ll be possible to build with good
hope for the future. Schemes of reconstruction are well enough in their
way, but if there is no ground of REAL HUMAN SOLIDARITY beneath, of what
avail are they?

(1) See Introduction, Ch. I.

An industrial system which is no real industrial order, but only (on
the part of the employers) a devil's device for securing private profit
under the guise of public utility, and (on the part of the employed) a
dismal and poor-spirited renunciation--for the sake of a bare living--of
all real interest in life and work: such a 'system' must infallibly
pass away. It cannot in the nature of things be permanent. The first
condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the
Common Life. This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal
order of the far past--which first came to consciousness in the
worship of a thousand pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless
sacrifices, initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which
inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the
Communism of the early Christians and in their adorations of the risen
Savior--must in the end be the creative condition of a new order: it
must provide the material of which the Golden City waits to be built.
The long travail of the World-religion will not have been in vain, which
assures this consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general
advance into this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know
not. It may be that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision
often comes quite suddenly, and GENERALLY perhaps after a period of
great suffering, so to society at large a similar revelation will
arrive--like "the lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth
even unto the West"--with unexpected swiftness. On the other hand
it would perhaps be wise not to count too much on any such sudden
transformation. When we look abroad (and at home) in this year of grace
and hoped-for peace, 1919, and see the spirits of rancour and revenge,
the fears, the selfish blindness and the ignorance, which still hold in
their paralyzing grasp huge classes and coteries in every country in the
world, we see that the second stage of human development is by no means
yet at its full term, and that, as in some vast chrysalis, for the
liberation of the creature within still more and more terrible struggles
MAY be necessary. We can only pray that such may not be the