Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/37

Rh no law." In this world-war nations fell to the lowest level of savagery. The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies, its corybantic bacchanalia, held its mad salto mortale over the grave of crucified humanity.

Our social status is a reversion to savagery of the most degenerate type, an atavistic lapse towards the paleolithic and eolithic man, only more brutal, because of the greater power for evil possessed by modern man. What Hun or Vandal ever dreamt of such collosalcolossal [sic] destruction! Over three hundred billions wasted by war and depredation, about seventeen to twenty million men lost by slaughter and disease! The fame of God's scourges, Attila, Jenghiz Khan, Batu, and Tamerlane pales and fades before the glories of modern warfare. In a few years Kultur and culture have caused more ruin to humanity than all the invasions of the yellow peril in the history of mankind.

Some future historian in describing and estimating our times will place us below the moral level of the Bushmen, the Hottentots, the Todas, and the Australian savages. He may say: "Towards the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century there took place a vast accumulation of wealth, due to a rapid development of applied science and practical arts. Instead, however, of improving their condition, European nations deteriorated intellectually and morally.

"Liberal education gave way to technical training. Science served on greed. Education became mechanical and military in character. The thinker gave way to the reporter, the scientist to the mechanic, the artist to the artisan, the genius to the Philistine. Industrial and commercial interests inspired by patriotism and chauvinism became the standard of nations. An insane frenzy of militarism obsessed the minds of men.

"The state enslaved the individual. Blind obedience became a virtue. Drill and discipline trained people into automatism of the subconscious with its abnormal suggestibility and extreme sensitivity to direct and indirect suggestions, intensified by brilliant parades, hypnotizing oratory, and by all the artifices of a militant chauvinistic press. Nations were thrown into a social trance, the subconscious came to the surface, yielded to the noxious suggestions, wriggled in hysterical convulsions of nationalism, became obsessed with the fury of homicidal mania, and plunged into the abyss of the world war with all its horrors and atrocities. Nations boasting of refinement and