ever so many years of fatness it must produce a famine. At such times men, demigods, stepped out of banks with sacks of gold on their shoulders and mitigated the rigors of its failure.

And these splendid personages might set going again that which law stopped. We bowed patiently and unquestioningly to its periodic eccentricity as part of the Fate that fell upon the original sinner, and watched hopefully the powerful men who might in their pleasure or their wisdom end our sufferings.

We were taught to regard it as a thing distinct from political authority, so that the less governors and lawmakers interfered with it the better for the general welfare. Back in our past is a thorough contempt for human intelligence which relates somehow to the religious precept against questioning the wisdom of God. Whatever ordinary men did in the field of economics was sure to be wrong and to check the flow of goods upon which the well-being of society depended. We were all, except the familiars of the great forces, impotent pieces of the game economic law played upon this checker-board of nights and days.

I have said that this government of the national workshop in which we were all laborers or foremen or superintendents or masters sometimes seemed to our consciousness a government of laws and sometimes a government of men. In any primitive faith priests played a large part, and probably the primitive worshippers before them much of the time did not think beyond the priests, while sometimes they did—when it was convenient for the priests that they should.

When famines or plagues came it was because the gods were angry. When they are averted it is the priests who have averted them. When economic panics came it was because we had sinned against economic law; when they were averted it was because men had averted them, men who lived on intimate terms with economic law and understood its mysterious ways, and enjoyed its favor, as their great possessions testified.

Naturally, we are immensely more directly and more constantly concerned with this government than with the government at Washington. Besides, we were mostly business men, or hoped to be. It was our government more truly than was the government at Washington.

Only a limited area in the political consciousness was left for self-government. You descended from the heights to the broad flat plain of man's contempt for man. It was there, rooted firmly in the constitution, that the government at Washington reared its head. Self-government is a new thing; no myth has gathered about it. It was established among men who believed in the doctrine of the original sin, and it had been carried by their successors, who had abandoned the sinner Adam as the progenitor of their kind for the sinless but inglorious earthworm. The inferiority complex which is the race's most persistent heritage from the past was written all over it.

I suppose it was Adam Smith who made self-government possible by discovering that the things really essential to our welfare would take care of themselves if we only let them alone and that the more we let them alone the better they would take care of themselves, under eternal and immutable laws. Ah, the happy thought occurred, if the really essential things are thus beneficially regulated why shouldn't we have the fun of managing the non-essentials ourselves?

Progress ruled the world kindly and well. It might be trusted to see that all went for the best. The government of business functioned effectively for the general weal. The future was in the hands of a force that made the world richer and better. The present, in all that concerned man most vitally with regards food and shelter, was directed by enlightened self-interest represented by men who personified success.

It was impossible not to be optimistic when existence was so well ordered. There was no sorry scheme of things to be seized entire. Life was a sort of tropics without tropical discomforts. The tropics do not produce men. They produce things.

The Mechanism worked, as it seemed to us, in those happy days. We were satisfied with the clock and the clock-winders. We were not divided in our minds as to whether we should turn back its hands. The less men meddled the better. There was little work for human government to do. There was no call for men.

The picture in our heads, to use Mr. Graham Wallas's phrase, was of a world well ruled by a will from the beginning, whose purpose was increase; of some superior men having semi-sacred relations with the will who acted as intermediaries between the will and the rest of us; and of the rest of us as being rewarded by the will, through its intermediaries, according to our timidity and submissiveness.

It was, the world, over the great age of the racial inferiority complex, for which Science had furnished a new and convincing basis. I might maintain that the Great War was modern society's effort to compensate for the evolution complex; man wanted to show what he could do, in spite of his slimy origin. Anyway, it broke the picture in our heads. Being economical, like Mr. Harding, we are trying both to save the pieces of the picture and put them together again, and to form, out of them unfortunately, a new picture; which accounts for our confusion.

But the picture in our heads before the war, such as it was, is the reason for our present inadequacy. You could not form much of a self-government or develop men for one, with that complex in your soul.

CHAPTER II

GOD'S TIME AS IT IS; AN INGERSOLL THAT REQUIRES MUCH WINDING

How many of us believe in Progress with the unquestioning faith we had before that day in July, 1914, when Austria's declaration of war upon Serbia started the ruin of all that centuries had built up in Europe? Most of us have not stopped to analyze what has happened since to our belief that the world ever moved by an irresistible primal impulse forward to more and better things, that the song which the morning stars sang together was "It shall be multiplied unto you," that increment is inevitable and blessed. But how many of us really believe that in the unqualified way we once did?

The world had many pleasant illusions about Progress before the great catastrophe of 1914 came to shatter them. And nowhere were these illusions more cheerfully accepted than in this country of ours, where a wilderness had become a great civilization in the space of a century and where the evidences of rapid, continuous advancement were naturally strong.

The first pleasant illusion was that modern progress had made war impossible, at least war between the great nations of the earth, which, profiting by the examples we had set them, enjoyed more or less free governments, where production mounted from year to year, where wealth was ever increasing. Destiny plainly meant more and more iron dug from the ground and turned into steel machinery, larger, more powerful automobiles, taller and taller buildings, swifter and swifter elevators, more and more capacious freight cars, and destiny would not tolerate stopping all this for the insanity of destruction.

Moreover—how good were the ways of Progress—the ever increasing mastery over the forces of nature which had been fate's latest and best gift to humanity, approaching a sort of millennium of machinery, while creating vaster engines of industry had brought into being more and monstrous weapons of warfare.

Life with benignant irony was making man peaceful in spite of himself. His bigger and bigger cannon, his more and more lethal explosives were destroying his capacity for