w,
is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is
under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
to shape it aright.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
Fischer.]

[Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.]

II

The question is not very urgent.

As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.

The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a
Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.

From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
suffered it, we