lege of Cardinals,
the venerable Pontiff gave expression to an estimate of present
conditions which should have attracted far greater attention than it
apparently did.

The Pope said that five plagues were now afflicting humanity.

The first was the unprecedented challenge to authority.

The second, an equally unprecedented hatred between man and man.

The third was the abnormal aversion to work.

The fourth, the excessive thirst for pleasure as the great aim of life.

The fifth, a gross materialism which denied the reality of the spiritual
in human life.

The accuracy of this indictment will commend itself to men who like
myself are not of Pope Benedict's communion.

I trust that I have already shown that the challenge to authority is
universal and is not confined to that of the political state. Even in
the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either
violently burning, or, at least, smouldering. Two of the oldest empires
in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population
(China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations
are in a stage of submerged revolt. If the revolt were confined to
autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against
tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among the most
enlightened peoples, the underground rumblings of revolution may be
heard.

The Government of Italy has been preserved from overthrow, not alone by
its constituted authorities, but by a band of resolute men, called the
"fascisti," who have taken the law into their own hands, as did the
vigilance committees in western mining camps, to put down worse
disorders.

Even England, the mother of democracies, and the most stable of all
Governments in the maintenance of law, has been shaken to its very
foundations in the last three years, when powerful groups of men
attempted to seize the State by the throat and compel submission to
their demands by threatening to starve the community. This would be
serious enough if it were only the world-old struggle between capital
and labour and had only involved the conditions of manual toil. But the
insurrection against the political state in England was more political
than it was economic. It marked, on the part of millions of men, a
portentous decay of belief in representative government and its chosen
organ--the ballot box. Great and powerful groups had suddenly
discovered--and it may be the