Columbia (BnitJcrsittp THE LIBRARIES ] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY By RALPH ADAMS CRAM LITT.D., LL.D. BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY MDCCCCXVII Copyright^ igiy By Marshall Jones Company All rights reser-ved PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning. Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophecies. Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people; wise and eloquent in their instructions. Such as find eut musical tunes and recited verses in writing. Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habita- tions: All these were honoured in their generations and were the glory of their times." — ecclesiasticus: xliv. A LREADY the revelations of war have cast jL\ their searching and mordant light -^ -^ on all that was brought over to us out of the last century, and nothing is as it seemed in those far and half mythical days when there was no war and we maintained a serene content well grounded on its broad base of solid accomplishment. It was a proud, even an august possession, this hoard of coined wealth such as men had never gathered before, made up as it was of all the broad and shining counters minted out of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolu- tion, and with this vast reserve our solvency [I] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY seemed beyond suspicion. The touch of war is like that of the magician in the fairy tale, and enough of the bright counters already have turned to dried and worthless leaves to make us wonder if in the end a single coin may remain to us, honest gold, undipped and undebased. Some day the count of these revelations will be made up, but now the tale is not fully told, and we wait, aghast, as each day some old truism crumbles into folly, some dogma shows thin and evanescent, some fundamen- tal principle of modernism reveals itself as a superstition as groundless as those we long ago had cast away. Meanwhile ^' here we have no continuing city;" the sands slide under our feet, and we touch nothing tan- gible as we reach out for support in a dark- ness that shows no sign of breaking. Amongst these revelations there is none more unexpected, more baffling in the fact of its existence or broader in its ramifica- tions, than the loss of leadership. To-day, when men cry aloud, as never before, for guides, interpreters, leaders, there is none to answer ; in any category of life, issuing out of any nation. None, that is, that matches in power the exigency of the demand. There [2] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY are those that honestly try to lead; there are those that increasingly lead under the grim schooling of war, slowly, painfully and towards an end still obscure and unde- termined. Arduously they struggle to build up a following, to see the insane life of the moment and see it whole; to keep ahead of the whirlwind of hell-let-loose and direct an amazed and disordered society along paths of ultimate safety. And always the event outdistances them, the phantasmagoria of chaos whirls bewilderingly beyond, and either they follow helplessly or are sucked into the rushing vacuum that comes in the wake of progressive destruction. In the im- mediate necessity of war one august general after another receives command, plays his part for a day, and disappears, marked by comparative failure if not by demonstrated incompetence. Potential reputations break down and are forgotten, in Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Galicia, Roumania, the Trentino, the Carso, Champagne, the Argonne: on the North Sea, in the Channel, through the Mediterranean. The battle fronts east, west, south, bury more than the bodies of dead soldiers, for reputations are interned with them in a quick and merciful oblivion. [3] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY Still, fate is a whimsical arbiter, whose operations are unaccountable, and any day may appear the great leaders thus far coldly refused to the desperate and death-locked armies, but there is little hope for a like mercy in statesmanship. The years just be- fore the war were tumultuous with the petty machinations of the degenerate political and diplomatic successors of the masterly ma- nipulators of destiny of the nineteenth cen- tury. Noble or cynical, they were leaders, these men of a dead generation: Metter- nich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck, Glad- stone, Gambetta, Lincoln, and they have left few successors, either to their glory or their infamy. Can there be honest comparison be- tween the political leaders in Great Britain to-day and Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, Dis- raeli and Salisbury, between the flotsam and jetsam of French parliamentary turbulence and Thiers, Gambetta, de Freycinet? Con- trast the men now controlling the destinies of Italy with those of the epoch of the Lib- eration; match the present politicians of Germany with those to the front from 1870 to 1895; place in one column the members of President Wilson's Cabinet, the leaders in Congress, the Governors of the several [4] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY States, and in the other the American politi- cal forces from i860 on for the space of a generation. Whether you like them all or not, these men of an elder age, one thing you must concede, and that is their capacity and their dominance as leaders. So one might traverse the fields of reli- gion, philosophy, literature, art, education, matching each man who claims or is ac- corded priority, with those of the immediate past whose historical place is now as assured as was their acceptance during their lives. Long after the contemporary list finds "finis" written beneath, the other calendar continues until its length is greater by ten- fold. Not only this, but there is unques- tioned difference in quality; as between Harmsworth and Gladstone, Bryan and Cleveland, Benedict XV and Leo XIII, Wells and Emerson, Ornstein and Brahms. The leaders that once were, found their fol- lowing through comprehension of their own force and dominance, those that are now, faute de mieux, and because there are no others to lead. Inch by inch the valleys are being filled and the mountains brought low. More ar- duously the man stronger than another lifts [5] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY above the level uniformity; a few still con- tinue, lasting over from an earlier genera- tion, but in a year or two they also will pass, and few indeed are rising to take their place. Meanwhile '' the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," for the soul of sane man demands leadership, and in spite of aca- demic aphorisms on Equality, a dim con- sciousness survives of the fundamental truth that without strong leadership democracy is a menace; v^ithout strong leadership culture and even civilization will pass away. Now as always the great mass of men look for the master-man who can form in definite shape the aspirations and the instincts that in them are formless and amorphous; who can lead where they are more than willing to follow, but themselves cannot mark the way; who can act as a centripetal force and gather into potent units the diffuse atoms of like will but without co-ordinating ability. So great is this central human instinct (which was not only the foundation of feudalism but harks back to the very beginnings of society) , that when the great leader is not re- vealed he is invented out of the more impu- dent element of any potential group, assur- [6] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY ance taking the place of competence ; or opti- mistically assumed, the most available being dragged from his obscurity and pitched into a position, or burdened with a task, outside the limits of his ability — as he himself only too often knows. And as the supply of leaders diminishes the more reckless becomes the desperate choice. It is perhaps not so much that men now reject all leadership as it is that they blindly accept