Ten more years elapsed.  Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it.  The circumstances of this catastrophe, the boyish cinema-fed romanticism which made it possible to impose it on the people as a crusade, and especially the ignorance and errors of the victors of Western Europe when its violent phase had passed and the time for reconstruction arrived, confirmed a doubt which had grown steadily in my mind during my forty years public work as a Socialist:  namely, whether the human animal, as he exists at present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his own aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilization.

COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS

Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are cowards when they have no religion.  They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them.  Government and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards.  Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters.  They fall into poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents.  At the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed:  a procedure which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism.  And the goodnatured majority are looking on in helpless horror, or allowing themselves to be persuaded by the newspapers of their exploiters that the kicking is not only a sound commercial investment, but an act of divine justice of which they are the ardent instruments.

But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use of giving him a religion?  A religion may make him hunger and thirst for righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to satisfy that appetite?  Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of political science, which is a very complicated one.  The most devoted and indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this science in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb.  It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in the course of which they have published several treatises comparable to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution adequate to existing needs.  If this is the measure of what can be done in a lifetime by extraordinary ability,