with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the
ground. Philosophy must wait. The interpretations cannot be hastened,
while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. The one
certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--_what_ it will
be, no one knows.

Nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking
will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. It will be
impossible for us, after the War, to do what we have done so widely
hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live
to something widely different in practice. Either we shall have to
abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with
them. We shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution
Christianity and the gospel of brute force. One or the other must be
rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. The effect on the thought
life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the
French Revolution. The twentieth century will differ from the
nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. The effect on the
relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so
far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth
century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the Athenian
tribal system or mediaeval feudalism.

Thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. We Americans
are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to
political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise.
All across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion
--if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. Thus we are
suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly
trusting to it to solve all problems. Legislation is no solution for