ends, were much the same
for all these small governing groups as they operated from behind the
various shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the
contending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the common
springs of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker,
ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they accept
the rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct.
They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social and
political establishment which, pretending to civilization, always
turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers to
physical force as the final arbiter.

It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalistic
principle still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled,
not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear to
be replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions are
being made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency
of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixed
and mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras and
as new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justice
is man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences and
practicalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is
the humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abiding
around which life may order and maintain itself.

Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by man
but discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctions
beyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampant
naturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of mean
and cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonment
of political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech by
governmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by the
physical suppression of the thinker. The several and notorious
attempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating of
the New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physical
or political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universally
impotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The only
law which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious and
political heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law of
love, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a
twentieth-