Walled Towns

What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war, “How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be solved—if only we knew the way! There can be no going back, of that we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended the work of four centuries and—there is no going back. “Finis” has been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return nor remain but—would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement.