Chapter XIX: Civilization Faces Its Successor

Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was not triumphant until the invention of written language, so the new order--call it what you will: Christianity, the Meaning of America, the Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy, Humanity--this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.

But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization.

It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic and political equality.

Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of industrial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the freedom of the seas during times of peace. The aeroplane and the airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the meek of the earth to rush together to one another's rescue; and wireless telegraphy, as soon as it is established universally, will sound to them the alarum in the twinkling of an eye. All the new inventions are, as it were, God's detectives for the exposing of the subtle and disguised crimes of the great; or they are God's captains for the mobilization of the scattered forces of the meek when the plot of an oppressor has been unearthed. The people need only to realize that the new inventions are by their very nature breakers of power-monopolies, in order to find in them an irresistible incentive to rise and act in the cause of world-wide democratic initiative. High explosives, the gas-engine, the giant gun, sheets of flame, deadly gases, all these are within the reach of Christ's little ones to encircle their kingdom-that-is-coming against the attacks of inhuman humans. The new inventions are humanity's destructors to annihilate civilization's destroyers.

I have specified some of the twentieth century's inventions to show that, like the compass and the printing-press, they will be scatterers of privileges to the masses. I might go on indefinitely adding to the list, but I will cite only one more. It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that a new way of making cheap paper was discovered--so cheap that it became possible to sell great dailies for one cent. But this practice was not established until the twentieth century. And it was only a few years ago that the greatest newspaper of the world--and a very stronghold of upper-class monopoly--was able, or driven, to reduce its price from threepence (six cents) to a penny. But I specify the case of the London _Times_ because, like a miracle of divine healing, but entirely due to the cheapness of paper, is the change of its policy from that of brutal imperialism to the democratic one of transforming the British Empire into a commonwealth of equal states. Now that the _Times_ has been converted, we may be sure that the universe itself has come round to the side of the right, and has taken up the cause of the poor. By the pricking of my thumbs I know that something better than civilization this way comes. Dull indeed must be that man whose blood does not tingle with anticipation. Yet the physical inventions of the twentieth century are not to be compared in pregnancy of good with its less palpable, its spiritual, novelties.