of
organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is
not an unmixed good.

Indeed, the moral lesson of the tragedy of Germany is the demoralizing
influence of organization carried to the _n_th power. No nation was ever
more highly organized than this modern State. Physically, intellectually
and spiritually it had become a highly developed machine. Its dominating
mechanical spirit so submerged the individual that, in 1914, the paradox
was observed of an enlightened nation that was seemingly destitute of a
conscience.

What was true of Germany, however, was true--although in lesser
degree--of all civilized nations. In all of them, the individual had
been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of
man has been destructive of his nobler self.

This may explain the paradox of so-called "progress." It may be likened
to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical
forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal
action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented
catastrophe. As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and
recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not
necessarily progress.

Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its
conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind. It not only accepted
progress as an unmistakable fact--mistaking, however, acceleration and
facilitation for progress--but in its mad folly believed in an immutable
law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would
propel man forward.

A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human
observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass. Emerson,
Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth
century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable
dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies
were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra.

One can see the tragedy of the time, as a few saw it, in comparing the
first _Locksley Hall_ of Alfred Tennyson, written in 1827, with its
abiding faith in the "increasing purpose of the ages" and its roseate
prophecies of the golden age, when the "war-drum would throb no longer
and the battle flags be furled in the Parliament of Man and the
Federation of the World," and the later _Locksley Hall_, written sixty
years later, when the great spiritual p