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It is possible to portray a great social movement of the past with accuracy and in detail if one can spare to the task the time necessary for research and further bring to it a certain power of co-ordination by which a great mass of detail can be integrated and made one whole.

Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not exceed the powers of history.

With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one can say even in its largest aspect or upon its chief structural line what that future will be. He can only present the main tendencies of his time: he can only determine the equation of the curve and presume that that equation will apply more or less to its next developments.

So far as I can judge, those societies which broke with the continuity of Christian civilisation in the sixteenth century—which means, roughly, North Germany and Great Britain—tend at present to the re-establishment of a Servile Status. It will be diversified by local accident, modified by local character, hidden under many forms. But it will come.

That the mere Capitalist anarchy cannot endure is patent to all men. That only a very few possible solutions to it exist should be equally patent to all. For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not believe there are more than two: a reaction towards well-divided property, or the re-establishment of servitude. I cannot believe that theoretical Collectivism, now so plainly failing, will ever inform a real and living society.

But my conviction that the re-establishment of the Servile Status in industrial society is actually upon us does not lead me to any meagre and mechanical prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The force of which I have been speaking is not the only force in the field. There is a complex knot of forces underlying any nation once Christian; a smouldering of the old fires.

Moreover, one can point to European societies which will most certainly reject any such solution of our Capitalist problem, just as the same societies have either rejected, or lived suspicious of, Capitalism itself, and have rejected or lived suspicious of that industrial organisation which till lately identified itself with “progress” and national well-being.

These societies are in the main the same as those which, in that great storm of the sixteenth century,—the capital episode in the story of Christendom—held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of morals. Chief among them should be noted to-day the French and the Irish.

I would record it as an impression and no more that the Servile State, strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to establish itself completely, by the strong reaction which these freer societies upon its flank will perpetually exercise.

Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our generation has seen the solid foundation of that institution laid. In France the many experiments which elsewhere have successfully introduced the Servile State have been contemptuously rejected by the populace, and (most significant!) a recent attempt to register and to “insure” the artisans as a separate category of citizens has broken down in the face of an universal and a virile contempt.

That this second factor in the development of the future, the presence of free societies, will destroy the tendency to the Servile State elsewhere I do not affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, certainly by example and perhaps by direct attack. And as I am upon the whole hopeful that the Faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original Paganism (for the tendency to the Servile State is nothing less) will in due time be halted and reversed.

Videat Deus.