Ralph Adams Cram

“ When work is subject to slavery, all sense of its holiness is lost, both by master and bondman; when it is subject to the factory system all the joy in labour is lost. Ingenuity may devise one clever panacea after another for the salving work and for lifting the working classes from the intolerable conditions that have prevailed for more than a century; they will be ephemeral in their existence and futile in their results unless sense of holiness is restored, and the joy in production and creation given back to those who have been defrauded. ”

“ How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of society to be achieved? Not alone by change of heart in each individual, though if this could be it would be enough. Humanly speaking there is not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up of individuals whose moral sense is defective. ”

“ There never has been and never will be a perfect aristocracy. Quite true; neither has there ever been a perfect democracy, or a perfect monarchy for that matter. As men we work with imperfections, but we live by faith, and our sole duty is to establish the highest ideals, and to compass them, in so far as we may, with unfailing courage, patience and steadfastness. The ideal of democracy is a great ideal, but the working of democracy has been a failure because, amongst other things, it has tried to carry on without the aid of true aristocracy. ”

“ The humility which recognizes that so widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope. Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the action of the Spirit. This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate. ”

“ Labour is not more culpable than capital, nor the proletarian than the industrial magnate and the financier, nor the nominal secularist than the nominal religionist. Nor am I charging conscious and willful acceptance of wrong in the place of right. It is the institution itself, industrialism as it has come to be, with all its concomitants and derivatives, that has betrayed man to his disgrace and his society to condemnation, and so long as this system endures so long will recovery be impossible and regeneration a vain thing vainly imagined. ”

“ Again, the individual Christian life must, like its Great Original, suffer for others. When we suffer as a result of our own wrongdoing we are but meeting our just reward; but if patiently and humbly and voluntarily we bear pain, even unto death, for others, we are transcending justice, the pagan law, and exemplifying mercy, the Christian virtue. No sensitive soul in this generation, conscious of the sacrifice of the millions of young lives who "stormed Heaven" in their willingness to die that others might live, can doubt this. The essence of love is sacrifice ”

“ The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice, warfare and hate. Society can continue even when avariciousness is rampant—for a time—and warfare of one sort or another seems inseparable from humanity, at all events it has always been so, but hatred is another matter, for it is the negation of social life and is its solvent. Anger passes; it is sometimes even righteous, but hatred is synonymous with death in that it dissolves every unit, reducing it to its component parts and subjecting each of these to dissolution in its turn. ”

“ Society is dissolving into classes and factions, either at open war or manoeuvering for position, awaiting the favourable moment. Law and order are mocked at, philosophy and religion disregarded, and of all the varied objects of human veneration so loudly acclaimed and loftily exalted by the generation that preceded the war, not one remains to command a wide allegiance. One might put it in a sentence and say that everyone is dissatisfied with everything, and is showing his feelings after varied but disquieting fashion. ”

“ Out of the depths have come those who have ascended to the supreme heights, for since Christianity came into the world to free the souls of men, this new liberty has worked without limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very creations of the emergent force, industrialism and democracy, while they were the betrayal of the many were the opportunity of the few, taking the place, as they did, of the older creeds of specifically Christian society, and inviting those who would to work their full emancipation and so become the servants of God and mankind. ”

“ This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages, from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and poised man himself in a sure equilibrium. Already it had of necessity developed the whole scheme of religious ceremonial and given art a new content and direction through its new service. ”

“ Is this supernatural gift of charity a mark of contemporary civilization? Does it manifest itself with power today in the dealings between class and class, between interest and interest, between nation and nation? If not, then we have forfeited the name of Christian and betrayed Christian civilization into the hands of its enemies, while our efforts towards saving what is left to us of a once consistent and righteous society will be without result except as an acceleration of the now headlong process of dissolution. ”

“ Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise, his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule. In a sense we must all be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for the things that are worth fighting for—either that they may be destroyed, or restored. ”

“ What had become of them, of this great bulk of the population of western Europe that, with the feudal aristocracy, the knighthood and the monks had made Mediaevalism? Some had degenerated into bourgeois traders, managers and financeers, but the great majority had been crushed down and down in the mass of submerged proletariat, losing liberty, degenerating in character, becoming more and more servile in status and wretched in estate, so forming a huge, inarticulate, dully ebullient mass, cut off from society, cut off almost from life itself. ”

“ Above all, we are tempted to this query when we think of our vanishing standards of right and wrong, of our progressive reversal of values, of our diminishing stock of social character. We tore down in indignant revolt the rotten fabric of a bad social system when it had so far declined from its ideal and its former estate that it could no longer be endured, and we made a new thing, full as we were with the fire of desire for a new righteousness and a new system that would compass it. ”

“ The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood, or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the annals of ancient history. ”

“ If our modern devices have failed; if the things we invented with a high heart and high hope, in government, industry, society, education, philosophy have in the end brought disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, it is less because of their inherent defects than because the individual failed, and himself ceased to act as the sufficient channel for the divine power which alone energizes our weak little engines and which acts through the individual alone. ”

“ All the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science, letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society, was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free. ”

“ The fact of industrial slavery has been done away with but the sense of the servile condition that attaches to work has been retained, therefore the idea of the dignity and holiness of labour has not come back any more than the old joy and satisfaction. Failing this recovery, no reorganization of industrial relations, neither profit-sharing nor shop committees, neither nationalization nor state socialism, neither the abolition of capital, nor Soviets nor syndicalism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat will get us anywhere. ”

“ Meanwhile international Bolshevism, hating the thing as violently as do kings in exile, substitutes a crude and venal autocracy, while organized labour, as a whole, works for the day when a "class-conscious proletariat" will have taken matters into its own hands and established a new aristocracy of privilege in which the present working classes will hold the whip-hand. Meanwhile the more educated element of the general public withdraws itself more and more from political affairs, going its own way and making the best of a bad job it thinks itself taught by experience it cannot mend. ”

“ There is no nobler record in the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and through it to come to the liking of great ideas? ”

“ Materialism, democracy, rationalism, anarchy contending against Medievalism of twenty sorts, and strange mysticisms out of the East. Which shall we choose, if we choose, and do not content ourselves with an easier inertia that allows nature to take its course? It is simply the question; On which wave will you ride; that which is descending to oblivion or that which has within itself the power and potency to control man's destiny for the next five hundred years? ”

“ It is a folly that works its insidious injury in two ways; first by confusing life by innumerable laws ill-advised, ill-drawn, mutually contradictory, ephemeral in their nature, inquisitorial in their workings; second, by creating a condition where any personal or factious interest can be served by due process of law, until at last we have reached a point where liberty itself has largely ceased to exist and we find ourselves crushed under a tyranny of popular government no less oppressive than the tyranny of absolutism. ”

“ To organize and administer the new industrial-financial-commercial régime, the leaders must be shrewd, ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe in the Middle Ages, which had inherited so much therefrom. The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art. ”

“ The truth is, the development of character is not in proportion to the development of public and private education. The moral standing of the nation, taken as a whole, has been degenerating; in business, in public affairs, in private life, until the standards of value have been confused, the line of demarcation between right and wrong blurred to indistinctness, and the old motives of honour, duty, service, charity, chivalry and compassion are no longer the controlling motive, or at least the conscious aspiration, of active men. ”