ors, our captains of industry, above all
who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great
industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
helplessness of hours.

If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the
disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight
for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
too late.

What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo
to working samplers. Fearing the ugl