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By Root 888 0

to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.

Even before 1914 a whole school of English political philosophers and social psychologists, including Graham Wallas, author of the phrase “The Great Society,” was overtaken by pessimism as a result of their studies of mass political behavior. One of them, William Trotter, in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, published in 1908, found the mob or herd instinct springing from the same dark and sinister well of the unconscious uncovered by Freud. Describing the herd instinct as an irrational force, “imitative, cowardly, cruel … and suggestible,” Trotter concluded his famous essay with one of the most somber sentences ever written: “The probability is very great that, after all, man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures.”

In 1914 came the Great War, the event that begins our time, which was, so to speak, its womb. Summarizing its causes, an English historian, F. P. Chambers, in 1939 wrote, “The universal expression of belligerent will at this time is perhaps a phenomenon whose uniqueness history has not yet taken sufficiently into account. It was as if expanding wealth and multiplying population, as if the unconscious boredom of peace over nearly fifty unbroken years, had stored up a terrific potential which only waited for an accident to touch it off. Far from being innocents led to the slaughter, the peoples of Europe more truly led their leaders.”

In that war men performed prodigies of valor and endurance, suffered and sacrificed and killed each other, moved by two convictions: that their country was right and that they were fighting to bring about a better order of things. If I may be forgiven for quoting myself, “When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.”

The fourteen points that looked so brave in the abstract melted as soon as they touched the hard reality of national interests among the victors. The Treaty of Versailles did not establish a peace of reason or even stability. The League of Nations, despite genuine and valiant effort, proved a failure (as has its successor, the United Nations). After four years, as Graham Wallas wrote, “of the most intense and heroic effort the human race has ever made,” the hopes and beliefs possible before 1914 slowly shriveled.

No betrayal of hope was more profound than that in socialism. It is hard to convey to this generation how ardent, how dedicated, how convinced were the anarchists, socialists, Marxists, working-class and labor-union leaders, and all the advocates of whatever class or kind who believed in and struggled for the goal of social revolution—that great overturn which would wipe out the wickedness and oppression vested, as they thought, in property, and build a new order based on social justice. They believed that the brotherhood of the working class transcended national boundaries, that war would be stopped when the workers of the world would refuse to shoulder a rifle to fire on their comrades of another country. They believed that when they should succeed in their task—the overthrow of capitalism—social inequities and want would be eliminated, leaving man free to fulfill his nature to be good as God intended him. This idealism was a powerful engine of social progress, a real political force, the motive power and faith of men like Kropotkin,