"It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled....Does no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose? It will trample cities; it will devour nations...."White read this on the 9th of October, 1914.One crumpled evening paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: "Rain of Incendiary Shells.Antwerp Ablaze." Another declared untruthfully but impressively: "Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City."He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on with Benham's manuscripts.
These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
"How can we ever begin over again?" said White, and sat for a long time staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to succeed them....
"We have to begin over again," said White at last, and took up Benham's papers where he had laid them down....
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One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position.This section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the psychology of economic organization....
It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of human affairs.This was a very natural result of his peculiar social circumstances.Most people born to wealth and ease take the established industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody is strong and clever enough to rearrange it.Their experience of it is a satisfactory experience.
On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of international dissensions.Travel and talk to foreigners open one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become conceivable.It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be negligent of and impatient about social reform.
But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity.It is a far profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs."I can foresee a time," he wrote, "when the greater national and racial hatreds may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in industrialism.This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of organization.Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace.But I do not understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs can be brought about.
"If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know that at once he would answer ‘Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in the wilderness and hungry.Of course everybody with any intelligence wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human efforts directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency of practical suggestions.I do not say that Socialism would not work, but I do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that they could work it.The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no other human advantage whatever.
Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, inspiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very helpful, towards the vast problem of moral and material adjustment before the race.That problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate, and only by great multitudes of generous workers, one working at this point and one at that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right to count himself among those who do these kingly services, is this elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be done."So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his panacea.All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not only of the individual but the world.
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