As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private intolerance begins. And lynchings start when official executions have come to an end. CHAPTER XXX THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book. The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost exclusively identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of tolerance” it was generally accepted that so and so had spent his life fighting the abuses of the Church and the tyranny of a professional priesthood. Then came the war. And much was changed in this world. Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen. Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his fellow-men, we got a hundred. And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of the horrors of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with the infinitely more painful manifestations of a paltry form of racial intolerance and social intolerance and a score of petty forms of intolerance, the existence of which had not even been suspected a decade ago. * * * * * This seems very terrible to many good people who until recently lived in the happy delusion that progress was a sort of automatic time-piece which needed no other winding than their occasional approbation. They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness of the human race which goes everlastingly to school, yet always refuses to learn. Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing ranks of our spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this or that or the other religious institution (that they may transfer their own burden to the back of some one else), and in the most doleful tones acknowledge themselves beaten and retire from all further participation in the affairs of their community. I don’t like such people. They are not merely cowards. They are traitors to the future of the human race. * * * * * So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution there be? Let us be honest with ourselves. There is not any. At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick results and expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably and speedily with the help of a mathematical or medical formula or by an act of Congress. But those of us who have accustomed ourselves to consider history in the light of eternity and who know that civilization does not begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more hopeful. That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much nowadays (“man has always been that way,” “man always will be that way,” “the world never changes,” “things are just about the same as they were four thousand years ago,”) does not exist. It is an optical illusion.