orld, there is a Mount Ararat,
upon which the ark of a truer and better peace can find refuge, it has
not yet appeared above the troubled surface of the waters.

Still less can one question the closely related third and fourth counts
in Pope Benedict's indictment, namely the unprecedented aversion to
work, when work is most needed to reconstruct the foundations of
prosperity, or the excessive thirst for pleasure which preceded,
accompanied, and now has followed the most terrible tragedy in the
annals of mankind. The true spirit of work seems to have vanished from
millions of men; that spirit of which Shakespeare made his Orlando
speak when he said of his true servant, Adam:

"O good old man! how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world.
When service sweat for duty, not for meed!"

The _moral_ of our industrial civilization has been shattered. Work for
work's sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has
gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit. The conception of work as
a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging
inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes
and in all countries.

The spirit of work is of more than sentimental importance. It may be
said of it, as Hamlet says of death: "The readiness is all." All of us
are conscious of the fact that, given a love of work, and the capacity
for it seems almost illimitable--as witness Napoleon, with his
thousand-man power, or Shakespeare, who in twenty years could write
more than twenty masterpieces.

On the other hand, given an aversion to work, and the less a man does
the less he wants to do, or is seemingly capable of doing.

The great evil of the world to-day is this aversion to work. As the
mechanical era diminished the element of physical exertion in work, we
would have supposed that man would have sought expression for his
physical faculties in other ways. On the contrary, the whole history of
the mechanical era is a persistent struggle for more pay and less work,
and to-day it has culminated in world-wide ruin; for there is not a
nation in civilization which is not now in the throes of economic
distress, and many of them are on the verge of ruin. In my judgment, the
economic catastrophe of 1921 is far greater than the politico-military
catastrophe of 1914.

The results of these two tendencies, measured in the statistics of
productive industry, are literally appalling.