Specifically, we must revise our attitude as to immigration, excluding
whole classes, and even races, that we have hitherto welcomed with open
hands from the disinterested offices of steamship companies: we must
control and in some cases prohibit, the mating of various racial stocks;
finally we must altogether disallow the practice of changing, by law,
one race-name for another. This process is one for which no excuse
exists and unless it can be brought to an end then, apart from certain
physical differentiations on which nature wisely insists, we have no
guaranty against the adulteration that has gone so far towards
substituting the mongrel for the pure racial type, while society is
bound to suffer still further deception and continued danger along the
lines that have recently been indicated by the transformation of
Treibitsch into "Lincoln," Braunstein into "Trotsky" and Samuels into
"Montague."
For its fulfillment, then, and its regeneration, the real democracy
demands and must achieve the creation and cooperation of a real
aristocracy, not an aristocracy of material force either military or
civil, nor one of land owners or money-getters, nor one of artificial
caste. All these substitutes have been tried from time to time, in Rome,
China, Great Britain, the United States, and all have failed in the end,
for all have ignored the one essential point of _character_, without
which we shall continue to reproduce what we have at present; a thing as
insolent, offensive and tyrannical as the old aristocracies at their
worst, with none of the constructive and beneficent qualities of the old
aristocracies at their best.
That race-values have much to do with this development of character I
believe to be true, but of far greater efficiency, indeed the actual
motive force, is the Christian religion, working directly on and through
the individual and using race as only one of its material means of
operation. Democracy has accomplished its present failure, not only
because it could not function without the cooperation of aristocracy,
but chiefly because, in its modernist form, it has become in fact
isolated from Christianity. All in it of good it derives from that
Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages which first put it into
practice, all in it of evil it owes to a falling back on paganism and a
denial of its own parentage and rejection of its control. I shall deal
with this later in more detail; I speak of it now just for the purpose
of entering a caveat against any deduction from what I have said that
any natural force, of race or evolution or anything else, or any formal
institution devised by man, ever has, or ever can, serve in itself as a
way of social redemption. I am anxious not to overemphasize these things
on which the development of my argument forces me to lay particular
stress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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