the inferior type; the spe- cious demagogue, the unscrupulous master of effrontery. Men follow to-day as they always have and always will, the difference lies in the quality of those that are followed. In default of the leader of the old type, the man who first saw beyond the obvious and drew others after him by force of vision and will and personal quality, the group, and the super-group which we call the mob, create their leaders in their own image, and out of their own material. Giolitti and Caillaux, Ramsay Macdonald, Lenine and La Follette are the synthetic product of a mechanical process of self-expression on the part of groups of men without leaders, but who must have them and so make shift to precipitate them in material form out of the undiffer- [7] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY entiated mass of their common inclinations, passions and prejudices. It is because of this that religion is no longer marked by the dominance of figures like St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, or even like Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, but rather by the uncouth flotsam of the intellectual underworld or the obscurantist faquirs of a decadent Orientalism. It is because of this that no longer a Plato or an Aristotle, a St. Thomas Aquinas, or a Duns Scotus, a Kant, a Descartes, or a Herbert Spencer controls the destinies of philosophy, but semi-con- verted novelists, jejune instructors in psy- chology, and imperfectly developed but sufficiently voluble journalists. It is because of this that salutary movements like social- ism, trades-unionism and political reform are betrayed by the leaders that, for lack of better, have been pitchforked into pre-emi- nence, and who, degraded and debased by dulness, obliquity of vision and crude in- competence, become not a benefit but a menace. The argument that we are too near the present (since we ourselves are the present) to estimate greatness or establish our stand- [8] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY ard of comparative values, but that another generation will find amongst our contempo- raries what we have missed, has no validity. I am speaking of leadership, and leadership is not posthumous. We knew, those of us who entered into the activities of life about 1880, that we were "surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses," that the world was so rich in leadership — either for wisdom or folly — we lacked no possible followings for our choice, but rather were confused by the plethora of options. There was no doubt then that there were great men around and about us. We were all hero-worshippers then, and there was sufficient reason for our^ worship. I have made a list of the men who were living in 1880, all of whom were great captains, and who would be accepted by all as leaders of men: there are sixty of them, and I can add another hundred of only a little less eminence, but whose claims some might contest. All of these hundred and sixty "immortals" had died before 1905, and I challenge anyone to fill a tenth of the places they left vacant with the names, unknown in 1880, of men whose claim can be unquestioned. A generation that contains such a group [9] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY as Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Ar- nold, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Bismarck, Disraeli, Cavour, Wagner, Browning, William Morris, Tourgeneff, Stevenson, Leo XIII, Cardinal Newman, Karl Marx and von Moltke is a generation that lacks nothing in leadership, and when is added a further century and a half of names, all practically of the same grade and class, we can only look back on those astonishing years with admiration, and then around at our own time, with the greatest issues in a thousand years clamouring for solution and almost none to lead in the solving, appalled and despairing, while we reach out blindly for some explanation of the cataclysm that has occurred. There are those who will claim that the leadership has not been lost but only changed in direction. They will say that the leaders are now to be found in the ranks of applied science, of industrial exploita- tion and organization, of high finance and economic '' efficiency." They will offer as their contribution Edison and Marconi and Krupp; Sage, Rockefeller, Morgan, Car- negie and the great Hebrew financiers of Eu- rope. They will offer Ford, Harmsworth, [lO] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY Hearst; the packers of Chicago, the mill magnates of New England, the coal and iron barons of Pennsylvania. Their contention may be admitted; the leadership exists, and it has changed direction; the point is, how- ever, that this leadership, while it may con- ceivably supplement that of an earlier day in other fields, may, under no circumstance whatever, be assumed to serve as a substitute. Mr. Abraham Flexner may well be held to contribute something (its essential value is not for the moment in question) to the idea of education as it was expounded by Cardinal Newman or Arnold of Rugby; Mr. Carnegie's vision of culture is not one that came within the purview of Emerson or Matthew Arnold or William Morris, while the original and varied, if not always edifying, religious cults of the last genera- tion open up possibilities not indicated by Dr. Martineau or Bishop Brooks or even Cardinal Manning. Certainly there is some- thing in vers libre and post-impressionism and the products of the cubist sculptors that escapes one in Browning and Burne-Jones and Saint-Gaudens. Considered in a supple- mentary sense these protagonists of modern- ism may be an extension of the principles of [II] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY their immediate precursors (even of all an- tecedent creators and leaders during the en- tire range of recorded history), but when it is assumed that they take their place the argument needs fortifying by something other than either the dictum itself or their own accomplishments. In any case the day of great leaders has passed. If we take the Cardinal of Malines as a standard, as one man at least who meas- ures up to the great controlling and direct- ing agencies of the last quarter of the nine- teenth century, we shall find it hard to pick others to place in his class. Certainly not the successor of Leo XIII and Innocent III, of Gregory VII and Gregory the Great; nor any of the present College of Cardinals. Honour and devotion, learning and piety are not wanting, but where is the vision, where the qualities of command and domi- nation, where the power and the will that mark the captains of men? Neither from Rome nor Moscow nor Canterbury, neither from the Episcopal Church nor from the Protestant denominations, comes the high call for men to rise up and follow along the lines revealed by clear vision and under the dynamic force of personal leadership. Halt- [12] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY ing and hesitant, bewildered by opportu- nism and expediency, dumb before a crisis beyond their powers to meet, the shepherds and pastors of flocks already more than dec- imated, shake in their indecision, put the great issue to one side, and while they wait helplessly for a time more in scale with their abilities, turn to the old round of theological argument and disciplinary bickerings, leav- ing the fate of their sheep to be determined after a fashion they cannot control, and the humbler clergy busy themselves with paro- chial routine or, to their honour, find on the blazing and thundering battle fronts of all Europe opportunity for heroic service in the trenches and often a glorious death. Nor in philosophy is the condition very dififerent. There were not wanting, in the immediate years before the war, men of 'Might and leading," though apart from Bergson, James and Chesterton (though it may seem strange to name the last in this connection) , they were hardly of the calibre of their forebears. James is dead, Bergson almost completely silent, while