Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/641



OURNE was the great bearer of moral authority while America was at war. He was our banner man of values in the general collapse. Round him, during those hateful years, there crashed, one after another, the ruins of intellectual directorships. Philosophers, educators, "socialists, college professors, new-republicans, practitioners of literature," the great majority of those who had thought themselves interpreters of the country's effort for larger life, made haste to overturn the values they had once defended. Liberal journals pretended that the war-technique annihilating those values was indeed the expression of them. Everywhere were men rationalizing in diverse fashions their own consentment in the course destined to pervert the better will of the country, to bring Europe to final disaster and America to the brink of demoralization. Bourne stepped without pompousness into the place left vacant by the universal recalcitrancy. Amid the dissolving minds his stood like a rock in the ocean. The external pressures so baleful to the great host of intellectuals succeeded only in kneading his rebellious spirit surer an hundredfold in itself than it had previously been. They summoned it into increased aggressiveness and doggedness; concentrated the whole of this powerful little man in a single resistant ironic point. His fine boy's head, cleared by the discipline of his pragmatist masters, became a powerful dialectical machine. Out of it, amid the shooting fires, there came the high act of the sort from which the other pragmatists and intellectuals to a man recoiled: the formulation, couched in the very terms of the present crisis and expressed with an incisiveness perhaps never excelled by any of his countrymen, of the creative will of American men.

Bourne knew his enemy. He knew with what power among his compatriots he had affair. He could not deceive himself into seeing the American participation in the European war as evil merely, as certain of the pacifists saw it, because it necessitated further carnage of men; no more than he could deceive himself into seeing