Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/366

356 are to-day listening to the old calls and summons to forgotten duties against which all our theories and personal interests are in revolt. Which will conquer?—reason, which is always selfish, or feeling, which is most often inclined to altruism and personal loyalty?

Summary. I have ventured to trace the general development of politics from the very outset. I have only tried to treat in a synoptic manner the conclusions which other men have reached; wiser and more patient than myself, specialists each in his own branch, speaking with an authority which the all-round Oxford amateur can never challenge or attain. We have seen that human society is in great measure artificial and non-natural: it is at best a coalition of the many weaker to prevent any one of their number becoming a tyrant like the old detested patriarch at his worst. But underneath every conception of the social union, until to-day, has lain some vaguely religions thought: the ancestral spirits, the Earth-Mother and her retinue, the personal mana embodied in the strong man of the crisis or the son of a divine house (who comes not from earth but from heaven and the sun), the mana transmitted by tribal election and consecration, the incarnate deity worshipped in person down to the victory of the church under Constantine, the carefully watched medieval king still held, even in his strict tutelage, to be God's lieutenant upon earth,—down to the break-up of Christendom into the hostile national camps or fortuitous alliances of to-day. I fail now to trace a single religious idea surviving in the body politic, an effective element or motive of social harmony and cohesion. The problem of restoring a religious—nay, a moral—basis to human society and the art of government is one of the most serious difficulties that must confront us at the close of the present war. More ideals have been irretrievably shattered than one at present can reckon, and a glance backwards at the convictions or delusions of untutored and unsophisticated man