Chesterton, perhaps under the compulsion of his grave illness, fails to meet the standard of his ear- lier period, except perhaps in ''The Crimes [13] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY of England " and '' A Short History of Eng- land." Dr. Jacks comes well to the fore on occasion, and Dr. Figgis and March Phil- lips, but Bernard Shaw has silenced his phil- osophical cynicism and Wells alone insists on his own narrow vision, brought over from the ante-bellum epoch, with all its mechanis- tic formulae and indeterminate determinism. Of all the ruined sanctuaries, that of states- manship is the most desolate. It was suffi- ciently laid waste in the years just before the war, when diplomacy, degenerate and incompetent, toiled along the dishonoured road that led from the Congress of Berlin. Into the coil of cynicism and trickery, Ed- ward VII and President Cleveland brought some elements of honesty and good sense, but the chancelleries of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, Petersburg were united in one thing, and that their devotion to the secret, the serpentine and the oblique. The '' Bal- ance of Power," poisonous heritage from the Treaty of Berlin, controlled all that was thought or done, and under its malignant spell considerations of honour, justice and righteousness vanished from the secret de- liberations of the various and ever-changing groups of inferior conspirators. Since the [14] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY opening of the war small men, pitched neck- and-crop into big places, have struggled against this legacy, and with scant success. Government in France at the opening of the first of the Seven Seals, was a tangle of political corruption complicated by ter- ror of what socialism would demand next; the prolonged crisis has produced — Briand, and no more, a small man, strengthened by responsibility and opportunity, who bore himself with firmness and honesty. He has now been deposed through the machinations of the still operative political cabals, to give place to the venerable but neither stimu- lating nor convincing Ribot, the colourless Painleve and the superannuated Clemen- ceau. England offered Asquith, a somewhat sinuous and agile mediocrity now smashed by an extraordinary journalistic phenome- non who has also been largely responsible for Lloyd George, another small man, essentially the middle-class demagogue of the first dec- ade of the century, who has also been forti- fied and chastened by the compelling force of anomalous circumstances. With him appear men like Churchill, still bending under the weight of tragic fiascos, Carson, whom the war saved from becoming a rebel and an [15] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY outlaw, together with a numerous clan of financiers and industrial magnates, soriie of whom had already exchanged their historic Hebraic cognomens for others associated, if not with their own genealogy, at least with the Norman conquest. Italy, after getting rid of her political hucksters and demagogues, has produced none of even moderate distinction to take their place. In the Balkans Jonescu and the Cretan Vene- zelos arrived with some heralding of trum- pets, but neither has succeeded in accom- plishing anything in particular, and both are now relegated to the category of geniuses ^^ without the enacting clause." Leaping suddenly into the Russian limelight come Miliukofif, Count Lvofif and Kerensky; the revolution is effected, the exaltation of the '^Oath of the Tennis Court" is repeated, and at once, from far down amongst the sub- merged majority, anarchy and insane folly rise up, insistent, not to be denied, and al- ready their power is in eclipse, extinguished by the rising tide of nihilism and dishonour — leaders who could not lead. As for the Teutonic Empires, from Kaiser to Scheidemann there is only mediocrity masquerading in the tarnished regalia of [i6] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY Bismarck and Andrassy. Precariously von Bethmann,with phantasmal Austrian nobles, insecure Hungarian magnates and Osmanli pashas, struggles to meet increasingly im- possible problems at home and abroad, and the time is not far away when the final crisis a Bismarck might victoriously have met, will show them thin and evanescent, pale futili- ties who could not lead, neither could they control. And America? Well, when the war broke we had three potential leaders, the President, Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Bryan, together with the untried forces of Cabinet, Congress and the State and munici- pal governments. What had been the result on these varied personalities of the unex- ampled stimulus of a world in chaos if not in dissolution? Thus far, apart from the President, the three and a half years of uni- versal liquidation have neither produced a leader unknown before nor raised the stand- ard of individuals or of the general mass of politicians. On the whole the average has been lowered. If on the one hand we have the reliable honesty and ability of men like Senators Lodge, Borah and Williams, with the mysterious and promising figure of Colonel House, we find on the other the [17] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY ominous figures of Stone, Cummins, Gronna, Clark, Vardaman, La Follette, togetherwith the depressing personalities that dominate and give its colour to the Cabinet. Outside administration circles the reader may pick from the several States such men as he con- siders measure up to the old standard of efifective leadership, or even to that of the era just preceding the war. Of the three conspicuous figures first named, one appears to have forfeited the position open to him of great constructive leadership while hon- ourably refusing to follow up the sinister opportunities revealed in the earlier days of the war, and has retired into an oblivion only broken in the beginning by sheer force of ingratiating oratory. The second strove for a renewal of that popular confidence and to restore that popular following he so emi- nently deserved, and failed, though in this failure was less of discredit to him than to a public somewhat defective in its powers of perception and in its standard of compara- tive values. And the third, the most august figure of all? Here, if anywhere to-day, is revealed the argument against the thesis I adduce — perhaps as the exception that proves the rule. The most astute politician [i8] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY America has produced since Andrew Jack- son (if not since Jefferson), with an infal- lible sense for apprehending the unexpressed will of a working majority, he pursued for three years the standard method of contem- porary politics, gauging this will by impec- cable instinct, making it his own, and so becoming the acceptable type of leader who does not lead but obediently follows on where the majority-will indicates the way. Then almost insensibly this method changed ; little by little as the inclusive incapacity of the democratic method revealed itself it was relegated to the background while a very real and equally constructive leadership took its place. Step by step the advance has been progressive and explicit; miraculously the nation as a whole acknowledges and accepts, while the influence of this novel and reassur- ing leadership daily reaches further and further into the other nations of the earth. It is a single leadership: Cabinet and Con- gress are granted little part therein and only the mysterious influences of unofficial and personal advisers shyly reveal themselves from time to time. It is a real leadership, of the old and almost forgotten type, and in- creasingly is it bringing coherency out of [19] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY the debilitated confusion of democratic •methods and parliamentary incapacity that have hampered our allies and imperilled their cause since the beginning of the war. And now opportunity opens before him; opportunity not only national but world- wide. If