universal crisis lies in the manifold opportunities of creating outlets.
These exist to the full in the vast fallow regions of Africa, and in the
scope for industries and commerce in Asia and elsewhere. Each
well-devised colonizing scheme, every railway built, and every other new
investment would afford improved employment and relieve the general
strain; every true convert gained by the spread of Christianity would
become an obedient and reliable unit towards the menaced stability of
authorized Governments. We see capital impelled to vast enterprises, as
it were by secret forces;[13] we are aware of the activity of nations
singly and in co-operation in promoting and sustaining such projects.
All those efforts and outlets would serve as safety-valves for the
discontent of the ill-provided masses, and their success would render
them governable at a lesser cost, and even admit the reduction of
standing armies and other objects treated by the recent Peace Conference
at the Hague. The essential thing, indeed, is peace, and that in turn
would consolidate security and progress. But the enemy is interested
exactly the other way. His ascendancy is coincident, not with the
mitigation of the conditions of human existence, but in accentuating the
misery of the masses, driving them to desperation and to embrace illogic
and deceptive maxims of socialism and violent anarchy. It is with those
forces that he intends to uproot and usurp divinely instituted authority
expressly set up to repress evil and to protect person and property. He
wants by licence and not liberty to hasten the advent of that murderous
political power prophetically depicted with the statue standing upon
feet of clay and iron: supreme authority vested in the world's
proletariat in unstable and uncohesive union with militarism, Satan
himself the actual lawless animator.[14] As to the scope for outlets in
the East, it is more restricted to industries and commerce, but those
enterprises, however brilliantly promising, are fraught with the risks
incidental to hostile rivalries and political complications, while in