Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/245

Rh you break the Going Concern or take it to pieces makes little practical difference. This attitude means social suicide. It is vital that discipline should be maintained in the Western Democracies during the period of Reconstruction, whatever Bolshevism may happen in Central as well as East Europe. The Westerners are the Victors, and they alone are able to prevent the whole world from having to pass through the cycle so often repeated in the case of individual nations—Idealism, Disorder, Famine, Tyranny. Provided that we do not hasten to dismantle running social machinery, but accomplish our ideals by successive acts of social discipline, we shall maintain the steady output of production, the fundamental Reality, that is to say, on which now, more than ever before, Civilisation rests. The disorder of a whole World, let us not forget, implies the absence of any remaining National base as a fulcrum for the restoration of order, and therefore the indefinite prolongation of Anarchy and Tyranny. It took several centuries to attain again to the stage of civilisation which had been reached when the Roman World of Antiquity broke down.

But if drifting in the grip of the Going Concern leads to disease in a nation, and if