There comes a time, therefore, when
the blind spots come from the edge of vision into the center. Then
unless there are critics who have the courage to sound an alarm, and
leaders capable of understanding the change, and a people tolerant by
habit, the stereotype, instead of economizing effort, and focussing
energy as it did in 1917 and 1918, may frustrate effort and waste
men's energy by blinding them, as it did for those people who cried
for a Carthaginian peace in 1919 and deplored the Treaty of Versailles
in 1921.
3
Uncritically held, the stereotype not only censors out much that needs
to be taken into account, but when the day of reckoning comes, and the
stereotype is shattered, likely as not that which it did wisely take
into account is ship-wrecked with it. That is the punishment assessed
by Mr. Bernard Shaw against Free Trade, Free Contract, Free
Competition, Natural Liberty, Laissez-faire, and Darwinism. A hundred
years ago, when he would surely have been one of the tartest advocates
of these doctrines, he would not have seen them as he sees them
to-day, in the Infidel Half Century, [Footnote: _Back to
Methuselah_. Preface.] to be excuses for "'doing the other fellow
down' with impunity, all interference by a guiding government, all
organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud
against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design
and forethought into the industrial welter being 'contrary to the laws
of political economy'" He would have seen, then, as one of the
pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven [Footnote: _The
Quintessence of Ibsenism_] that, of the kind of human purpose and
design and forethought to be found in a government like that of Queen
Victoria's uncles, the less the better.
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