N NATURE

All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly
delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every
outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity,
incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of
super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal
sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats
who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for
years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German,
American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal
negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report
and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of
omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to
human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general
can be blamed on no one in particular.

Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with
it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the
slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black
fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator
to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority?
Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers
through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every
gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm
of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into
great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid
variants, involve millions in their disease, the idea of freedom
persists obstinately. Have we any reason for regarding it as other
than an illusion?

If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And no
Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene
as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other
social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's
barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as
though every other method has failed us.

In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have
failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are
sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown
them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a
permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the C