Quite possibly a little that was fine and true has gone overboard with the rubbish, but most of the destruction was salutary. And it has served, it seems to me, to bring those two classes, the dumb majority and the articulate minority, closer together than ever before. In a sense it is not a real closeness; for, as I have said, the two can never touch, one living among facts, the other in a picture of facts. But at least the picture now bears some relation to the facts, is by way of becoming what it must become to be of any value--an interpretation of them. This, surely, is something to the credit of our disillusioned period. It is a puzzling period to study, and would still be so, I think, even were we not in the midst of it. It questions everything, all once accepted premises. Yet it is not like other great periods of change--the Reformation or the Romantic Revival, for instance. They were, in one way or another, periods of revolution, when men brushed aside the past, sure that they had found something better--sure because they felt young and fresh. The present period is not young and fresh; it is very, very tired. And so, despite the obvious and extensive social changes that it has already witnessed, it is not in spirit revolutionary. It questions everything--governments, nationality, economics, religion, human nature, life itself--but it is not young enough or fresh enough to discard recklessly. People question and wonder, yet vote overwhelmingly for the Republicans in America and the Conservatives in England. Phenomena such as these and others more distressing are frequently cited as evidence that ours is a period of discouraging reaction. I do not agree. The bitter intolerance displayed by such movements as Fascismo--or, for that matter, Fundamentalism--is, to my thinking, a good sign, rather than a bad. It means that violent intolerance is to-day forced back where it belongs--to the outskirts, to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. It is violent and domineering because it dares not be otherwise; it represents only an inconsiderable fraction of the whole, and is afraid. At the moment when I write this, Fascismo still governs Italy, but it has against it probably eighty per cent. of the population, and governs by force alone, suppressing its most dangerous enemies, muzzling the press, forbidding political gatherings, dissolving societies, outraging the constitutional rights of individuals. Such tyranny signifies fear--fear based on the certain knowledge of the Fascisti that they and their policies do not represent the country.