16. The Political Pupa - Page 2

stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in their
midst as if every component element of the State (but especially the one
in which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested)
were rushing violently down a steep place to eternal perdition. Chaos
appears to be swallowing up everything. "The natural relations of
classes" disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bonds
fail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the place
of old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of the
period--call them scribes or augurs--wring their hands in despair, and
cry aloud that they don't know what the world is coming to. But, after
all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social
order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can
begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in
the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development.

Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain of
comfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; for
what _they_ want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole social
organism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredom
and parsonry. That is what they mean by "national welfare;" and any
interference with it they criticise in all ages with the current
equivalent for the familiar Tory formula that "the country is going to
the devil."

Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced
upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed
internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke
up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes,
again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak,
inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as
in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic
development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the
chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically,
ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or
plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a
while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is
produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new
order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise;
till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the
most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as
exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a
particular butterfly.

Through just such a period of reconstruction