18 Making of the Complete Citizen
more violent and bitter. Our material civilization is both
degrading and making resentful those who on closer inter-
course are becoming conscious of their degradation. It
is also putting our skill and our destructive ideas at the
disposal of highly intelligent races whose traditions are
very different from our own. If the white man deals in-
solently with those of other color he will meet insolence in
return. Our civilization has proved to be such a solvent
of the cultures of Asia that the Orient, more materialized
by the loss of its native traditions, may reinfect the West.
What a spectacle would civilization present were the mind
of Shanghai like a pall to extend over both East and West,
and were the lawlessness and hatreds of seething races to
dominate the world. Then the City of Humanity, for
which the Stoic hoped, would be so far off that even the
colors of the dream might fade away.
The most spectacular overthrow of tradition, or indeed
it may be the uprooting of it, has taken place during the
last dozen or more years in Russia. Its old culture has
disappeared with the killing off, or the extrusion, of the
former educated classes; and those now in control have
sought to destroy the cultural ethos of the old Russian
character. How effectively the substituted economic so-
ciety will permanently satisfy the cultural demands of hu-
man nature, in which they probably lie embedded like roots
with the top growth cut off, it is useless to speculate. It
may be that in time these cultural roots will push up through
the old buried life and crack the mausoleum of a dead ex-
periment. On the other hand it may be that the old tradi-
tion has been so exterminated that slowly a new tradition
will arise; and in that case will it remain distinctly national
and Russian, or will it aggressively challenge western civili-
zation for world control? In such a struggle the victory