Behind the Mirrors

up in Europe? Most of us have not stopped to analyze what has happened since to our belief that the world ever moved by an irresistible primal impulse forward to more and better things, that the

where were these illusions more cheerfully accepted than in this country of ours, where a wilderness had become a grea

free governments, where production mounted from year to year, where wealth was ever increasing. Destiny plainly meant more and more iron dug from the ground and turned into steel machinery, larger, more

ch had been fate's latest and best gift to humanity, approaching a sort of millennium of machinery, w

re lethal explosives were destroying his capacity for destruction. War was being hoist by its own petard. The bigger

d not do, the steel foundries and the chemical laboratories had done. They had made war too deadly to be endured. In effect they had abolished i

olerably destructive of men and cities; it had made it intolerably destructive of money.

ntire world. A European war would destroy immensely more capital and involve vastly greater burdens. No nation with such a load on its shoulders could meet the competiti

ach. Cannon to fire them cost so many thousands of dollars each and could only be used a very few times. Armies such as the nations of

ankruptcy lay at the end of a short campaign. A month would disclose the folly of it, and bring the contestants to their senses; if

t know it, but it had. Their armies belonged as much to the past as their little titles, as all the middle-age humbug of royalty, their high-wheeled coaches, their out-riders in their bright uniform, their debilitating habit of marrying cousins, their absurdities abou

they could not last. It took all of Kitchener's prestige to persuade society that the fighting would keep on through the winter, and his prediction that it woul

ion that the world had been vastly and permanently changed for the better. As it was proved that there could be a war and a long one and as the evidence multiplied that this wa

dering war impossible by making it destructive and costly, it visited the earth with the greatest war of all time in orde

r happen again. It was a lesson sent of fate. Men must co-operate with progress and not leave to that force the sole responsibility for a permanently peaceful future. They had sinned against the light in allowing such unprogressive things, as autocracies upon the earth. They must remove the abominations of the H

ention to their duties regarding certain anachronis

AM'S CO

straight ahead toward a goal of unimaginable splendor, even whose questionable products like bigger cannon an

and could choose courses utterly inconsistent with itself in order to achieve ends

that help themselves, the cleaning up by men of the human rubbish heap, the purging of autocr

tocracies never had been armed. They might elect to remain so and use their weapons as provocatively as any Hapsburg or Hohenzollern ever did. Men must organize, must league themselves together, must govern themselves internationally in order to have peace, wh

ispute among the smaller countries; and they sign a covenant which the unanimous opinion of mankind rejects as an effective safeguard against future wars and which many regard as dividing the earth into tw

peace as its by-product, but moral progress has f

e. And only a beginning has been made. If we may come to use the power that holds atoms together in the driving of engines, we may also use it in war to blast whole cities from the face of the earth. Conquest

the war we had the pleasant illusion of steadily decreasing hours of labor and steadily lowering costs. Men had worked twelve, ten, and finally eight h

charge. The railroads collected a little over two cents a mile for carrying passengers and in many states statutes were enacted establishing two cents a mile as the l

nventions, and if not these, the economics of concentrated organization, and if not these, the use of by-products, were steadily lowering costs. The standa

ne still further. No one now talks of a six-hour day. We recognize a check in the process toward increasing well-being at less effort. Life has become more difficult. Progress is no longer a simple and steady movement on

f living by skimming the cream of our natural resources. When our original forests were cut, when the most easily mined veins of iron and coal were exhausted, when oil wells ceased to gush and had to be pumped, unless substitutes were found, all the basic costs of production w

ne. We forgot the law of diminishing returns. We ignored the lessons of history that all ages come to an end, when the struggle for existence once more grows severe until new instruments are found equal to the further conquest over nature. Useful inventions have not kept pace with increasing consumption and rapidly disappearing virgin resources. The process of stea

did the steam engine would make the war debt as easily borne as the week's account at the grocery store. But when will progress vouchsafe it? Converting coal into power we waste 85 per cent of its energy in coal and call that

y, according to rule, it should be met by some great invention that would blast the Germans out of their places in the earth and give the sons of light an easy and certain

ey would be fools if they had. I write to suggest that they have ceased to believe in Progress. They wou

man offering his breast to the shots of the enemy. The hope of the future is all in human organizations, in societies of nations, in councils and conferences. Men's minds turn once more to governments with renewed expe

of the general credit and for what purposes, it fixed the prices at which we could buy and sell. It came to occupy a new place in the national consciousness and one which it will never wholly lose. One rival to it,-the belief, having its roots in early religious ideas, and str

g near in store far greater and better than went before. We shall not trust men too far, men with their obstinate blindness, men with their originally sinful habit of thinki

ge and Harding, our own commonplace "best we have on hand" substitute for the infinitely variable Englishman, adjusted to

o form any the people wouldn't let him. They elected him not to have any. They desired in the White House some one who would no

at the outset of the recent disarmament and Far Eastern Conference, that

le. They even took in hand the vast industrial mechanism which we ordinarily leave to the control of the "forces." We half suspect they might do the impossible in peace but we half ho