Politically a similar decline, a no less noticeable evidence of
disintegration and confusion, can be discovered in the age we live in--the
age which a future historian might well recognize to have been the
preamble to the Great Age, whose golden days we can as yet but dimly
visualize.
The passionate and violent happenings that have, in recent years, strained
to almost the point of complete breakdown the political and economic
structure of society are too numerous and complex to attempt, within the
limitations of this general survey, to arrive at an adequate estimate of
their character. Nor have these tribulations, grievous as they have been,
seemed to have reached their climax, and exerted the full force of their
destructive power. The whole world, wherever and however we survey it,
offers us the sad and pitiful spectacle of a vast, an enfeebled, and
moribund organism, which is being torn politically and strangulated
economically by forces it has ceased to either control or comprehend. The
Great Depression, the aftermath of the severest ordeals humanity had ever
experienced, the disintegration of the Versailles system, the
recrudescence of militarism in its most menacing aspects, the failure of
vast experiments and new-born institutions to safeguard the peace and
tranquillity of peoples, classes and nations, have bitterly disillusioned
humanity and prostrated its spirits. Its hopes are, for the most part,
shattered, its vitality is ebbing, its life strangely disordered, its
unity severely compromised.
On the continent of Europe inveterate hatreds and increasing rivalries are
once more aligning its ill-fated peoples and nations into combinations
destined to precipitate the most awful and implacable tribulations that
mankind throughout its long record of martyrdom has suffered. On the North
American continent economic distress, industrial disorganization,
widespread discontent at the abortive experiments designed to readjust an
ill-balanced economy, and restlessness and fear inspired by the
possibility of political entanglements in both Europe and Asia, portend
the approach of what may well prove to be one of the most critical phases
of the history of the American Republic. Asia, still to a great extent in
the grip of one of the severest trials she has, in her recent history,
experienced, finds herself menaced on her eastern confines by the onset of
forces that threaten to intensify the struggles which the growing
nationalism and industrialization of her emancipated races must ultimately
engender. In the heart of Africa, there blazes the fire of an atrocious
and bloody war--a war which, whatever its outcome, is destined to exert,
through its world-wide repercussions, a most disturbing influence on the
races and colored nations of mankind.
With no less than ten million people under arms, drilled and instructed in
the use of the most abominable engines of destruction that science has
devised; with thrice that number chafing and fretting at the rule of alien
races and governments; with an equally vast army of embittered citizens
impotent to procure for themselves the material goods and necessities
which others are deliberately destroying; with a still greater mass of
human beings groaning under the burden of ever-mounting armaments, and
impoverished by the virtual collapse of international trade--with evils
such as these, humanity would seem to be definitely entering the outer
fringes of the most agonizing phase of its existence.
Is it to be wondered at, that in the course of a recent statement made by
one of the outstanding Ministers in Europe this warning should have been
deliberately uttered: "If war should break out again on a major scale in
Europe, it must bring the collapse of civilization as we know it in its
wake. In the words of the late Lord Bryce, 'If you don't end war, war will
end you.'" "Poor Europe is in a state of neurasthenia...", is the
testimony of one of the most outstanding figures among its present-day
dictators. "It has lost its recuperative power, the vital force of
cohesion, of synthesis. Another war would destroy us." "It is likely,"
writes one of the most eminent and learned dignitaries of the Christian
Church, "there will have to be one more great conflict in Europe to
definitely establish once and for all an international authority. This
conflict will be the most horrible of horribles, and possibly this
generation will be called on to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives."
The disastrous failure of both the Disarmament and Economic Conferences;
the obstacles confronting the negotiations for the limitation of Naval
armaments; the withdrawal of two of the most powerful and heavily armed
nations of the world from the activities and membership of the League of
Nations; the ineptitude of the parliamentary system of government as
witnessed by recent developments in Europe and America; the inability of
the leaders and exponents of the Communist movement to vindicate the
much-vaunted principle of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; the perils
and privations to which the rulers of the Totalitarian states have, in
recent years, exposed their subjects--all these demonstrate, beyond the
shadow of a doubt, the impotence of present-day institutions to avert the
calamities with which human society is being increasingly threatened. What
else remains, a bewildered generation may well ask, that can repair the
cleavage that is constantly widening, and which may, at any time, engulf
it?
Beset on every side by the cumulative evidences of disintegration, of
turmoil and of bankruptcy, serious-minded men and women, in almost every
walk of life, are beginning to doubt whether society, as it is now
organized, can, through its unaided efforts, extricate itself from the
slough into which it is steadily sinking. Every system, short of the
unification of the human race, has been tried, repeatedly tried, and been
found wanting. Wars again and again have been fought, and conferences
without number have met and deliberated. Treaties, pacts and covenants
have been painstakingly negotiated, concluded and revised. Systems of
government have been patiently tested, have been continually recast and
superseded. Economic plans of reconstruction have been carefully devised,
and meticulously executed. And yet crisis has succeeded crisis, and the
rapidity with which a perilously unstable world is declining has been
correspondingly accelerated. A yawning gulf threatens to involve in one
common disaster both the satisfied and dissatisfied nations, democracies
and dictatorships, capitalists and wage-earners, Europeans and Asiatics,
Jew and Gentile, white and colored. An angry Providence, the cynic might
well observe, has abandoned a hapless planet to its fate, and fixed
irrevocably its doom. Sore-tried and disillusioned, humanity has no doubt
lost its orientation, and would seem to have lost as well its faith and
hope. It is hovering, unshepherded and visionless, on the brink of
disaster. A sense of fatality seems to pervade it. An ever-deepening gloom
is settling on its fortunes as she recedes further and further from the
outer fringes of the darkest zone of its agitated life and penetrates its
very heart.
And yet while the shadows are continually deepening, might we not claim
that gleams of hope, flashing intermittently on the international horizon,
appear at times to relieve the darkness that encircles humanity? Would it
be untrue to maintain that in a world of unsettled faith and disturbed
thought, a world of steadily mounting armaments, of unquenchable hatreds
and rivalries, the progress, however fitful, of the forces working in
harmony with the spirit of the age can already be discerned? Though the
great outcry raised by post-war nationalism is growing louder and more
insistent every day, the League of Nations is as yet in its embryonic
state, and the storm clouds that are gathering may for a time totally
eclipse its powers and obliterate its machinery, yet the direction in
which the institution itself is operating is most significant. The voices
that have been raised ever since its inception, the efforts that have been
exerted, the work that has already been accomplished, foreshadow the
triumphs which this presently constituted institution, or any other body
that may supersede it, is destined to achieve.