Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/18

 As religious faith and sectarian controversy are weakened, this world displacing the next in most men’s minds, an intensification of passion has entered into the secular movements for reform and the “isms” which they incorporate and endeavour to express. A number of new passionate creeds and movements, appealing to the reason, justice, and welfare of mankind, to the interests of individuals, classes, nations, races, and humanity, are struggling to gain power over human conduct in the arts of economic and political organization. These new appeals and movements have so reacted upon orthodox ideas, interests, and parties, as to infuse a new vigour of resistance into the latter, in which a discreet policy of minor concessions and adaptations to new social circumstances is used to strengthen the buttresses of the nineteenth-century conservatism and liberalism. For the assailant “isms,” Fascism, Socialism, Communism, in their several sorts and qualities, have sprung up with unexpected rapidity in a world where a generation ago peace, progress, security, and general contentment seemed to be the accepted ways of life, and where minor troubles seemed capable of cheap and easy settlement. In politics, popular self- government (under the actual control of ruling groups or families), in economics the growing application of equality of opportunity (within reasonable limits) were, up to the last decade of the nineteenth century, held to be sufficient guarantees for a pacific, prosperous