V
It will be evident at once that the Walled Towns are founded in deliberate opposition to nineteenth century democracy as well as to its bastard issue, its Mordred and its Nemesis, anarchy and Bolshevism, and to its inevitable but blood-kin enemy, socialism. Through state socialism, communism or internationalism a fool-hardy and illiterate democracy, surrendering at discretion to the materialism of industrial civilization, has striven to maintain the thing itself in all its integrity and its wealth-producing potency while turning its products into the hands of the many rather than the few. Even now, with the myrrh of war still bitter on the lips, the dim visions of greater things are fading away, and only one cry goes up for ever greater production, for more intensive effort, in order that the material losses may be retrieved.
Neither by state-socialism nor by soviets nor by any other ingenious device can wholesome social conditions be brought out of a thing unwholesome in itself; neither can a new control, a new basis of production and distribution, or new laws, compacts and covenants, take the place of a new spiritual energy, a new vision of ultimate values and their relationships. That communism, collectivism and social democracy have all gone bankrupt during and following the war is one truth at least we have learned. The methods were foolish enough but the object aimed at, the preservation and redemption of modern industrialism, was worse.
The impulse and incentive towards Walled Towns, whenever it comes, will be primarily social, the revolt of man against the imperial scale, against a life of false values impregnably intrenched behind custom, superstition and self-interest, against the quantitative standard, the tyranny of bulk, the gross oppression of majorities. It will echo a demand for beauty in life and of life, for the reasonable and wholesome unit of human scale, for high values in ideal and in action, for simplicity and distinction and a realization of true aristocracy. Engendered of a new spiritual outlook, it may be fostered by the compulsion of circumstance, for in spite of the brave front assumed by those who even now are looking towards a future, it becomes daily more apparent that the war has destroyed modern society and that in spite of all the best intentions in the world it can never be restored. The whole fabric of industrial civilization, already rotten at heart, has collapsed; it could not save the world from universal war and it possesses no power to enforce its own recuperation. In five years the potential in men has been cut down by millions, an enormous amount of machinery for production and transportation has been destroyed, together with much arable land and many mines. The birth-rate steadily decreases all over the world and with no evident prospect of a reversal of the process. The debts of all the warring nations have reached a point where in some cases the interest charges alone will almost amount to the whole pre-war budget. The entire system of credit and of international finance has become hopelessly disorganized and no one has yet suggested any way in which it may adequately be restored. Neither armistice nor peace has brought about even the beginnings of industrial recovery; the demand is fabulous and acute, but the problems of raw materials, transportation, credits, and of markets that will not only take but also pay, are apparently unsolvable; meanwhile national debts are still increasing through the payment of enormous amounts to the unemployed.
To meet the crisis there is an unanimous cry for a resumption of production, and for a vastly augmented output through increased efficiency and more intensive methods, but the crying is in vain, for meanwhile the working element has entered on a course of restriction that will inevitably nullify every effort at increasing the output. Partly through its pre-war victories in the contest with capital, partly through the abnormal wage returns brought into being through the desperation of the managers of the war, labour is now successfully engaged in the work of cutting down production far below what it was even ten years ago, both by reducing the hours of work and by vastly augmenting the wage. The actual productivity of a “labour unit” today is less than at any time since industrialism became the controlling element in life, and in many categories it is less and less productive of satisfactory results. Under these conditions it is hard to see just how the reconstructionists expect to obtain that greatly increased output they admit is the only visible hope of saving the world from bankruptcy, chaos and barbarism.
The contest is an unfair one, for the entrance of Bolshevism has added a new factor hitherto unknown. Enraged by the failure of strikes and other war measures to improve their condition, labour is increasingly turning to the small minority of avowed revolutionists who proclaim the rather obvious fact that so long as industry is engineered by the two antagonistic forces of capitalism and proletarianism, no permanent improvement in the state of the latter is possible. Every increase in wages is followed automatically by a greater increase in the cost of living, and the ratio today between a wage of eighty cents an hour and the cost of food, clothing and shelter, is less advantageous than was the case when this sum represented not a wage per hour, but per day. The reason for this state of things is not thought out with any particular degree of exactness, and the leap is made in the dark to revolution, confiscation and, of late, to Bolshevism. The ease with which an insignificant, alien and unscrupulous minority has succeeded in destroying society in Russia and Hungary, and the apparent ease with which the same theory has almost been carried out in Germany, and may be carried out in France and Italy—not to speak of North Dakota—has aroused all the latent savagery and the impulse to revolt in large sections of the working classes, but it has also completely terrorized the politicians if not the capitalists themselves, and the menace of anarchy is met cringingly and half-heartedly. It has even acquired a strong if somewhat veiled defence among contemporary directors of human destiny.
Were it not for the results of Bolshevism wherever it is being tried, the situation might appear hopeless, for it begins to look very much as though the attitude of labour, now apparently fixed, would make impossible the industrial restoration on which statesmen, captains of industry and high financiers count for the saving of the situation. If this fails then there appears no escape from international bankruptcy and a complete breakdown of the modern social system, with all this implies of poverty, unemployment and even starvation. This is the breeding-ground of Bolshevism, but the hope lies in the fact which is becoming more apparent every day, that the thing is even worse for the proletarian than for the capitalist or the man of culture and education, the criminal being the only one that derives any profit from the adventure. A few months more of Lenine, Trotsky and Bela Kun, and the danger of Bolshevism will have passed, so far certainly as the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy are concerned.
Yet with the removal of this peril the possibility of a social and industrial breakdown still remains, and whether in anticipation thereof, or as a forced expedient under sudden catastrophe, the Walled Town offers itself as a means of solution, since it does not depend for its existence on the maintenance or recovery of the pre-war industrial system—rather on its rejection and reversal—while equally it is the prophylactic against Bolshevism and its entire reversal.
And so the Walled Towns go back to an earlier age before modernism began; back to the dim cities, the proud cities, the free cities of centuries ago. They wall themselves against the world without, and build up within their grey ramparts, and guard with their tall towers, a life that is simpler and more beautiful and more joyful and more just than that they had known and rejected because of its folly and its sin. As, long ago, when the world became too gross or the terror of its downfall too ominous, cell and hermitage, convent and monastery grew up now here, now there, in secluded valleys, on inaccessible mountains, in the barren and forgotten wilderness; as the solitary drew around him first a handful, then a horde; as the damp cave or the wattled hut gave way to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and the tall towers of enormous churches, so now, when time has come full circle again, is all to be done over once more though after a different fashion.
Men have despaired of redeeming a crumbling or recalcitrant world and have gone out into the desert for the saving of their own souls, and lo, the world followed and by them was saved. From each centre of righteousness and beauty and salvation radiated circle after circle of ever widening influence; the desert and the waste became orchard and garden, the ribald and the lawless and the insolent came knocking at the gates; soldier and bravo and king humbled their heads before tonsured monk and mitred abbot. Ever wider waxed the increasing circles until they touched, merged,—and the wonder was accomplished; ill had come to an end and good had come into being.
So the Walled Towns, now when the need is clamorous again. Evil imperial in scale cannot be blotted out by reform imperial in method. The old way was the good way, the way of withdrawal and of temporary isolation. “To your tents, O Israel!” Gather together the faithful and them of like heart, building in the wilderness sanctuaries and Cities of Refuge. The old ideals are indestructible; they survive through the scorching of suns and the beating of tempests and as ever they are omnipotent when they are rightly used. Not for long would the Walled Towns stand aloof, and rampired against an alien and unkindly world, for more and more would men be drawn within their magical circuits, greater and ever greater would become their number, and at last the new wonder would be accomplished and society once more redeemed.