Yet it is now evident why modern civilization is so durable. Its strength lies in its sensitiveness. The effect of bad decisions is so quickly felt, the consequences are so inescapably serious, that corrective action is almost immediately set in motion. A simple society like Russia can let its railroads go gradually to wrack and ruin, but a complex society like London or New York is instantly disorganized if the railroads do not run on schedule. So many persons are at once affected in so many vitally important ways that remedies have to be found immediately. This does not mean that modern states are governed as wisely as they should be, or that they do not neglect much that they cannot really afford to neglect. They blunder along badly enough in all conscience. There is nevertheless a minimum of order and of necessary services which they have to provide for themselves. They have to keep going. They cannot afford the luxury of prolonged disorder or of a general paralysis. Their own necessities are dependent on such fragile structures, and everyone is so much affected, that when a modern state is in trouble it can draw upon incomparable reserves of public spirit. “I made ninety-one local committees in ninety-one local communities to look after the Mississippi flood,” Mr. Hoover once explained, “that’s what I principally did.... You say: ‘a couple of thousand refugees are coming. They’ve got to have accommodations. Huts. [p274] Water-mains. Sewers. Streets. Dining-halls. Meals. Doctors. Everything.’... So you go away and they go ahead and just simply do it. Of all those ninety-one committees there was just one that fell down.” Mr. Hard, who reports these remarks, goes on to make Mr. Hoover say that: “No other Main Street in the world could have done what the American Main Street did in the Mississippi flood; and Europe may jeer as it pleases at our mass production and our mass organization and our mass education. The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass leadership.” Allowing for the fact that these remarks appeared in a campaign biography at a time when Mr. Hoover’s friends were rather concerned about demonstrating the intensity of his patriotism, there is nevertheless substantial truth in them. I am inclined to believe that “multitudinous mass leadership” will be found wherever industrial society is firmly established, that is to say, wherever a people has lived with the machine process long enough to acquire the aptitudes that it calls for. This capacity to organize, to administer affairs, to deal realistically with necessity, can hardly be due to some congenital superiority in the American people. They are, after all only transplanted Europeans. That their aptitudes may be somewhat more highly developed is not, however, inconceivable: the new civilization may have developed more freely in a land where it did not have to contend with the institutions of a military, feudal, and clerical society.