in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is
universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the
greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one
today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills
and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their
millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock
exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and
the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional
associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do
not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of
false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent
weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it
has generally escaped notice.

There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored;
either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more
unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos,
and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before
after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as
we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can
from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right
shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so
becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the
monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the
Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the
Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and
failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already
begun.

The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is