Mechanics of power : on Government in spite of people C.2

IT is perhaps not surprising that, nearly two thousand years after the birth of Christ, the Prince of Peace, the fate of the world should rest with the leaders of the nations with the biggest bombs.
Disappointingly, the Church has so far failed to convince mankind that love and concord are preferable to hate, ran- cour and war. There have even been Popes who believed that a little violence was therapeutic. Pope Julius II refused to be depicted in stone with a scroll in his hand. "Nay”, he said to the sculptor, “rather put a sword in my hand for I am no scholar." The progress of John Bunyan's Mr. Christian to- wards Salvation was littered with corpses. And all the world wars of the twentieth century have seen a great deal of flag and gun blessing by bishops on all sides.
Not that the world of anti-Christ has set a better example. A few months ago, a Communist Peace Congress was adjourned when delegates began fighting among themselves. "All changes and nothing changes,” Tchaikovsky's nephew said to me one day in Klin, contemplating the imprint left by a German boot on his uncle's sofa.
Brute force is still the ultimate sanction which makes meaningful the words "treaty" and "agreement” in international relations. What is new, and interesting if deplorable, in the twentieth century is that brute force is now wielded by nations which have either never known refinement of taste, or have renounced it, nations which have also renounced the urban concept of democracy. It is the world's peasants who now dictate the pace at which civilisation advances or retreats