the most binding compacts known to social man. This happened
coincidently to be in keeping with the general insurgence against all
checks and restraints, moral and social, for which the war is mainly
answerable, and to be also in harmony with the regular supersession of
right by might which characterizes the present epoch and with the
disappearance of the sense of law. In a word, under the auspices of the
amateur world-reformers, the tendency of Bolshevism throve and
spread--an instructive case of people serving the devil at the bidding
of God's best friends.

As in the days of the Italian despots, every individual has the chance
of rising to the highest position in many of the states, irrespective of
his antecedents and no matter what blots may have tarnished his
'scutcheon. Neither aristocratic descent, nor public spirit nor even a
blameless past is now an indispensable condition of advancement. In
Germany the head of the Republic is an honest saddler. In Austria the
chief of the government until recently was the assassin of a prime
minister. The chief of the Ukraine state was an ex-inmate of an asylum.
Trotzky, one of the Russian duumvirs, is said to have a record which
might of itself have justified his change of name from Braunstein. Bela
Kuhn, the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, had the reputation of a thief
before rising to the height of ruler of the Magyars.... In a word,
Napoleon's ideal is at last realized, "La carrière est ouverte aux
talents."

Among the peculiar traits of this evanescent epoch may be mentioned
inaccessibility to the teaching of facts which run counter to cherished
prejudices, aims, and interests. People draw from facts which they
cannot dispute only the inferences which they desire. An amusing
instance of this occurred in Paris, where a Syndicalist organ[36]