Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/87

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E are often told that the present European war is the greatest calamity the world has ever known, and as such, it paralyzes the minds of men, whose normal reactions are totally inadequate in the presence of such extraordinary conditions. Future students of the history of the twentieth century will read the chronicle with despair or boiling indignation, according to their temperaments, asking why, in heaven's name why, were those people so utterly incompetent to do the simple things which might have prevented the catastrophe? In many respects, there is little resemblance between the fourteenth century and the twentieth, and less between the bubonic plague and war; yet it may not be unprofitable to consider that other enormous European calamity, of the years 1348–9, and its effects upon the stricken populations. Although the cause of death and loss was different, the results were in many respects similar, and if the attempts of our ancestors to deal successfully with the situation now seem to us amazingly futile, we may at least ask ourselves whether we are exhibiting any better judgment to-day. In the fourteenth century the microscope was of course unknown, and it was beyond the powers of the wisest man to learn anything about the Bacsillus pestis or its communication to man by the rat flea. At the same time, the uncultured people of many times and countries had reached sound empirical judgments; and the beginnings of science in remote antiquity had promised something better than the dominance of unreasoning superstition posing as religion. Was it not a fact that the cult of the ruling classes had so imposed itself on the masses that for centuries the free action of the mind, in observing relations between cause and effect, had been inhibited? Is it not a fact to-day that a similar cult, that of the necessity and propriety of war, acts as a like inhibitor to those mental reactions which might otherwise clarify the atmosphere and make easy the way to peace? The problem of the fourteenth century was a terrific one, as is our problem to-day. Even a partial solution would have required the utmost exercise of all the wisdom available; but the point is, that then as to-day, men cravenly ac- VOL. III.—6.