CHAPTER VIII

MORNING

Where had the courage gone that was needed to tell the truth? What had destroyed it? Where was the tone that had bred the courage in years gone by? What had destroyed that?

Looking frankly at Britain and the United States one beheld a strange situation. One saw an Anglo-American majority battered and divided on other issues, guilt-ridden and bemused by the equalitarian dogma; one observed a mass media saturating the public with a scientific fraud promoted by a hierarchy whose aim was not the search for truth but political propaganda; one found ignorant political and judicial leaders, with mediocre minds and little moral stamina, drawn from a society whose human resources had been emasculated by two generations of compromise and appeasement. These were some of the results of the destruction. But they were not the source.

Nor could the source lie in the humanitarian impulse itself. The drive for social justice and the awakening of sympathy for the unfortunate were both good. Where the train ran off the track was at the equalitarian switch—flashing false signals and manipulated by envy. If there existed one crime more contemptible than any other it was the use of good to promote evil. On this siding other trains had been looted and destroyed. Would this one?

But still the question was not on point. Not proximate causes, but the root cause alone could provide the key I sought. In the closing pages of Race and Reason I had spoken of the leftward overdrift of the West as justifying to my mind a term Ortega y Gasset had used—"the sovereignty of the unqualified." I had also quoted two sentences from Lord Tweedsmuir: "The gutters have exuded a poison that bids fair to infect the world. The beggar on horseback rides more roughshod over the helpless than the cavalier."

This was strong language, perhaps too strong, but certainly with the trend toward sympathy with failure—toward encouragement of the underdog—had grown a tendency to disparage the superior and to fawn upon the inferior. It was not a pretty sight, this picture of the top abasing itself before the bottom. It did not improve the bottom, and it meant rapid deterioration at the top.{1} The good lost respect for goodness, and the bad lost respect for it, too. Capacity for leadership dwindled, tolerance of evil increased. Was there not here cause enough for the emasculation of the values which had made the flowering of Western civilization possible?

In other words, did not the equalitarian dogma, like a rank growth, contain within itself not only the seeds of its own proliferation, but of general collapse as well? Was this not the point where the erosion of both the individual and the national psyche began?

Let a man be told incessantly that everything he and his forefathers had achieved was largely a matter of chance; that the poverty and backward condition of other individuals and races was also largely a question of luck—in fact perhaps even the fault of himself and his forefathers; that his standards of morals, fiscal responsibility and personal integrity were no better than anyone else's; that his civilization was mostly happenstance and really nothing much to be proud of; that since all humanity were innately equal, all actual differences must be due to the other man's misfortune and his own four-leaf clovers—let a man hear these things often enough and his values were bound to change.

And the change must soon diffuse itself through the family, the community and the nation. The child must begin to sense it in the parent, the criminal in the court, the employee in the employer, the citizen in his leaders. How seldom one saw the word distinguished today! How seldom one dared to speak of a man as discriminating! In other words in condemning the concept of in-

1. I cannot forbear quoting once again William Harvey's lines: "Far more and abler operations are required to the fabric and erection of living creatures than to their dissolution, and plucking of them down. For those things that easily and nimbly perish, are slow and difficult in their rise and complement."

feriority, our society necessarily had had to destroy the concept of superiority, for one could not exist without the other.

With its destruction had come the death of respect for authority, of pride in the achievements of the past, of reverence for tradition, of the wisdom to honor the heritage of one's family, one's race and one's country. Also had come the death of that quality in superior men which sprang from confidence not only in their own personal excellence but in that of their kind and race. This was the most serious loss of all, for it was an electric quality that had once communicated itself, with instant conviction, to others. With it had passed the genius of true leadership, the power to lead up the hill instead of down, to get a nation "moving again" morally as well as economically.

It was, in fact, the quality that had given men the courage to tell the truth. And thus one was back in the circle, which was just what the hard-core leftist, and the communist, counted on, and which the bemused humanitarian, and the castrated conservative, obligingly tread like a squirrel in a cage—a vicious circle, indeed, with just one point where it might be broken: by an attack on the lie.

So this was the challenge—two generations of false indoctrination to be overcome, an Anglo-American society saturated in a debilitating fallacy to be cleansed. No doubt in due course the Supreme Court would forbid the singing of Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve, which would be consistent enough, and would spare us even the memory of those who had given us all we had. If ever there was a goose whose golden eggs were being stolen and which was now in the process of being killed, we were it.

Not many years remained to correct the fallacy. The successors to the last two generations were in the nursery this very minute, and in the schools. Luckily life renewed itself in the family and in the race. There might yet be enough of the genes for honor left in the human fabric to respond to the truth in a new generation, provided it, too, were not emasculated.

A hard task but a clear one. The sword of truth in the vital area of race could cut the ground from under both socialism and communism at one stroke if it were used. Let it be placed in the hands of honorable men wherever possible, not to injure the defenseless but to restore the strong.

In my own small sphere my testament would have to stand on Race and Reason and on this brief review of what had happened since. I had done enough meditating. The time had come to speak.

And the key?

"Beyond this single trait of hers . . . I set nothing further down for his remembrance . . . " I thought of the children of two bemused generations. I could set nothing further down for them.

I heard a knock, the door to my study opened and my wife stood on the threshold smiling wryly. I wondered about that smile, and I wondered still more when she spoke.

"What a waste!" she said.

Could she be referring to a waste of time? Had she perceived my purpose and deemed it hopeless? Then I noticed she was looking over my shoulder, so I turned to follow her glance and understood.

I had been sitting with the lights still on, at my desk and around the room . . .

Yet here it was, broad daylight!