Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/593

 that time. It was a world of lost or faded beliefs. It did not believe even in the florid nationalisms and imperialisms which waved their flags and filled half the world with the stir and glitter of great armies. But it set itself in the form of these things because they trampled and glittered very entertainingly and because they promised sensational adventures. The catastrophe of the war was not an unnecessary disaster; it was a necessary fulfilment of such an age of drift. Only through a catastrophe, it may be, could a new phase of human thought and will have become possible.

This graver world of 1920 does seem to be awakening to the truth that there are realities worth seeking and evils not to be tolerated. The mental and moral backgrounds of hundreds of millions of minds have been altered and are being altered by the stern lessons of this age. Brotherhood through sorrow, sorrow for common sufferings and for irreparable mutual injuries, is spreading and increasing throughout the world. There are no doubt great countervailing evils, a wild scramble for the diminishing surplus of wealth, a propaganda, but a failing propaganda, of division and hatred. The dominating fact, nevertheless, is a new sanity....

What a wonderful and moving spectacle is this of our kind to-day! Would that we could compress into one head and for the use of one right hand the power of ten thousand novelists and playwrights and biographers and the quintessence of a thousand histories, to render the endless variety, the incessant multitudinous adventure, and at the same time the increasing unity of this display. Everywhere, with a mysterious individual difference, we see youth growing to adolescence and the interplay of love, desire, curiosities, passionate impulses, rivalries. As the earth spins from darkness into the light, the millions wake again to a new day in their life of toil, anxiety, little satisfactions, little chagrins, rivalries, spites, generosities. From tropic to the bleakest north, the cocks crow before the advancing margin of dawn. The early toiler hurries to his work, the fox and the thief slink home, the tramp stretches his stiff limbs under the haystack, and springs up alert before the farmer's man discovers him, the ploughman is already in the field with his horses, the fires are lit in the cottage and the kettle sings. The hours warm as the day advances; the crowded trains converge upon the city centres, the traffic thickens