Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/48

Rh sense, but in a practical 'tactile' way, gaining, as we say, greater command over his material—so has it been with the knowledge of humanity at large in regard to the Realities of the round world on which we must practise the intricate art of living together. It is not merely that we have amassed vast encyclopædias of fact, but that, as we live through each new epoch, we see all the past and all the present with new eyes and from new standpoints. It is obvious that these four years of war have wrought a change in human outlook the like of which was not effected in all the previous life of those of us who have grey hairs. Yet, when we look back with our present knowledge, is it not clear that the currents of thought now running so tumultuously were already setting in gently some twenty years ago? In the last years of last century and the first of this, the organisers at Berlin and the minorities in London and Paris had already discerned the new drift of the straws.

I propose trying to depict some of the Realities, geographical and economic, in their