The Last War
1

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane¹ and ambitious social order, it is difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives³ that plunged⁵ mankind into the war that fills the histories of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world at that time was everywhere extraordinarily⁶ behind the collective intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and pretensions⁷, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The absurdities⁸ of courts and the indignities⁹ of representative parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of opportunity in other directions, had withdrawn¹⁰ the best intelligences more and more from public affairs. The ostensible¹¹ governments of the world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth century there are no more great ecclesiastics¹² upon the world’s memory, after the opening of the twentieth no more statesmen. Everywhere one finds an energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, common-place type in the seats of authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously reliant upon the traditions of the past.