But if religious ideals have not greatly profited by the war, it is plain that in the field of social change we are on the eve of transformations--throughout Europe--which may well rank in history with the establishment of the Pax Romana, or the incursion of the northern races upon the Empire; with the Renaissance, or the French Revolution. In our case, the vast struggle, in the course of which millions of British men and women have been forcibly shaken out of all their former ways of life and submitted to a sterner discipline than anything they have ever known, while, at the same time, they have been roused by mere change of circumstance and scene to a strange new consciousness both of themselves and the world, cannot pass away without permanently affecting the life of the State and the relation of all its citizens to each other. In the country districts, especially, no one of my years can watch what is going on without a thrilling sense, as though, for us who are nearing the last stage of life, the closed door of the future had fallen mysteriously ajar and one caught a glimpse through it of a coming world which no one could have dreamt of before 1914. Here, for instance, is a clumsy, speechless laborer of thirty-five, called up under the Derby scheme two years ago. He was first in France and is now in Mesopotamia. On his first leave he reappears in his native village. His family and friends scarcely know him. Always a good fellow, he has risen immeasurably in mental and spiritual stature. For him, as for Cortez, on the "peak in Darien," the veil has been drawn aside from wonders and secrets of the world that, but for the war, he would have died without even guessing at. He stands erect; his eyes are brighter and larger; his speech is different. Here is another--a boy--a careless and troublesome boy he used to be--who has been wounded, and has had a company officer of whom he speaks, quietly indeed, but as he could never have spoken of any one in the old days. He has learned to love a man of another social world, with whom he has gone, unflinching, into a hell of fire and torment. He has seen that other dare and die, leading his men, and has learned that a "swell" can reckon _his_ life--his humble, insignificant life as it used to be--as worth more than his own.