Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/36

 race onward. The reformer’s belief in the future is a scientific deduction from the past.

The failure of the mass of people to co-operate in the realisation of this ideal is due, not to indolence or stupidity, but to the obsessing influence of the old traditions. They choke the fires of the mind: they make us insensible to the real enormity of a great deal of our social arrangements. Hence it is that the reformer’s appeal is cast so frequently in a negative or aggressive form. The most powerful thing in our world is, not truth, but untruth; and the most important thing in the world is to assail it. “Great is truth, and it will prevail,” said an ancient writer. But the civilisation which gave birth to that sentiment died, and all its promising young truths perished with it, and Europe fell under the rule of lies for more than a thousand years. Untruth is millennia older than truth. Its roots run deep into the flesh of the heart, while the rootlets of truth are struggling for a frail clasp in the intellect. Great is untruth, and it will prevail—unless it is attacked unceasingly. No untruth ever died a natural death. Being the sacred truth of yesterday, it is usually entrenched in powerful corporations, embodied in the law and life of nations, enshrined in the tenacious affections of the millions. At one time you incurred sentence of death if you challenged it: now you incur slander, misrepresentation, and mockery. The race has been made docile to it by a kind of negative Eugenic—perhaps we ought to say Cacogenic—selection.