CHAP. In a Free and Popular Government There Is No Valu able Re- Will Not The Suppression of Free Agitation Invites the Resort to Force the United States. Yet the effect of cutting off the central region from the oil of Baku, the coal and iron of the Donetz basin, the food stuffs of Western Siberia and the cotton of Turkestan has been most calamitous. The conclusion is irresistible that violent social change is a desperate policy, which has no place where speech is free and elections are honest. Any good thing which might be established by the arms of a minority will, within a few years, be voted in by the majority, if only its friends will keep agitating. Therefore the unpardonable sin in a would-be reformer is impatience. To defy the verdict of the count, when that count is the only thing which commands general reverence, is to invite chaos. The principle that the duly ascertained will of the majority should prevail and that if a certain minority has the right idea it will be able to make itself the majority is the only safe principle to follow. In the end society will get on faster on this principle than on any other. The true reformer gets out into the arena and battles stubbornly for his ideas, takes political defeat submissively and good-naturedly, comes up smiling for the next bout and perseveres until he has won over the majority or sees that he has been in the wrong. But the boot is on the other foot if a dominant social class lays rude hands upon the mechanism by which social readjustments are peacefully accomplished. Serious and persistent interference with public criticism, free discussion, the spontaneous formation of public opinion, association for political ends, the free selection of policies and leaders, leaves force as the sole means of bringing to pass needed social change. It is now the foes of reform, rather than its friends, who are in the wrong. By violating the conditions on the strength of which we bid reformers to abjure all thought of hastening their reforms by violence, they have put themselves outside the social pact. Morally they have not a leg to stand on and deserve to be treated as any other band of stranglers. CHAPTER XLVI UNIFORMITIES СНАР. The Mer gence of Small Peoples NE grand outcome of the social processes is that there is uniformity where there was diversity. In prehistoric times mankind must have comprised thousands of racial stocks which, although springing originally from a small number of parent Groups stems, had gradually become more or less differentiated physi- into Great cally from long continuance in diverse natural environments. and Races The formation of larger and yet larger societies, however, has facilitated displacement, migration, crossing and blending, the result being that innumerable kindreds and peoples have disappeared by amalgamation, leaving a small number of great races counting tens of millions, yea, even hundreds of millions, of human beings. While anthropologists discriminate various racial types in each of the great modern peoples, e.g., the English, the French, the Germans, the Italians, there can be no doubt that many ancient stocks have vanished in the melting pot leaving not a trace. STRUGGLE AND SURVIVAL AMONG CULTURES Incipient cultures have been merged as well as incipient races. Consider the destiny of the civilization of those Chinese who more than thirty centuries ago came down the Valley of the Wei River. It has been spread and spread until half a billion people, in Eastern Asia light their tapers at its flame. Uncounted savage tribes and barbarian hordes have succumbed to its influence. Says Metchnikoff: 1 Whatever these heterogeneous tribes have of civilized life, Kalmucks of the Russian steppes and Annamites of Tonkin, Tunguses of Siberia, Manchus of the Amur and the Ussuri, mariners of Fokien and Canton, emanates from one and the same center of civilization, the "Land of the Hundred Families." . . . Nor can one doubt that 1"La civilization et les grands fleuves," p. 321. CHAP. and the Saracenic The Struggle fying Forces with Homo if Japan had not had the good fortune to light her torch at the fire of the Celestial Empire, she would perhaps have remained like the Philippines with their Tagals and their Visayas. Nestorian Christianity came, flourished for a time and vanished. The Jews of Kaifêng-fu lost their language and their religion and became Chinese in all but physiognomy. The conquering Manchus have forgotten their language and literature. "China," it has been finely said, "is a sea which salts everything which flows into it." Or take the Near East. What wealth of contrast would have been noted in Homer's day in the country between Bokhara and Morocco! But the Saracen flood passed over it and now it has the sameness of an ancient beach from which the sea has retired. No sooner is one south of the Caucasus than the eye notes such characteristic "Eastern" features as "shaven heads and mustachios, instead of the full beard; the middle girt by the gay sash or the fancy ornamental belt; brimless caps of lambskin and huge black mantles of shaggy felt; embroidered heelless slippers or soft-soled boots; baggy cotton trousers tied in at the ankles; strings of beads for the man's idle hands to play with; merchants sitting cross-legged on beautiful hand-woven rugs; barefoot, veiled women and women draped with festoons of coins; finger nails and grizzling beards stained with henna; shepherds who look as if they live on locusts and wild honey; importunate beggars with the air of having an assured social position; diminutive donkeys, Biblical asses, camels of the desert and slow-moving oxen at the plow; piles of pomegranates, and long, sweet grapes; sacks of goatskin, with the hair turned inside, distended with wine or olive oil; draft animals bedecked about the head with beads to avert the evil eye; heifers treading out the grain on threshing floors; bricks of mud and straw drying in the sun; white-washed mud huts with flat roofs; domed marabouts, and Moorish architecture." 2 All down the stream of history diversifying forces have been of Diversi at work and homogenizing forces have been at work; but often they are quite out of balance. During the pushing out of the Roman frontiers and the diffusion of the classic culture the likeness-producing forces had the upper hand. After the break-up of the Empire and the decay of communications, i.e., after the fifth century A.D., the diversifying forces came on top, as we 2 Ross, "Russia in Upheaval," pp. 51-52. gonizing Forces |