RECONSTRUCTION FROM THE WAR

We have seen how impossible it is to forecast the new world that will
follow the War, we know merely that it will be utterly new.
Nevertheless, the great tendencies already at work we can partly discern
and recognize something of what they promise. It is well to try to see
them, that we may be not too unready to welcome the opportunity and
accept the burden of the world that is being born in pain.

Peace and prosperity produce a peculiar type of conservatism. People
are then relatively free in action and expression, things are going well
with them, and they are instinctively inclined to let well enough alone.
Thus in thought they tend to a conservative inertia.

On the other hand, in periods of great strain and suffering, as in war
time, thought is stimulated, all ordinary views are broken down and the
most radical notions are widely disseminated and even taken for granted
by those who, shortly before, would have been scandalized by them.
Action and certain phases of free speech are, in such a period, much
more widely restrained by authority. There is a swift and strong
development of social control, urged by necessity.

Thus, in war time, there is the curious paradox of ever widening
radicalism in thought, with constantly decreasing freedom in action and
expression. When the discrepancy becomes too great, you have the
explosion--Revolution. This cause hastened and made more extreme the
Russian Revolution, which had been simmering for a century. It has not
yet appeared in Germany because of the forty years of successful work in
drilling the mind of the German people to march in goose-step; yet the