§ 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and appearances
of human life which is going on about us, a change as rapid and as
wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the
barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at
least as unprecedented. It is not as if old things were going out of
life and new things coming in, it is rather that the altered
circumstances of men are making an appeal to elements in his nature that
have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have
hitherto been over-stimulated and over-developed. He has not so much
grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century,
for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men. There
was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century that
seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty
of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly,
gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the
years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling
from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable
existence of the respectable poor,
or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naïve passions
of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and
inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in
circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more
individual instances the constantly observed difference between one
portion of a life and another consequent upon a religious conversion,
were a standing example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of their old
established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and
prejudices that came down to them from the past. To borrow a word from
the old-fashioned chemists, men were made nascent; they were released
from old ties; for good or evil they were ready for new associations.
The council carried them forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had
reached their destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them
back to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a harder
one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic bombs had been a
profound one, and for a while the cunning side of the human animal was
overpowered by its sincere realisation of the vital necessity for
reconstruction. The litigious and trading spirits cowered together,
scared at their own consequences; men thought twice before they sought
mean advantages in the face of the unusual
eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at last the weeds revived
again and `claims' began to sprout, they sprouted upon the stony soil of
law-courts reformed, of laws that pointed to the future instead of the
past, and under the blazing sunshine of a transforming world. A new
literature, a new interpretation of history were springing into
existence, a new teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the
young. The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city
for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of estates,
was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made his demand for
some preposterous compensation; the owner of the discredited Dass
patents makes his last appearance upon the scroll of history as the
insolvent proprietor of a paper called
The Cry for Justice, in
which he duns the world for a hundred million pounds. That was the
ingenuous Dass's idea of justice, that he ought to be paid about five
million pounds annually because he had annexed the selvage of one of
Holsten's discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his
right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private hospital at
Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended their days enormously
wealthy, and of course ennobled in the England of the opening twentieth
century, and it is just this novelty of their fates that marks the
quality of the new age.
The new government early discovered the need of a universal
education to fit men to the great
conceptions of its universal rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the
local, racial, and sectarian forms of religious profession that at that
time divided the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it
left these organisations to make their peace with God in their own time;
but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that sacrifice was
expected from all, that respect had to be shown to all; it revived
schools or set them up afresh all around the world, and everywhere these
schools taught the history of war and the consequences and moral of the
Last War; everywhere it was taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of
fact that the salvation of the world from waste and contention was the
common duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are
now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to the
councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim them,
marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt, that flushed
the cheek and fired the eye.
The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during the
next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness. This
educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the mental and
spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And prominent upon it,
and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was a Russian named Karenin,
who was singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so
that
he walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had
at last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages
so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of the
human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had a
curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling towards him was
mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather
than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright brown
eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His
skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all
times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust through
his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige was very great.
To him far more than to any contemporary is it due that self-abnegation,
self-identification with the world spirit, was made the basis of
universal education. That general memorandum to the teachers which is
the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely his
work.
`Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. `That is
the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all
we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain
statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
self-forgetfulness,
and everything else that you have to teach is contributory and
subordinate to that end. Education is the release of man from self. You
have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify
their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance and the
suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to shed the old
Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and passions, and to find
themselves again in the great being of the universe. The little circles
of their egotisms have to be opened out until they become arcs in the
sweep of the racial purpose. And this that you teach to others you must
learn also sedulously yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort
of skill, every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation
from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding preoccupation with
self and egotistical relationships, which is hell for the individual,
treason to the race, and exile from God. . . .'