he wills he may become the co-ordinating, the directing, and the con- structive force in the world. Arbiter of De- mocracy, re-creator of the true democracy of ideal. The old tradition of politics, the sen- sitive appreciation of a vacillating majority- will and the subtle following thereof in all its tergiversations, has been abandoned in favour of a daring and therefore true leader- ship prefigured by some of the finest verbal pronouncements of high principle the Re- public has thus far heard. The old days when we were told of a ^' peace without vic- tory," and that we as a nation had no quarrel with the German people; the days when we were assured that the aims of Germany and those of the Allies were apparently much the same; the days of experimental adven- tures in compromise are now very far away. Does this mean that from now on the course followed will be increasingly exalted, high- spirited and courageous? It may well be; [20] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY if so, and to that extent, the present lack of world-leadership will be corrected. Tested by every standard this leadership is now deficient both in quantity and quality. To what are we to attribute this anomalous condition? Why is it that our lack is not only appalling when compared with those periodical moments of the past when, as in the eleventh century, every nation of Europe was following leaders as amazing in number as they were commanding in ability, but even in contrast with the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was not an epoch to which future generations will look back with any notable degree of pride, yet it left us a heritage of great names that, as I have said before, reached the number of one hun- dred and fifty, a count that could be in- creased to two hundred if the arbitrary quarter century I have chosen, during which all were still living, were extended by ten years before 1880 and by five after 1905. The answer is simple, but it is an answer that will be rejected with practical unanim- ity. Democracy has achieved its perfect work and has now reduced all mankind to a dead level of incapacity where great leaders are no longer either wanted or brought into [21] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY existence, while society itself is unable, of its own power as a whole, to lift itself from the nadir of its own uniformity. "The world must be made safe for de- mocracy" is a noble phrase, but it is mean- ingless without its corollary, '' democracy must be made safe for the world." This latter condition does not exist. For exactly one hundred years democracy has suffered a progressive degeneration until it is now not a blessing but a menace. This categorical statement demands both amplification and explanation. In the first place the word ''democracy" is used in its current sense, as representing both the im- plicit aim and the explicit result of individ- ual and community life during the last two generations in Great Britain, France and the United States; and in all other countries where any portion of the democratic system has been put in practice, including the very recent ''republics" of Portugal, China and Russia. It covers not only political agencies and methods but all those other forms of ac- tivity, such as organized religion, education and social life, where democratic principles and devices have been increasingly adopted. It does not mean the real democracy, [22] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY which is the noblest ideal ever discovered by man or revealed to him. True democ- racy means three things : Abolition of Privi- lege ; Equal Opportunity for All ; and Utili- zation of Ability. Unless democracy achieves these things it is not democracy, and no matter how '^ progressive " its meth- ods, how apparently democratic its machin- ery, it may perfectly well be an oligarchy, a kakistocracy or a tyranny. The three im- perative desiderata named above may be achieved under a monarchy, they may be lost in a republic, the mechanism does not matter. One of the chief faults with what we call our democracy is our stolid failure to understand that there is a democratic ideal and a democratic method, that there is not necessarily any connection between the two, and that generally speaking the democratic method (unstable, constantly changing its form) is incapable of accomplishing the democratic ideal. That ^Memocracy" for which the war is ^V to make the world safe is of course the de- mocracy of ideal; it could not conceivably be the democracy of method for this had proved itself in the two generations before the war corrupt, incompetent and ridicu- [23] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY lous, while during the war it has revealed increasingly its almost sublime incapacity in all matters where it has had a part; from Westminster to Rome, from Washington to Petrograd. The only thing that has thus far saved the Allies from the utmost penalty of their common democracy of method has been the process which has proceeded every- where of eliminating the democracy and substituting a pure and perfectly irrespon- sible absolutism, whether of one man or a very small committee. Now for the last hundred years the world has abandoned itself to an insane devising of new mechanical toys for the achieving of democracy: representative government, the parliamentary system, universal suf- frage, the party system, the secret ballot, ro- tation in office, the initiative, referendum and recall, popular election of members of upper legislative houses, woman suffrage, direct legislation. All have failed to obtain abolition of privilege, equal opportunity and utilization of ability, on the contrary, they have worked in the opposite direction, and so far as these three things are con- cerned, the peoples are worse off than they were fifty years ago, while during the same [24] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY period government and society have become progressively more venal, less competent and further separated from the ideals of honour, duty and righteousness. Mean- while so obsessed have we become by our pursuit of new devices for obtaining democ- racy, and by our search for nostrums to cure the ills of our constant failures, we have now wholly forgotten in what democracy consists. In the year before the war the govern- ment of the great democracies — Great Britain, France and the United States — was illogical, inefficient, and widely severed from the one object of obtaining for all men justice and the rule of law. It was pro- foundly cursed by the incubus of little men in great office, by chaotic, selfish and unin- telligent legislation, dull, stupid and fre- quently venal administration, and by par- tial, unscrupulous and pettifogging judicial procedure. Everywhere the bulk of legis- lation increased to preposterous propor- tions as its quality degenerated. Superfi- cial, doctrinaire, and engendered by selfish personal interests, it ceased to command re- spect or even obedience in proportion as it became vacillating and insecure. Legisla- [25] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY tive decrees, subject to sudden abrogation or reversal, took the place of laws. With the party system dominant (now severed en- tirely from fundamental principle and be- come simply the engine of spoils), demo- cratic administrative machinery became the obedient agency of a partizan and irrespon- sible committee, maintaining itself through purchased ''honours," and exemption from well-deserved penalties, in England; through alliances with secret and equally irresponsible cabals whose object was plun- der of one sort or another, in France; and through deals, spoils and " pork," in the United States. Everywhere the standard of personal ability sank lower and lower, until all manner of ignorant, incapable and frequently venal men, without culture, tra- dition or principle, forced up from the sub- merged strata of society, entered into the leg- islative and executive and administrative