except in the direction of the war business. Ability is concentrated
upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are
neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the
savings that are needed to finance new experiments. Moreover, we are
killing off many of our brightest young men.

It is fairly safe to assume that there will be very little new furniture
on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if there is
much difference in the roads and railways and shipping it will be for
the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be
fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914. In
the trenches of France and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia,
the Germans have been spending and making the world spend the comfort,
the luxury and the progress of the next quarter-century. There is no
accounting for tastes. But the result is that, while it was possible
for the writer in 1900 to write "Anticipations of the Reaction of
Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought," in 1916 his
anticipations must belong to quite another system of consequences.

The broad material facts before us are plain enough. It is the mental
facts that have to be unravelled. It isn't now a question of "What
thing--what faculty--what added power will come to hand, and how will it
affect our ways of living?" It is a question of "How are people going to
take these obvious things--waste of the world's resources, arrest of
material progress, the killing of a large moiety of the males in nearly
every European country, and universal loss and unhappiness?" We are
going to deal with realities here, at once more intimate and less
accessible than the effects of mechanism.

As a preliminary reconnaissance, as it were, over the region of problems