None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation, in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the same gifts, were able to rise. This _amalgame_ is especially noticeable in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in 1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries, but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from their predecessors.
It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally come to admit, at least to themselves--that in some very important ways the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the kind of change the geologist studies.
We may take as an illustration of the foregoing uniformity the attempts of certain of our revolutionists to alter radically and quickly phases of the law of the family. Le Play has shown that the uniformities of the family are among the stablest and most persistent things in our Western civilization. The ardent Leftist revolutionist in the last few centuries has, therefore, naturally enough, tended to dislike this monogamous Christian family, to him a bulwark of individual selfishness, social snobbery, intellectual stuffiness, snarled up with testamentary red tape, dedicated to the myth of masculine superiority, hardened into rigidity by religious sanctions, a festering center which must be cleaned up before men and women can live as God, Nature, or Science intended them to live. The French revolution saw no widespread attempt to destroy the family, and indeed its generally middle-class course is filled with pious praise of the family virtues. But the humanitarians did put through some far-reaching legislation in this field, such as generous laws of adoption and other measures tending to break down the rigid, almost Roman, family law of the old regime. Notably they attempted to make illegitimate children absolutely equal in every respect with legitimate children. As the law to put this into effect was passed, a glowing orator remarked: “There are no more bastards in France.” We need hardly add that he was mistaken. In a monograph on _French Revolutionary Legislation on Illegitimacy_, the present author has tried to show how even the good bourgeois who passed this law were emotionally too entangled in the traditional family feelings to try to put it into effect. They _said_ that bastards were free and equal to legitimate children; but they could not bring themselves to _act_ as if they really believed or wanted it to be so. On the whole, the traditional family in its French form emerged unscathed from the revolution.
Russia has seen a much more determined attack on the monogamous Christian family, legislation making divorce even easier than in Nevada, legalizing abortion, encouraging collective household arrangements, establishing _crèches_ and kindergartens, bringing children up as far as possible outside the home, and so on. Let there be no misunderstanding. Russian idealists who sought to do all of this were not nasty-minded folk seeking to make life easier for the sensualist. Quite the contrary, they had, as we have tried very hard to show, a strong streak of Puritanism. To this day, a young Russian Communist would be shocked to the fibers of his being at the sight of almost any American newspaper and periodical stand. These idealists thought the bourgeois family corrupting, and agreed with Mr. Shaw that marriage combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Their legislation was aimed at achieving the ideals behind Christian monogamy though destroying what they regarded as the corrupting family institutions within which it was hedged.
Here again we are not in the position of historians working with good sources, but through the conflicting reports coming to us from Russia of the 1930’s we can make out that the reformers have failed, that the Christian monogamous family has survived the old Bolsheviks in Russia. Recent legislation, as we have seen, has not only hedged legalized abortion so much as to limit it to cases of the strictest medical necessity, but has actually set up premiums for large families. Divorce has been made more difficult. Filial piety and indeed all the conventional bourgeois family virtues are now in high honor in press, movie, stage, and school.
To take a very specific example, homosexuality was, for the old Bolsheviks, an abnormality, possibly open to medical treatment, but not of course a crime. They didn’t like it, but they were too consistent and open-minded to treat it as a crime. Naturally they had no narrow bourgeois disgust for the practice. But in March, 1934, homosexuality was made a crime with a three- to eight-year prison penalty. We cannot refrain from adding that the Webbs explain this with their usual obligingness: “It is understood that this action followed the discovery of centers of demoralization of boys, due to the influence of certain foreigners, who were summarily expelled from soviet territory.” But even with the foreigners expelled, Russia retains the law. The fact is that Russian _sentiments_ on the subject of homosexuality are nearly constant; only Russian _ideas_ on the subject are variable, and in the long run the constant prevails.
The whole subject of change in the routines of the daily life of John Jones, in the more intimate of his relations with his fellows and his environment, is none too well explored. Here again common sense, with its decisive “human nature doesn’t change,” is much too absolute. But it does appear that our revolutions had but slight permanent effect on the important little things of life for John Jones. What is perhaps loosely called the “Industrial Revolution” had certainly a much greater effect, forced John into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions. And none of our societies seems to have undergone changes as complete as those undergone by Turkish society since the World War or by Japanese society in the last fifty years. It is tempting to record the apparent paradox that Western society is in some respects more slow to change than Eastern society. But the truth is much more complex than any such paradox. Both the Turks and the Japanese seem to have preserved intact through social and economic change a series of national disciplines. In our Western societies, family, moral and religious disciplines have in a similar way served as a balance to very important social and economic changes, of which the revolutions we have studied are only a part.
Modern Western society has indeed gone through in the last few centuries changes so continuous that, if we adopt the very plausible concept of social equilibrium, we must expect to find certain forces pulling in the opposite direction, in the direction of stability. These forces are not as a rule articulate. They do not seem to interest intellectuals as much as do forces making for change. They are perhaps a bit undignified, and certainly undramatic. Insofar as they do get themselves translated into language, they appear in a variety of logical disguises difficult to penetrate. But they are there, and as we have seen, they set a definite limit to what the reformer or revolutionist can do. Bastardy can hardly stand up against logic or biology; but bastardy exists by virtue neither of logic nor of biology, but by virtue of well-established, slow-changing human sentiments. Men may feel tearfully sorry for poor children stigmatized from birth for something clearly not their fault; but hitherto not even revolution has prevailed against those perhaps ignoble but certainly persistent sentiments behind the “man-made” and “artificial” distinction between children born after a certain rite has been performed and those born without benefit of such a rite. The rite seems fragile, changeable, unimportant--a mere matter of trivial words and gestures. Actually it has proved effective against much grander words and more striking gestures, as well as against whole batteries of logic. For it is, to use Pareto’s terminology, associated with the “persistent aggregates,” patterns of sentiments and behavior very slow to change.