..續本文上一頁 frequently shaken by the destructive antics of informally organized hooligan gangs of young aristocrats. Those young roughs, having idled away their days, spent their nights beating people up, smashing up coffee stalls, alarming women and such like — the Bucks, the Corinthians, and all their imitators and hangers-on. Such bands were following, somewhat less cruelly, in the tradition of the nefarious Mohocks, who terrorized eighteenth-century London.

　　Sexual propriety

　　 Quoting again from Hemming:

　　Brothels in the nineteenth century were big business, and, laws to forbid living on the immoral earnings of women, after several rebuffs in Parliament, did not reach the statute books till 1885.

　　But this was in England, the most progressive country in Europe. There is no evidence for believing that conditions were better on the Continent.

　　Understandably, twenty-five years after World War II, we are still appalled by the memory of the Nazi gas-chambers and the genocide which was their aim. This is by no means an isolated instance of genocide. History bears witness to similar incidents of destructive hate, culminating in mass murder. The Albigenses were wiped out to a man, and in 1572, at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew”s Eve, thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered, Pope Gregory XIII commanding bonfires to be lit and a medal to be struck in celebration! The idea that the mass destruction of one”s ideological enemies is justified was already old in the days of the Old Testament. Saul was commanded:

　　Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

　　All of the foregoing is not intended as apologetics justifying violence, bloodbaths, or inpidual or collective acts of immorality but merely to dispel the myth that there was ever a previous idyllic phase, when man could have said with some semblance of truth:

　　God”s in His Heaven

　　And all”s right with the world.

　　So, let us lay to rest forever the belief that in the past men were truer, kinder, more upright, and generally more worthy than they are today. Let us give that piece of romantic fiction the respectable funeral that it deserves. Our ancestors and predecessors were no better than we are, and we are certainly not worse than they were. In many respects we have improved considerably on the ways of our forbears. Actually, there has been a great deal of progress, considering that slavery hung on in England until 1772, in America till 1863, and serfdom in Russia till 1861. And, in spite of the injustices and lack of moral scruples that still exist, there is more awareness, kindliness, and sensitivity in many human societies than there has ever been before. Today when a national disaster of great magnitude occurs in a country, quite often the rest of the world rallies around and helps — perhaps not to the extent that it should, but nonetheless, to some extent. Such a broadening expansion of the human conscience would have been deemed a Utopian ideal in former times and impossible.

　　When acts of genocide were perpetrated in the past, people just accepted it: that was that, and there was nothing to be done about it. In our time, the whole world was revolted by the Nazi gas-chambers, eventually rose against the loathsome disease of Fascism and smashed it even thought it took the combined might of the allied force five years of bitter conflict to do so.

　　However, in the past, without exception, whatever was inflicted upon a people, they mostly took. Today they don”t — they protest, they demonstrate, they kick up a fuss. They have become articulate because they have realized that the greatest evil of all is not poverty, racialism, or war but powerlessness. Naturally, such an unexpected…

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