THE Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest characters among the small group of honest enthusiasts1 who were responsible for the outbreak of the great French Revolution. He had devoted2 his life to the cause of the poor and the unfortunate. He had been one of the assistants of d'Alembert and Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopedie. During the first years of the Revolution he had been the leader of the Moderate wing of the Convention.
His tolerance3, his kindliness4, his stout5 common sense, had made him an object of suspicion when the treason of the king and the court clique6 had given the extreme radicals7 their chance to get hold of the government and kill their opponents. Condorcet was declared "hors de loi," or outlawed8, an outcast who was henceforth at the mercy of every true patriot9. His friends offered to hide him at their own peril10. Condorcet refused to accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to reach his home, where he might be safe. After three nights in the open, torn and bleeding, he entered an inn and asked for some food. The suspicious yokels11 searched him and in his pockets they found a copy of Horace, the Latin poet. This showed that their prisoner was a man of gentle breeding and had no business upon the highroads at a time when every educated person was regarded as an enemy of the Revolutionary state. They took Condorcet and they bound him and they gagged him and they threw him into the village lock-up, but in the morning when the soldiers came to drag him back to Paris and cut his head off, behold12! he was dead.
This man who had given all and had received nothing had good reason to despair of the human race. But he has written a few sentences which ring as true to-day as they did one hundred and thirty years ago. I repeat them here for your benefit.
"Nature has set no limits to our hopes," he wrote, "and the picture of the human race, now freed from its chains and marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue13 and happiness, offers to the philosopher a spectacle which consoles him for the errors, for the crimes and the injustices14 which still pollute and afflict15 this earth."
The world has just passed through an agony of pain compared to which the French Revolution was a mere16 incident. The shock has been so great that it has killed the last spark of hope in the breasts of millions of men. They were chanting a hymn17 of progress, and four years of slaughter18 followed their prayers for peace. "Is it worth while," so they ask, "to work and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed beyond the stage of the earliest cave men?"
There is but one answer.
That answer is "Yes!"
The World War was a terrible calamity19. But it did not mean the end of things. On the contrary it brought about the coming of a new day.
It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages. The actors who played their parts upon that long-forgotten stage are all dead. We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that applauded their efforts has dispersed20. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings.
But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary events. The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we pass through life, are our own problems, and they hurt us too much or they please us too well to be described with that fairness which is necessary when we are writing history and not blowing the trumpet21 of propaganda. All the same I shall endeavour to tell you why I agree with poor Condorcet when he expressed his firm faith in a better future.
Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance22 and the Reformation, and Modern Time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word "modern" implies that we, the people of the twentieth century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years ago the liberals of England who followed the leadership of Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representative and democratic form of government had been solved forever by the second great Reform Bill, which gave workmen an equal share in the government with their employers. When Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a dangerous "leap in the dark" they answered "No." They felt certain of their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would co-operate to make the government of their common country a success. Since then many things have happened, and the few liberals who are still alive begin to understand that they were mistaken.
There is no definite answer to any historical problem.
Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those sluggish23 animals of the prehistoric24 world have perished.
If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own great-great-grandchildren who will take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But what will they think of those short four thousand years during which we have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the Assyrian conqueror25. Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan or Alexander the Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an end will appear in the light of that long commercial conflict which settled the supremacy26 of the Mediterranean27 when Rome and Carthage fought during one hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) to them will seem a continuation of the disordered conditions caused by the Great Migrations28. They will look at pictures of the Rheims cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns as we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined two hundred and fifty years ago during a war between the Turks and the Venetians. They will regard the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a childish superstition29 which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and mediaeval surgeons.
And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not "modern" at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last generations of the cave-dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made "knowledge and understanding" the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great War was the "growing-pain" of this new world.
For a long time to come people will write mighty30 books to prove that this or that or the other person brought about the war. The Socialists31 will publish volumes in which they will accuse the "capitalists" of having brought about the war for "commercial gain." The capitalists will answer that they lost infinitely32 more through the war than they made—that their children were among the first to go and fight and be killed—and they will show how in every country the bankers tried their very best to avert33 the outbreak of hostilities34. French historians will go through the register of German sins from the days of Charlemagne until the days of William of Hohenzollern and German historians will return the compliment and will go through the list of French horrors from the days of Charlemagne until the days of President Poincare. And then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow was guilty of "causing the war." Statesmen, dead and not yet dead, in all countries will take to their typewriters and they will explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked opponents forced them into it.
The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about these apologies and vindications. He will understand the real nature of the underlying35 causes and he will know that personal ambitions and personal wickedness and personal greed had very little to do with the final outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery36, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth37, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group of courageous38 leaders.
A Zulu in a frock coat is still a Zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.
If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It will become clearer to you in a moment and it will explain many things that have happened these last six years.
Perhaps I may give you another, more familiar, example, to show you what I mean. In the movie theatres, jokes and funny remarks are often thrown upon the screen. Watch the audience the next time you have a chance. A few people seem almost to inhale39 the words. It takes them but a second to read the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from twenty to thirty seconds. Finally those men and women who do not read any more than they can help, get the point when the brighter ones among the audience have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It is not different in human life, as I shall now show you.
In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last Roman Emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of "imitation empires." It gave the Bishops40 of Rome a chance to make themselves the head of the entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman world-supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly41 harmless barbarian42 chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare43 because they were for ever under the spell of this magic word "Rome." All these people, Popes, Emperors and plain fighting men were not very different from you or me. But they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital issue something living—something which was remembered clearly both by the father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled and sacrificed themselves for a cause which to-day would not find a dozen recruits.
