But consider the pathetic result. He got it. A great war crisis arrived. He wished to be useful with his great (and purely imaginary) power, to do some significant thing which would help the world or at least his country in its hour of stress. Had he the mental or spiritual equipment to see or even feel what was needed? Or was he but one of that immense class of American men and women who discovered in this crisis that business somehow failed to fulfill their spiritual needs and reached out from it, only to find themselves lost in a maze of wider relationships for which they had no technique? Ford organized a peace ship! He, with a little load of editors, journalists, preachers and what not, going to Europe to “call the men out of the trenches by Christmas!” (1915). And the wise American papers, especially in our Middle and Far West, full of his praises, and the probability of success! It could be done! And that, in the face of an amazing and subtle racial movement and propaganda, with war and conquest as its under-stones, organizing in Germany since the year 1813. The rest contented themselves with making more money. So much for one American business giant’s success, and his intellectual grasp on life! * * * * * Take yet another phase in conclusion. At the beginning of the great world war we were constantly hearing talk of “the obligations laid upon us,” “our duty to civilization,” the necessity for “making the world safe for democracy,” when, as a matter of fact and according to our chief spokesman’s own admission it was not until between the third and fourth year of the war that we began to realize the true program or purpose of the enemy and that some such enthusiasm as was at first called for might be necessary! We talked of the time having come for us “to play our part among the societies of the world”--and then sent a Root and a Francis (corporation lawyers and agents both, and long since discredited by the American people themselves) to argue with the representatives of a torn and war-worn people seeking a new and better form of social and political life. In the war itself it was apparently assumed that “men, money and ships” (the old American idea of quantity, you see, not ideas or wits wherewith to match the deepest schemes of our adversaries as well as our friends) was the point. But life or international politics and relations or diplomacy is something more than that. It may, and did, require nothing less than a mobilization of new characteristics and unique forces on the part of the pacifistic and religious-minded American. It actually compelled him to open his brains to the fact that life is more dark and mysterious than he had supposed, more forceful and terrible and cruel than his petty little pacifistic and puritanic dreams would previously have permitted him to believe. A door was unlocked, a window opened, and looking out or in on the deeps