A despairing fact was that individuals and groups, whose profession in life it had been to be auxiliaries of peace and order, became auxiliaries of war and disorder. There was one way of counteracting their power, and that was using them, putting it up to them as Mr. Lincoln put it up to Horace Greeley in 1864.
To put it up to them in the way of the Niagara Conference—that was the real wisdom, the real wisdom of the leader always toward protesting groups—let them try their hand. Possibly they can pull it through, contribute something which he and those of his type cannot do. But in this avalanche of demands—causes, old and new; injustices running back to the Flood; with a hundred unsolvable problems for every hour—how place all this pestiferous mob that knew how to do it? It was to bale out the Seine with a teaspoon—a vaster river than the Potomac and a smaller teaspoon.
And the trying came so often to naught. There was Prinkipo—modeled on the real idealist’s formula, sound enough for a limited scene, with a limited cast—“get together around a table and talk it over.”
But the table? How find it in this still seething land over so much of which the lava was still hot and uncrossable, with so many craters where at every instant new eruptions threatened. They tried it—went into the sea for their table, at a spot of which some of those who chose it had never heard, and to which one at least objected—soundly enough—because the name sounded so like the name of a comic opera.
And the table selected, how get contestants there? In this Europe they were remaking, such was the physical, military and political hampering that there was no spot to which it was certain that everybody could reach. And, as in the Prinkipo case, you ran up against things more unyielding than armies or parties—that hardening of will, that deadening of the spirit of coöperation which is one of the most terrible works of revolutions—something happening to men who have all their lives been good men, devoted to the end of human happiness, freezing them until they will no longer work with other men to bring order and peace to a tormented land for which they have always slaved.
To sit at a table and hear a great noble, white-bearded advocate of human rights, turned to bitterness and scorn of those who have ruined his plan of doing things but who, for the moment, are in the saddle, carrying out their own violent, fanatic way, refuse to even meet at the Prinkipo table the representative of those advocates of violence in order to attempt to somehow soften their madness—you know then that you have reached a human limit, a limit to the human being’s capacity to face those who disagree and those whom he despises though in that meeting there may be a remote, though ever so remote, chance to stay a murderous hand and soften a murderous spirit.