departments of government and took pos- session. The kind of men rife in the Chambre des Deputes and in the short-lived ministries were of the same type found in the provincial mairies, ignorant, doctrinaire, self-sufficient, with the insolence of power clouding even what flickerings of native in- [26] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY telligence or honour they may have pos- sessed. The full story of what happened in England between the death of Gladstone and the triumph of Lloyd George has not yet been written, but the facts are known if unavowed. Autocracy in its worst form, in Byzantium, the Renaissance or the eight- eenth century, contains no more sordid ex- amples of base trafficking in honours, emol- uments and privileges, while never was the personal quality of the beneficiaries so radi- cally unworthy and so malevolent in its in- fluence on the State. During the Middle Ages, when the ideal of democracy was at its highest point, and v/hen it was most nearly achieved, it was held as incontrovertible that the purpose of political organization was primarily ethical and moral, and that its function was the achievement of righteousness and justice. Authority was from God, and the power also to enforce that authority, but both were operative only when they were used for right ends. ''La dame ne le sire n en est seigneur se non dou dreit/' Equally un- questioned was the fact that law was not made, but was the concrete expression of that morality, right and justice that had grown [27] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY with the life of the community, exactly ex- pressing the needs of society, and with the moral sanction of communal life behind it. " There is no King where will rules and not law" was the Mediaeval conviction as op- posed to the absolutism of the Renais- sance first expressed in theoretical form by Macchiavelli. Finally the Middle Ages asserted that Government was a solemn con- tract between ruled and rulers, to be broken by neither without the abrogation of the contract. Treason on the part of the sov- ereign was then as clearly recognized a pos- sibility as treason on the part of the people. This great ideal, the noblest man has yet conceived in the realm of civil law, was com- pletely destroyed by the Renaissance, and absolutism took its place. This, having made itself intolerable, was in its turn de- stroyed in the latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury, when once more the old ideals of Me- diaeval freedom came to the front though in a somewhat different verbal guise. The Oath of the Tennis Court, the Declaration of Independence, the Reform Laws of Eng- land were all assertions of the true prin- ciples of the real democracy, but they were [28] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY destined either to fail of fulfillment or to only a brief duration of power, partly be- cause of the shattering of the sense of right and wrong by Calvinism and other Protes- tant phenomena, partly because their birth coincided with an industrial development that blotted out for the time all considera- tions except those of material benefit and of selfish advancement. Here and there, for brief periods of time, righteous impulses made operative a true democracy, but by the middle of the century the battle had been lost: materialism, omnipotent in its power, invincible through its self-created energies, was everywhere supreme, and from then on was recorded only the progressive develop- ment of a conscienceless material imperial- ism, the incessant invention of new and al- ways unsuccessful machines for the obtain- ing of the old democratic ideals, the growth, through rage and impotence at the solemn mockery, of violent and revolutionary prop- aganda along nihilistic, anarchistic or so- cialistic lines, and finally the apotheosis of inefficiency, injustice and unrighteousness that held the democracies of the world when the Teutonic Powers made their desperate but perfectly logical attempt to establish the [29] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY hegemony of Europe under the dominion of efficiency, materialism and force. That very wise Frenchman, Emile Faguet, has said, ''The sum and substance of the Revolution was to substitute for 'Votre Majeste' 'Votre Majorite.' " The absolutism and the tyranny remained, only its habitat and its personality were changed. Something however was lost, and that the possibility that legislation and the execution of the laws might sometimes approach in- telligence and efficiency. In another place the same author says: '' Our examination of modern democracy has brought us to the following conclusions. The representation of the country is reserved for the incom- petent and also for those biassed by passion, who are doubly incompetent. The rep- resentatives of the people want to do everything themselves. They do every- thing badly and infect the government and the administration with their passion and incompetence." Democratic government for the last twenty-five years has neither desired nor created leaders of an intellectual or moral capacity above that of the general mass of voters, and when by chance these appear [30] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY they are abandoned for a type that is not of the numerical average but below it, and the standard has been lowering itself steadily for a generation. The strong man, strong of mind, of will, of moral sense, the man born to create and to lead, now seeks other fields for his activity, or rather one field alone, and that the domain of "big busi- ness" and finance. Here at least he finds scope for his force and will and leadership, even if the opportunities to use his moral sense to advantage leave something to be desired. The world no longer wants or knows how to use statesmen, philosophers, artists, religious prophets and shepherds, but rather '^ captains of industry," directors of "high finance," "efficiency experts," shrewd manipulators of popular opinion through journalism, or of popular votes through primaries, political conventions, and the legislative chambers of representa- tive government. Here also the demand creates the supply. Tributary to this demand is the current system of popular education, probably the worst ever devised so far as character-mak- ing is concerned. Secularized, eclectic, vo- cational and intensive educational systems [31] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY do not educate in any true sense of the word, while they do not develop character but even work in the opposite direction. The concrete results of popular education, as this has been conducted during the last genera- tion, have been less and less satisfactory both from the point of view of culture and that of character, and the product of schools and colleges tends steadily towards a lower and lower level of attainment. Why anything else should be expected is hard to see. The new education, with religion and morals ignored except under the aspect of archae- ology; with Latin and Greek superseded, and all other cultural studies as wxll; with logic, philosophy and dialectic abandoned for psychology, biology and '' business ad- ministration "; the new education with its free electives and vocational training, and its apotheosis of theoretical and applied sci- ence (a glory and a dominion mitigated only by the insidious penetration of semi- professional athletics) — this new educa- tion was conceived and put in practice for the chief purpose of fitting men for the sort of life that was universal during the elapsed years of the present century, and this life had no place for pre-eminence, no use for [32] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY leadership, except in the categories of busi- ness, applied science and finance. It did its work to admiration, and the result is before us in the shape of a society that has been wholly democratized, not by filling in the valleys and lifting the malarial swamps of the submerged masses, but by a levelling of all