incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and
administrators for a disillusioned world.

Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it
as a return to sanity is obviously no matter here. Our first concern
with fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing
social order, and to think of them simply as an important part of the
machinery of human communication. Now in any society that is not
completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone
can know all about everything that happens, ideas deal with events
that are out of sight and hard to grasp. Miss Sherwin of Gopher
Prairie, [Footnote: See Sinclair Lewis, _Main Street_.] is aware
that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. She has never
been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the
battlefront.

Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is
impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can
imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as,
say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the
order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she
fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a
personal duel. Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind's
eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth
Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled
and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures
winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men
oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a
photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class
office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to