et turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of the North
Germans over the Southern traditions of Germany and of Europe.

The men who will not face this fact are men whose minds are not free.
They are more crushed by Progress than any pietists by Providence. They
are not allowed to question that whatever has recently happened was all
for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a
theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It
is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far
more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no purpose, or if the
purpose permits of human free will, then in either case it is almost
insanely unlikely that there should be in history a period of steady and
uninterrupted progress; or in other words a period in which poor
bewildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, without making
a single mistake. What has to be hammered into the heads of most normal
newspaper-readers to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes.
Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, in the case of that
progressive and pioneering character, one is sometimes tempted to say
that he has made nothing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and
Capitalism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery of the Northern
tribes were mistakes. In the French the persecution of Catholicism by
the politicians was a mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when
the memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for hanging back.
In England the loss of agriculture and therefore of food-supply in war,
and the power to stand a siege, was a mistake. And in America the
introduction of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found that
the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them was even more of a
mistake.

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have not yet seen the end of
the whole industrial experiment; and there are already signs of it
coming to a bad end. It may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end
in the Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so different as
some suppose, and they grow less different every day. The Bolshevists
have already called in Capitalists to help them to crush the free
peasants. The Capitalists are quite likely to call in Labour Leaders to
whitewash their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. The
cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the East will not find it so
very hard t