He could not affirm with confidence, even to
himself, that his "largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to
be chaos, since he would be equally obliged to deny the chaos.
The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for
thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred
million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already
more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the
riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to
blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked
merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist
saw light.
Thus the student of Hegel prepared himself for a visit to
Russia in order to enlarge his "synthesis" -- and much he needed
it! In America all were conservative Christian anarchists; the
faith was national, racial, geographic. The true American had
never seen such supreme virtue in any of the innumerable shades
between social anarchy and social order as to mark it for
exclusively human and his own. He never had known a complete
union either in Church or State or thought, and had never seen
any need for it. The freedom gave him courage to meet any
contradiction, and intelligence enough to ignore it. Exactly the
opposite condition had marked Russian growth. The Czar's empire
was a phase of conservative Christian anarchy more interesting to
history than all the complex variety of American newspapers,
schools, trusts, sects, frauds, and Congressmen.
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