e grave disadvantages of a
natural catastrophe in that national unity. Pacifists who complained in
England of the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what
patriotism can be like. If they had been in America, after America had
entered the war, they would have seen something which they have always
perhaps subconsciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their
worst dreams detested; and the name of it is democracy. They would have
found that there are disadvantages in birds of a feather flocking
together; and that one of them follows on a too complacent display of
the white feather. The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with
eccentrics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an
aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, the American
Pacifist, which really was prolonged and oppressive, would probably have
been shortened in England where his opinions were shared by aristocrats
like Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like Lord Hugh Cecil
could be moved to the defence of conscientious objectors, partly by a
true instinct of chivalry; but partly also by the general feeling that a
gentleman may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite as mad.
He takes the matter personally, in the sense of being able to imagine
the psychology of the persons. But democracy is no respecter of persons.
It is no respecter of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good
and sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. He was but one
of the millions. This is a real problem, or question in the balance,
touching different forms of government; which is, of course, quite
neglected by the idealists who merely repeat long words. There was
during the war a society called the Union of Democratic Control, which
would have been instantly destroyed anywhere where democracy had any
control, or where there was any union. And in this sense the United
States have most emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there is
something rather more subtle than this simple popular solidity behind
the assimilation of American citizens to each other. There is something
even in the individual ideals that drives towards this social sympathy.
And it is here that we have to remember that biological fancies like the
herd instinct are only figures of speech, and cannot really cover
anything human. For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious
people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampe