and if big masses of unemployed
and unfed people, no longer strung up by the actuality of war, masses
now trained to arms and with many quite sympathetic officers available,
are released clumsily and planlessly into a world of risen prices and
rising rents, of legal obstacles and forensic complications, of greedy
speculators and hampered enterprises, there will be insurrection and
revolution. There will be bloodshed in the streets and the chasing of
rulers.

There _will_ be, if we do seriously attempt to put the new wine of
humanity, the new crude fermentations at once so hopeful and so
threatening, that the war has released, into the old administrative
bottles that served our purposes before the war.

I believe that for old lawyers and old politicians and "private
ownership" to handle the great problem of reconstruction after the war
in the spirit in which our affairs were conducted before the war is
about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer,
working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest
avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no
means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows
that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do
not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has
come into human affairs; that our ostensible rulers and leaders have
been falling behind the times, and that in the young and the untried,
in, for example, the young European of thirty and under who is now in
such multitudes thinking over life and his seniors in the trenches,
there are still unsuspected resources of will and capacity, new mental
possibilities and new mental habits, that entirely disturb the
argument--based on the typical case of Bocking and Braintree--for a
social catastrophe after the war.

How best can this new spirit be defined?

It is the creative spirit as distinguished from the legal spirit; it is
the spirit of courage to make and not the spirit that waits and sees and
claims; it is the spirit that looks to the future and not to the past.
It is the spirit that makes Bocking forget that it is not Braintree and
John Smith forget that he is John Smith, and both remember that they are
England.

For everyone there are two diametrically different ways of thinking
about life; there is individualism, the way that comes as naturally as
the grunt from a pig, of thinking outwardly from oneself as t