In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the Reformation and if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years War with that on Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already puffing44 in the laboratories of a number of French and German and English scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these strange contraptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion which to-day causes yawns, but no anger.
And so it goes. A thousand years from now, the historian will use the same words about Europe of the out-going nineteenth century, and he will see how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles while the laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk who cared not one whit45 for politics as long as they could force nature to surrender a few more of her million secrets.
You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The engineer and the scientist and the chemist, within a single generation, filled Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They created a new world in which time and space were reduced to complete insignificance46. They invented new products and they made these so cheap that almost every one could buy them. I have told you all this before but it certainly will bear repeating.
To keep the ever increasing number of factories going, the owners, who had also become the rulers of the land, needed raw materials and coal. Especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking in terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and clinging to the old notions of the state as a dynastic or political organisation47. This clumsy mediaeval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It did its best, according to the rules of the game which had been laid down centuries before. The different states created enormous armies and gigantic navies which were used for the purpose of acquiring new possessions in distant lands. Whereever{sic} there was a tiny bit of land left, there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives objected, they were killed. In most cases they did not object, and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did not interfere48 with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines or the gold mines or the rubber plantations49, and they derived50 many benefits from the foreign occupation.
Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials wanted the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a war. This occurred fifteen years ago when Russia and Japan fought for the possession of certain terri-tories which belonged to the Chinese people. Such conflicts, however, were the exception. No one really desired to fight. Indeed, the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early 20th century. They associated the idea of violence with the long-ago age of unlimited51 monarchies52 and intriguing53 dynasties. Every day they read in their papers of still further inventions, of groups of English and American and German scientists who were working together in perfect friendship for the purpose of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in a busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only a few noticed that the development of the state, (of the gigantic community of people who recognise certain common ideals,) was lagging several hundred years behind. They tried to warn the others. But the others were occupied with their own affairs.
I have used so many similes54 that I must apologise for bringing in one more. The Ship of State (that old and trusted expression which is ever new and always picturesque,) of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Venetians and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth century had been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood, and commanded by officers who knew both their crew and their vessel55 and who understood the limitations of the art of navigating56 which had been handed down to them by their ancestors.
Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery57. First one part, then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions were increased. The sails were discarded for steam. Better living quarters were established, but more people were forced to go down into the stoke-hole, and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative58, they did not like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rigging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden square-rigger had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. But the captain and the mates remained the same. They were appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years before. They were taught the same system of navigation which had served the mariners59 of the fifteenth century. In their cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. In short, they were (through no fault of their own) completely incompetent60.
The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those Imperial and Colonial liners began to try and outrun each other, accidents were bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the wreckage61 if you venture to pass through that part of the ocean.
And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership—who will have the courage of their own visions and who will recognise clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely62 new system of seamanship.
They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices63. They will have to fight their way to the top against every possible form of opposition64. When they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious65 crew may cause their death. But some day, a man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port, and he shall be the hero of the ages.
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1
enthusiasts
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| n.热心人，热衷者( enthusiast的名词复数 ) | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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kindliness
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| n.厚道，亲切，友好的行为 | |
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clique
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| n.朋党派系，小集团 | |
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radicals
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| n.激进分子( radical的名词复数 )；根基；基本原理；[数学]根数 | |
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outlawed
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| 宣布…为不合法（outlaw的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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patriot
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| n.爱国者，爱国主义者 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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yokels
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| n.乡下佬，土包子( yokel的名词复数 ) | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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injustices
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| 不公平( injustice的名词复数 )； 非正义； 待…不公正； 冤枉 | |
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afflict
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| vt.使身体或精神受痛苦，折磨 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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slaughter
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| n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀 | |
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calamity
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| n.灾害，祸患，不幸事件 | |
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dispersed
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| adj. 被驱散的, 被分散的, 散布的 | |
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trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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sluggish
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| adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的 | |
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prehistoric
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| adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的 | |
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conqueror
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| n.征服者，胜利者 | |
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supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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migrations
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| n.迁移，移居( migration的名词复数 ) | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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socialists
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| 社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 ) | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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avert
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| v.防止，避免；转移(目光、注意力等) | |
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hostilities
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| n.战争；敌意(hostility的复数)；敌对状态；战事 | |
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underlying
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| adj.在下面的，含蓄的，潜在的 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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sloth
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| n.[动]树懒；懒惰，懒散 | |
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courageous
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| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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inhale
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| v.吸入(气体等)，吸(烟) | |
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bishops
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| （基督教某些教派管辖大教区的）主教( bishop的名词复数 )； （国际象棋的）象 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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barbarian
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| n.野蛮人；adj.野蛮(人)的；未开化的 | |
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warfare
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| n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突 | |
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puffing
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| v.使喷出( puff的现在分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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whit
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| n.一点，丝毫 | |
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insignificance
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| n.不重要；无价值；无意义 | |
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organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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plantations
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| n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 ) | |
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derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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monarchies
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| n. 君主政体, 君主国, 君主政治 | |
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intriguing
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| adj.有趣的；迷人的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的现在分词)；激起…的好奇心 | |
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54
similes
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| （使用like或as等词语的）明喻( simile的名词复数 ) | |
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55
vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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navigating
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| v.给（船舶、飞机等）引航，导航( navigate的现在分词 )；（从海上、空中等）横越；横渡；飞跃 | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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remunerative
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| adj.有报酬的 | |
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mariners
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| 海员，水手（mariner的复数形式） | |
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incompetent
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| adj.无能力的，不能胜任的 | |
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wreckage
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| n.（失事飞机等的）残骸，破坏，毁坏 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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apprentices
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| 学徒，徒弟( apprentice的名词复数 ) | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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envious
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| adj.嫉妒的，羡慕的 | |
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