing in common. The souls of these men are different in the very nature, origin and purpose of their existence.
Thousands of people move in a world of material shadows while their souls, the [Pg 37] substance of which is intellectual and spiritual, inhabit a sphere absolutely apart. ”

“ The new era of woman, which is just beginning to dawn, will direct education; and through education, politics; through politics, the progress of nations. Heretofore, the commercial and political world had a free hand. ”

“ It was like building houses without windows. When leading business men commit such folly what can you expect of the nation at large?
The three things most needed by the people are food, raiment and shelter. ”

“ New combinations will amaze your statesmen and diplomats, who are ignorant of the fact that changes and upheavals operate in cycles of three and seven. What they call chance is the [Pg 69] working of law. Spiritual forces operate through the physical, and nature will take a hand in the reactions in Petrograd and Moscow. Cold, hunger and starvation will dissipate the hopes of the ruling minority. Untold numbers will be sacrificed.
During the French Revolution philosophers and thinkers were decapitated. In Russia such men are killed by hunger, the difference being one of method. ”

“ The people who elect a President are the ones who will influence his actions. And when we talk about a President being a good man for business we are compelled to seek for the reason behind the statement. ”

“ My own experiences as a student in this sphere of psychic research in Europe and America, covering a period of thirty years, convince me that we have here a revelation of a new mode of spiritual communication unlike anything heretofore given to the world, not only different in quality but different in purpose. ”

“ I once stated that three movings equal one fire, and I can say now that the lack of teachers and farm hands has resulted in a damage [Pg 44] equal to one revolution. No calamity comes and goes single handed. The world, the flesh and the devil are a triumvirate bound together by ties of consanguinity. Your school teachers are passing over to the world, your farm laborers to the flesh, and your ministers to the devil. ”

“ The fundamental objection to prohibition, as it stands, lies in the cold fact that provincialism, no matter how sincere, can never compete with international common sense and cosmopolitan culture.
Village residents are ignorant of the laws that govern society in the most intelligent centers of the world. ”

“ If we say that a statesman represents Americanism, the question arises what kind of Americanism? The Yankee, the Southerner, each had his place in the political economy of America from 1776 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and even up to the Cleveland Administration, after which conditions began to change with startling rapidity, when the children born of foreign parents were beginning to come of age and the European ferment began to leaven the lumps of sectional dough. ”

“ Millions are sent to the people of distant countries in no way related to our Government or people, and yet Congress permits thousands of veterans of the great war to continue in a state of neglect, suffering and humiliation. ”

“ Human nature is always the same.
The two things brought to the surface by great upheavals are extreme virtues and extreme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on the one hand, the vice of self interest on the other. Vice is flexible, cunning, adaptable. ”

“ Much of the work of the League of Nations will have to be undone. But it will not be undone by any League. The nations will settle differences in accordance with the law that permits the more powerful to wield control commensurate with their geographical and intellectual importance. ”