else remains, a bewildered generation may well ask, that can repair the
cleavage that is constantly widening, and which may, at any time, engulf
it?

Beset on every side by the cumulative evidences of disintegration, of
turmoil and of bankruptcy, serious-minded men and women, in almost every
walk of life, are beginning to doubt whether society, as it is now
organized, can, through its unaided efforts, extricate itself from the
slough into which it is steadily sinking. Every system, short of the
unification of the human race, has been tried, repeatedly tried, and been
found wanting. Wars again and again have been fought, and conferences
without number have met and deliberated. Treaties, pacts and covenants
have been painstakingly negotiated, concluded and revised. Systems of
government have been patiently tested, have been continually recast and
superseded. Economic plans of reconstruction have been carefully devised,
and meticulously executed. And yet crisis has succeeded crisis, and the
rapidity with which a perilously unstable world is declining has been
correspondingly accelerated. A yawning gulf threatens to involve in one
common disaster both the satisfied and dissatisfied nations, democracies
and dictatorships, capitalists and wage-earners, Europeans and Asiatics,
Jew and Gentile, white and colored. An angry Providence, the cynic might
well observe, has abandoned a hapless planet to its fate, and fixed
irrevocably its doom. Sore-tried and disillusioned, humanity has no doubt
lost its orientation, and would seem to have lost as well its faith and
hope. It is hovering, unshepherded and visionless, on the brink of
disaster. A sense of fatality seems to pervade it. An ever-deepening gloom
is settling on its fortunes as she recedes further and further from the
outer fringes of the darkest zone of its agitated life and penetrates its
very heart.

And yet while the shadows are continually deepening, might we not claim
that gleams of hope, flashing intermittently on the international horizon,
appear at times to relieve the darkness that encircles humanity? Would it
be untrue to maintain that in a world of unsettled faith and disturbed
thought, a world of steadily mounting armaments, of unquenchable hatreds
and rivalries, the progress, however fitful, of the forces working in
harmony with the spirit of the age can already be discerned? Though the
great outcry raised by post-war nationalism is growing louder and more
ins