down to their own plane. The disappearance of religion as a vital force in human life and society, during the last century, has been a very potent agency in urging political, educational and in- dustrial democracy towards its final tri- umph, and in fixing the manacles of capital- ism and industrial slavery on the world. Since the Reformation religion has been only a dissolving tradition, without any real force or potency in and over society. For individuals it has, from time to time, pos- sessed all its old energy: over them it has exerted all its old influence, and just as great saints, confessors and even martyrs have shed their glory over the last century as at any time in the past. But since the Reformation religion has gone back to the catacombs whence Cojistantine had drawn it fifteen centuries ago: it is now the precious pos- session of the individual, hidden, cloistered, [33] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY fearful of coming to the light. As a domi- nating influence over states, as a controlling power in diplomacy, business, politics, phi- losophy, education, art, or over communi- ties as such, it is now, and has been for a long time, a negligible factor. This is true as well of Catholicism as of Protestantism. For generations at a time it has been the effective moral and spiritual guardian of nations, and while this was true civilization flourished as neither before nor since. The Renaissance destroyed the claim of the Church, as it was then, to such moral and spiritual leadership, and the Reforma- tion and Revolution destroyed the fact. For a time, as a result of the Counter-Reforma- tion, something of the old leadership was restored in all its plenitude, where Protes- tantism had not taken effect, but little by little it surrendered to the new spirit in the world, until now it is not only impotent amongst the nations, it is as well conditioned by the same considerations of materialism and opportunism and a false democracy, as Protestantism, industrialism and the capi- talistic-scientific state. The Church still carries in petto all that was ever her pos- session, including infinite possibilities of [34] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY beneficent action and influence; at present, however, this is inoperative, and with the rest of the world she stands hesitant and diffident, rejected by the majority of men, ignored by states and denied even the form of leadership. Democracy in government and democ- racy in education have each played their part in the destruction of leadership and 4^he establishing of the reign of mediocrity. There is yet a third aspect, or rather result, of the same force, which may perhaps prove in the end the most significant of all, and that is the democratization of society by the breaking down of the just and normal bar- riers of race, first through the so-called ''melting pot" process, second through the substitution of the mongrel for the product of pure blood byreason of the free and reck- less mixing of incompatible strains. From the beginning of modern democracy it has been with its adherents a cardinal point of faith that a ''free country" should set no limits to immigration of any race, class or degree of cultural development. It is equally a dogma that under a true democ- racy there is no discrimination possible be- tween individuals on the score of difference [35] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY in race, blood or status, and that therefore no restrictions should be recognized or es- tablished which would control or limit absolute freedom of union in marital rela- tions and the legal procreation of children. The nineteenth century superstition, erected by the doctrinaire protagonists of "evolution," that human progress was both automatic and constant, through the acqui- sition of new qualities by education, the force of environment, and "natural selec- tion," has been the scientific justification for the supposedly "democratic" principle of free immigration and free mating. Were the theory demonstrably true it would indeed negative the chief arguments for the scrupu- lous recognition and preservation of race values both in marriage and control of im- migration. If character is determined by education and environment, and is trans- mitted in substance generation after genera- tion, the question is manifestly only one of enough education, of the right kind, and dis- tributed with sufficient generality. Mongol and Slovak, Malay and Hottentot stand on the same plane with Latin and Saxon and Celt, for it is merely a question of educa- tion, environment and continued breeding; [36] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY good is cumulative, automatically trans- mitted, and time is the answer to all. On this superstition has been erected the great modern system of universal state education. With a mechanical exactness it has failed to produce appreciable results. State education, secularized, standardized, compulsory, has left native character un- touched, furnishing only a body of faculties, used to good ends if such was the character- predisposition of the individual, for base ends if this race or family predisposition so determined. Nor is there any evidence whatever that what the father acquires the son inherits. It is a commonplace of sociol- ogy that the American-born son of the for- eign-born immigrant of a decadent race or inferior blood who himself had reacted to the stimulus of a new environment and un- precedented educational opportunities, is not in general an advance over his progeni- tor either in character or capacity, but rather, however great his educational acquirement, a retrogression and a return to type. Empirical ''science" of the nineteenth century yields to the more exact science of the twentieth century, and it is now ad- mitted that acquired characteristics are not [37] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY heritable. That which persists is some in- delible quality of blood or of race, modified by the conjunction of two germ plasms in generation; while new species are not the result of the building up of one characteris- tic added to another by inheritance and the process of '' natural selection " and the '' sur- vival of the fittest," but of some cataclysmic action the nature and source of which no scientist has determined or dared to assume. With the breakdown of this once popular theory, the factor of blood becomes no longer negligible and the doctrine of the omnipo- tence of education and environment falls to the ground, yet we still continue debauch- ing race by free movement of peoples through immigration, and by unrestrained mating amongst men and women of alien racial qualities. In large sections of Amer- ica society is now completely mongrel, and the same is true of portions of Europe where the process is of increasing force. Through uncontrolled alliances the same thing is happening in blood, and appar- ently the whole world is about to repeat what already has happened in Russia, the Balkans and Central America. The appeal of the eugenist to biology and [38] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY the testimony of botany and zoology is dan- gerous when carried too far — as it gener- ally is — for it leaves out of account the ele- ment of the soul, which is a factor that enters into the human consideration and is not operative in the case of plants and beasts. For those who deny its existence except as a biological product of the working of purely physical forces, the democratic prin- ciple of the free movement, intercourse and mating of peoples of every known blood, race and status can only appear the blackest and most imbecile crime in the human cal- endar. Continued for another generation or two the result can only be universal mon- grelism and the consequent end of culture and civilization. Cross-fertilization and the producing of special and higher types thereby is a perfectly artificial process, and however brilliant the result in the first in- stance the