An invention seems to be needed that will insure adequate knowledge in high officials in governments. But such an invention is not really needed, because it is merely necessary to utilize an invention made and used in Greece many centuries ago. This invention consisted in conceiving, developing and producing a system whereby every candidate for any office was required to show adequate knowledge of matters coming within the jurisdiction of that office, by passing a rigid examination. Such a system may be deemed impracticable in modern representative governments. _Why?_ It is followed in all civilized armies and navies. If it be really impracticable, then it is impracticable to assure that wise and able men shall manage the complex Machine of Civilization. This means, if history has any lessons for us, that sooner or later, it will again go down in ruin;--as it has gone down at different periods of the past, in Egypt and Assyria and Babylon and Rome. That influences are already at work which impair the functioning of the Machine in the present and threaten its continuance in the future, cannot reasonably be denied. Of these, the two most powerful may be classed under the general heading "bolshevistic" and "pacifistic." At the bottom of the bolshevistic movement is, of course, the thirst for wealth and power; the thirst for opportunities for handling and using the Machine and its various parts, by men who have done no work in designing, or building, or caring for it. At the bottom of the pacifistic movement is effeminacy: a desire for mere ease and luxury and softness, a shirking of responsibility and discipline and sacrifice. These two influences, unlike though they are, combine to threaten the Machine; the bolshevistic by assault, the pacifistic by insuring weakness of resistance to assault. Of these, the pacifistic is the more dangerous, because the more insidious; for the same reason that a disease hidden inside is more dangerous than an attack made openly outside. The most potent cause of pacifism is the effeminacy caused by the combination of prosperity and long-continued peace, with its resulting division of a population into a vulgarly ostentatious rich minority and a more or less envious poor majority. When a division like this has come to pass, hostile conflict has usually ensued. Such a conflict produced the French Revolution, and almost wrecked the Machine in France. Such a conflict is now in progress in Russia, and threatens some parts of Europe.