And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as Isaid, our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality? For there are two--a true one and a false; a noble and a base; a healthful and a ruinous. There is the truly divine equality, and there is the brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms. There is the equality which is founded on mutual envy. The equality which respects others, and the equality which asserts itself. The equality which longs to raise all alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all alike. The equality which says: Thou art as good as I, and it may be better too, in the sight of God. And the equality which says: I am as good as thou, and will therefore see if I cannot master thee.
Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, are the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same name, but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, the Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, are, as in the old Greek legend, contending for the prize.
And the prize is no less a one than all free people of this planet.
In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the equality of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step farther towards realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written: "The despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they that exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But he that will be great among you let him be the servant of all."And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one step forward, towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, "Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."Only, alas! in that evil equality of envy and hate, there is no hindmost, and the devil takes them all alike.
And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy, followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free, because tyranny will at least do for them what they were too lazy and greedy and envious to do for themselves.
And all because they have forgot What 'tis to be a man--to curb and spurn.
The tyrant in us: the ignobler self Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute;And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, No purpose, save its share in that wild war In which, through countless ages, living things Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God, Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?
That we are brutes, great God, we know too well;Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step;Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs;Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel, Instead of teeth and claws:- all these we are.
Are we no more than these, save in degree?
Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts, Taking the sword, to perish by the sword Upon the universal battle-field, Even as the things upon the moor outside?
The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs;The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine;The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak;The many eat the few; great nations, small;And he who cometh in the name of all Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.
While ever out of the eternal heavens Looks patient down the great magnanimous God, Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all;Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, What 'tis to be a man--to give, not take;To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.
"He that cometh in the name of all"--the popular military despot--the "saviour of his country"--he is our internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, whenever he rises--the inaugurator of that Imperialism, that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of her--the sink into which all wicked States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by PANEM ET CIRCENSES--bread and games--or, if need be, Pilgrimages; that the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last. That, let it ape as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as another Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead *******, really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money-bag, by the divine sanction of the bayonet.
That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do.
It does not last. Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last?
How can it last? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's spear of truth and fact. And -"Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth them down. Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the city."Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in the United States?