tendency of reversion to type is inexorable. Either the result is a hybrid without power of propagation, or a precari- ous phenomenon tending inevitably towards a retrogression that in a few generations comes back to the normal type. Nor is the situation much better when re- garded from the standpoint of those who [39] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY postulate of each individual a spiritual fac- tor that is not the product of biological proc- esses but is something of a different nature added thereto. This element in the human entity works towards the negativing or amelioration of the conditions consequent on the predispositions determined by hered- ity — race factors, blood tendencies, new inclinations that are the result of the com- bining of two different sets of parental char- acteristics — and towards the utilization of the possibilities inherent in education and environment. It is, however, not omnipo- tent; it is conditioned by the nature of the various forces with which it deals, and it can rise superior to them only when it calls into play the energy of those kindred spirit- ual forces that exist, are universally avail- able, and are the only sure instrument of victory over the gravitational pull of a pre- determined natural handicap. Recognition of, and reliance on, these remedial factors decrease in inverse ratio to their necessity, and this is true both of the individual and the community as a whole. The time comes for both when the power of the degenerative forces becomes so great through poverty of blood, hybridization of race and depravity [40] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY of status, that the energy of the spiritual fac- tor is negatived, and the individual or the community or the race declines, completes the final surrender, and fails, disappearing in ignominy and oblivion. /There is no tragedy greater than that of the human soul full of the promise and potency and desire of good things, imprisoned in the forbid- ding circle of mongrel blood, inimical inheritance and pernicious environment against which it desperately rebels, but from v^hich there is no possibility of escape ex- cept through the power of supernatural assistance on which it no longer possesses the impulse or the will to call.; Democracy of method then, not democ- racy of ideal, has not only failed to attain the supreme objects for which, in its protean forms, it has been devised, it has as well brought into existence a system that has practically eliminated sane, potent and con- structive leadership and has therefore be- trayed society, involving it in a profound mediocrity which now confronts that fate which always follows identical progress in other categories of the organic world, — reversion to type and ultimate sterility. And so we stand to-day where the Great [41] A THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY War has revealed us, peoples without lead- ers; helpless, inefficient and, barring the miracle of redemption through bitter chas- tizement, hurrying on to anarchy or slavery as the fortunes of war may determine. The true democracy of St. Louis, Edward I and Washington is forgotten and a false democracy has taken its place, employ- ing the old shibboleths but ignoring the thing itself, while inventing one new device after another to serve as a red herring drawn across the trail pursued implacably by the ever-increasing numbers of those who see the inefficiency and deceitfulness of it all, and maintain their pursuit so that in the end they may establish what is to them democ- racy pure and simple, but is in fact its reductio ad absurdum. Whatever the issue of the war there is for the world neither release from intolerable menace nor yet a proximate salvation. The war that is redeeming myriads of souls leaves the organic system of society, both ma- terial and spiritual, untouched. Were peace to come to-morrow, after a brief period of readjustment life would go on much as before, with industrialism supreme and capitalism versus proletarianism the condi- [42] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY tioning clauses of its unstable equilibrium; with the parliamentary system still in vogue, and all this means of incapacity, opportu- nism and the political survival of the unfit; with religion in a condition of heresy against heresy and all against a thin simulacrum of Catholicity; with philosophy still clinging to the shreds and tatters of evolution or re- modelling itself on the plausible lines of an intellectualized materialism; with the mon- grelizing of blood and community going steadily forward, and with education prowl- ing through the ruins of scientific determin- ism, and struggling ever to build out of its shreds and shards some new machine that will make even more certain the direct ap- plication of scholastic results to the one prob- lem of wealth production — with educa- tion failing as before to produce leaders to fill a demand that no longer exists. The best that one can say, if peace really comes again and man returns once more to his old ways of life, is that this return will be for the briefest of periods. The war is only the first of a series, for one war alone cannot undo the cumulative errors of five centuries. Either after a year or two for the taking of breath, or merging into it v/ith- [43] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY out appreciable break, will come the second world-wide convulsion, the war for the revo- lutionizing of society, which will run its long and terrible course in the determined effort to substitute for our present industrial sys- tem of life (in itself perhaps the worst man has devised) something more consonant with the principles of justice. And the third, which may also follow immediately after the second, or merge into it, or even precede it, will be the war between the false democracy, now everywhere in evidence, and whatever is left of the true democracy of man's ideal. From these three visita- tions there is no escape. The thing we have so earnestly and arduously built up out of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, with industrialism and scientific determin- ism as the structural material, is not a civili- zation at all, and it must be destroyed in order that the ground may be cleared for something better. At first it seemed that one war might do the work, when we con- sidered the glorious regeneration of France and the heroism and self-sacrifice of all our allies. We know better now. We can see that the war has not touched the industrial problem at all, nor the religious nor the [44] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY social nor the political. Capitalist on the one hand, proletarian on the other, when they stop to think of themselves in either capac- ity, are just of the same old kidney as before, and the problem of final solution only hangs in abeyance. The same is true of govern- ment in France, England, America. Patri- otism and devotion, genuine as they are in many cases, serve only as a costume easily laid aside, and underneath is just the same old politician, learning nothing, forgetting nothing. Nothing is added to the issue by rotund phrases about the warfare for uni- versal democracy. When nations are blindly and half unconsciously fighting for the last shreds of honour and liberty left over from an old Christian civilization, their case is not fortified by suggestions that they really are struggling to preserve and extend representative government, univer- sal suffrage or direct legislation; rather something is taken away from a holy cause. Great leaders could not have averted the war, and when Lloyd George declares that if Germany had been a democracy the war could not have occurred, he is simply in- dulging in the standard type of political jargon. The issue was too great to be set [45] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY aside by a change from imperialistic effi- ciency to democratic incapacity. On the other hand, it is true that men com- petent to