Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would
ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the
modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been
emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black
man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe
the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its
real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a
primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the
tables of an ancient law, _against_ the trend of the nineteenth century;
repeating, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a
generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this:
'We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all
things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity
and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so
on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded
a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never
have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to
produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical
imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of
monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as
the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species,
so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat
devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and
his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that
were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the
bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the
chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree
and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference
between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and
eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort.

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable post. Against
all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be
symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a prie