at
they were mistaken in their ideas regarding the purposes of the war does
not in any sense detract from the sincerity of their desires, nor from
the earnestness of their efforts.

The World War fervor was typical of the eager attempts that men have
made at intervals all through history, to win freedom against immense
odds. During the past three or four centuries this struggle has been
particularly severe in the political, the social and in the economic
fields alike.

Although the Dark Ages almost obliterated the expression of creative
energy in the Western World, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the
industrial revolution, following in quick succession, proclaimed its
reawakening, and to-day there is scarcely a group of people--in Egypt,
in Ireland, in Korea, in the Philippines, or in dark, enslaved Africa
that does not hold a molten mass of sentiment surging toward freedom,--a
seething, smouldering pressure, continually seeking an outlet.

Economic emancipation does not include all aspects of freedom. Many
other chains remain to be broken. But the economic organization of the
world would be one step in the direction of freedom, and would burst
many a bond that now holds the human race in subjection.

2. _Freedom from Primitive Struggle_

The first step in economic liberation is to free man from the more
savage phases of the life struggle--the struggle against nature: the
struggle with other men.

Since those far-off times when men lived by tearing away clusters of
nuts, by picking berries, by digging roots, by snaring fish and by
clubbing game, they have been compelled to wrest from nature the means
of subsistence. In this struggle, there have been the terrible phantoms
of hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and physical suffering of every sort,
driving men on. He who won in the contest with nature was able to escape
the worst of these miseries, but he who lost was tortured by them as
long as life remained in his body. The race is saddled, even to-day, by
an oppressive fear of these physical hardships that makes the strongest
a willing servant of any agency that will promise to ward them off.

The first victory that men must gain in their battle for economic
liberation, will be won when hunger, thirst, cold, darkness and other
aspects of physical suffering are banished from the lives of all people
as effectively as yellow fever and cholera have been banished from the
western world during recent generations