see clearly, capable of thinking constructively, and with will to lead ca- pably, might, at this juncture, make this the last war and avert the grim terror of the two others to come. ^* Mene, Tekel, Uph- arsin " is on the wall in words of fire and blood, and the Belshazzars of modernism can neither understand them, nor, which is worse, find their interpreter, therefore they and we go on to our predestined fate. Democracy, without the supreme leader- ship of men who by nature or divine direc- tion can speak and act with and by author- ity, is a greater menace than autocracy. Men and nations have been what they have been, either for good or evil, not by the will of a numerical majority but by the supreme leadership of the few — seers, prophets, captains of men; and so it always will be. When, as now, the greatest crisis in fifteen centuries overpasses the world, and society sinks under the nemesis of universal medi- ocrity, then we realize that the system has doomed itself, since, impotent to produce leaders, it has signed its own death warrant. [46] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY What we confront through democracy as it is interpreted to-day is a degradation of the human potential through a double dissi- pation of energy. With no defensible stand- ard of comparative values, all the spiritual and mental force in men is turned towards the realization of the unimportant, to which accomplishment it is given with a prodigal- ity hardly equalled in the Middle Ages when it was lavished on the realization of the essential. Simultaneously man has been dissipating the stored-up energy of the world through his mastery of thermo- dynamics and his precarious dominion over electrical forces, at such a rate that physical potential has been degraded in a hundred years more than in the preceding hundred centuries. Of what becomes of this fabu- lous force, what the permanent contribu- tions may be to human life, he cares little. It is sufficient for him to realize that he is the arbiter of this gigantic power, and if it is exploited and dissipated, with nothing of lasting value to show, he cares no more than any other type of spendthrift. As Henry Adams has said, with cold irony, ^'Neither historians nor sociologists can afford to let themselves be driven into [47] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY admitting that every gain of power — from gunpowder to steam, from the dynamo to the Daimler motor — has been made at the cost of man's and of woman's vitality." Yet the fact remains that this is true, and our present deplorable estate is partly the result of this very degradation and dissipation of energy, which has been lavished on activi- ties totally unproductive so far as lasting benefits are concerned, and spread out over a vast area where it disappears without results. It would seem that there is in the world at any one time only a certain amount of available spiritual energy, which may be preserved and made effectively operative through concentration, or lost through dissi- pation, while the physical energy, stored up out of endless ages, is limited in its original quantity, and only added to, if at all, in a very small degree. At the beginning of each new era this spiritual force is precipi- tated in the form of great leaders who trans- late it, and transmit it in available form (and directed toward productive ends) to the general mass of men. Later, the specific era having reached its meridian, the leaders pass as the prophets before them, and the [48] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY force once concentrated in them, and made operative, spreads thin and ineffective, and at last is dissipated through the general mass of men. At the end the prodigal ma- jority, having wasted its inherited substance in riotous living, falls into puerile contests and finally destroys itself, and another era takes its place in history to the accompani- ment of war and anarchy. So Greece lost its leaders and squandered its intellectual heritage; so Rome dissipated its Imperial force and succumbed to barbarism; so Me- diaevalism played fast and loose with its spiritual capital, and so modernism is now wasting all it had inherited from these three antecedent periods, and prepares to take its place with antiquity. From the earliest Renaissance, great men in whom were concentrated the dynamic force of a crescent era, built up the impos- ing and consistent thing called modernism. Great men transformed this into the terms of industrial civilization, when they had given their commanding abilities to the discovery and the utilization of the latent physical forces inherent in the world, hitherto un- touched by antecedent generations. Then they ceased, almost by a cataclysmic cutting- [49] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY off, and little men, little in spirit and crafty rather than creative, took into their hands the carrying out of the last phase of epochal de- velopment — the establishing of the hegem- ony of the world on a basis of physical and intellectual force from which the last ele- ments of morality had been purged away. Little men, blinded, puzzled and appalled, met the crisis as best they could, and for three years the world has been plunged in carnage and destruction, while military, political and psychological blunders have followed each other in a witches' sabbath of incapacity. And now the victory of the shrewd, cyni- cal and definitely immoral forces, so long held impossible even in thought, is more clearly indicated than at any time since the Battle of the Marne. The exploits of Russia in its efforts to make the '' world safe for democracy" may very well prove the determining factor. A miracle is of course possible, but at present not predicable. A Napoleon there, a Charlemagne in France, a Washington here, even a Cromwell in England, might avert the nemesis of medi- ocrity, but. a Kerensky, a Painleve, a Lloyd George does not fill the bill. With a Ger- [50] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY man victory and a German peace, modern- ism, supreme over all the world, may es- tablish a regime of mechanistic efficiency. Imperial, Godless, temporally superb, but without real leaders, it can only prove an interlude of plausibility, a preface to sud- den degeneration, and the chaos of the end of the century, when the world-slavery of Teutonistic modernism goes down to its final ruin, will leave the record of the present war as that of a mere rehearsal. And if the miracle happens; if the leader comes who can shatter the Brumagem effi- ciency of Prussia, and so the world is saved from a fate it richly deserves, can we say that we have a better hope? Yes, if with victory comes realization of what the war means, and why it came upon us. For this realization one of two things is necessary: either such a spiritual regeneration of the great mass of people, through suffering and sorrow and privation and the bitter school- ing of the trenches, that they will follow up their victory over the enemy in the field by an even greater victory over the enemy at home in religion, philosophy and society, purging a chastened world of the last folly and the last wickedness of modernism; or [51] THE NEMESIS OF MEDIOCRITY the coming once more of the great prophets and captains of men who alone can lead as their predecessors have always led, and so build up a new life on the ruins of an old that has passed in blood and flame and dishonour. If none of these things happens, if there is a German peace, or an inconclusive '^ peace through negotiation," or a victory in the field for the Allies that is followed by no attainment of a new vision; if in the end the world returns to the same system, the same basis of judgment, the same standard of comparative values that held before the war — what then? Russia already has given the answer. [52] DUE DATE msir^L '■ fmm :^. fi f/i-i^rr. ^^-u 'T^X^i ^0^'"^ ytj DFf : n "K vi'! ,^ 201-6503 Printed in USA mmmmm /j; /Tr„"'""E''s,r pillSi/SSf mil. 9-10.31 C847 '■ « * H