THE SWINGING PENDULUM.

Lord Birkenhead, in a late number of the "Century Magazine," has taken up the role of prophet. He foretells that in the year 2020 the present glorification of the individual will have ended; that man will have ceased to be emotional, and become rational, even as the eighteenth century intellectuals were; and that reason will replace sentiment. In his own words, "It will be an age in which Caesar or Voltaire might repeat his famous triumphs ; but where Garibaldi would lack his meed and glory and Dickens would sob in vain." To use a colloquial phrase suited to the present season, Lord Birkenhead is making a safe bet, for in the year 2020 neither he nor any of his readers will be alive, so that there will be none left to condemn him as a false prophet or exalt him as a seer.

Another writer in a recent issue of the "Edinburgh Review" deals with the same subject from a less lyrical point of view, being content to rest his case on an appeal to history rather than sublimity. He points out that the world has for nearly three thousand years at least been but as a pendulum swinging to and fro between two extremes of thought and action. At the one end of the swing is the Greek ideal of man as the free individual, untrammelled in thought and conduct, governing himself and others as the passion or caprice of the moment directs. At the other end of the beat is the Roman ideal of citizenship, the reign of law and order, in which, nevertheless, all careers are open, yet in the end an aristocracy of talent, in the shape of capacity to rule, must prevail. The "Edinburgh Review" article deals with the triumph—temporary though it may be—of Fascism in Italy under Mussolini the Duce, and infers the same conclusion as Lord Birkenhead, that the world is passing out of the stage of Greek idealism of the individual back to the position in which the well-being of society is, in the last resort, more important than that of the individual. At the same time the writer points out that the future must find an equitable solution of the rival claims for individual benefit and social welfare, and he sees in Fascism, rightly directed, the possibility of this solution.

Good government consists in central control for the collective good. Society cannot cohere without the reign of law ; and a bad law, if definite and maintained, is to be preferred to the absence of law, which ends in one of the two extremes—anarchy or tyranny. Something like 2,500 years ago the small Greek societies developed their democratic Governments, inspired by exactly the same feelings and acting in much the same way as democracies do to-day. The Greek democracies passed away because they became the victims of the demagogues, the Cleons, who realised and used what the founders had failed to foresee, the reaction of the masses to emotional appeals. As Rome succeeded, and conquered the available world, the Roman insistence upon order prevailed. Greece had been the idealist and individualist ; Rome was the realist. Greece had been poetry ; Rome was prose. Greece exalted the individual ; Rome the State. For the first 1,500 years of the Christian era the Roman system triumphed. The empire of Charlemagne was but that system applied to existing circumstances. Here and there revolt against it had a partial triumph, as in the case of the Swiss cantons, but such successes were only sporadic. Then came the Renaissance and the Reformation, the parents of the reaction towards the Greek idea. There is but one institution which before and after this period has returned the Roman idea, and even that has been greatly modified by the Christian ethic. That institution is the Roman Catholic Church, which in its principles and in its practice adheres rigidly to central supremacy. It is no small tribute to the Roman system that this Church is to-day as powerful in its sphere as it was even in the days when Gregory and his successors became the unquestioned masters of the Christian world.

The Renaissance of intellect in the fourteenth century had as its inevitable offspring the Reformation, with its assertion of the right of individual judgment in things spiritual as well as things temporal. These in turn were followed in the eighteenth century by action, with Rousseau as its inspiration. The French Revolution despite its inevitable excesses—for freedom must be known and practised before it can be wisely used—marks the beginning of the present age, in which we are once more attempting to revive the Greek idea ; also once more beginning to repeat the Greek error, and so tending to revert to the Roman idea. It is perhaps historically fitting that Italy, the original home of that idea, is again leading the way in matters temporal in the return to it. The essence of the theory is solidarity, guided and controlled by authority. Most of the countries and Australia not the least, are resentful of this tendency. They are still obsessed by belief in the individual. Christ declared that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." The twentieth century translation is that society was made for man and not man for society. Is this true ? And does it work?

Curiously enough, it is from the very class that has most benefited by the modern revival of the rights of the individual that the danger of either tyranny or anarchy is most imminent. The "rights of the people" are threatened by the people themselves. If anarchy is to come it will come from those associations, steadily increasing in numbers and power, which defy the law when the law is not to their liking. If tyranny is to come whether it be the tyranny of an individual or an oligarchy, it will come from the controlling groups which are to-day attempting, and with much success, to decree the daily and hourly doings of their hopelessly faithful followers. An oligarchy, is worse on the whole than a dictator, for its members affect each other with mass emotion. A tyrant may have moments of compassion or sympathy ; an oligarchy has none, for its members are on the watch against each other, and always afraid of denunciation. It is impossible that the present condition of affairs can continue. Democracy is insistent upon the individual, and so logically denies the community. It is fast becoming the victim of the new Cleons, with the appeals to passion which of old destroyed Greek democracy. Can it rise superior to the defect which will otherwise destroy it, or will the whole world see what Italy is seeing, the dominance of the one or the few, accompanied though it may be by material well-being at the price of spiritual loss? Society is to-day in the chemist's crucible, it may crystallise into enduring form. On the other hand, it may dissolve into shapeless ruin, bestridden by the Colossus of brute force.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 2 November 1929, page 18