em.

The real preparation for a creative statesmanship lies deeper than
parties and legislatures. It is the work of publicists and educators,
scientists, preachers and artists. Through all the agents that make and
popularize thought must come a bent of mind interested in invention and
freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic culture must, with
critical persistence, make man the measure of all things. I have tried
again and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly necessary
to avoid the distraction that comes of idolizing our own methods of
thought. Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind upon human uses,
human purposes, and human results, it drops into idolatry and becomes
hostile to creation.

The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful
humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the
people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity
to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a
vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That
prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their
own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of
those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them.

But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life
in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody
else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of
self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government
and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the
nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of
kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an
aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life
when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth
century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics,
parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian
Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original
virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its
own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was
performed by many hands into a