ions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in
their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and
taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also
for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of women have
been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and
independence. The thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been
pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an
unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although
the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make
a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to
his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to
be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we
were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only
a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a
possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in
other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process
anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.

Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who
was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how,
after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other
war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a
heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years
in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the
task they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel
was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn
anything from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that
we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for,
are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years
revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed
by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how
happy Lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired
messages became scraps of paper. He knows well that from the Peace
Conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will
be able, like Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind:
and the gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy
the militarism of Zabern; and