Behind most of the modern hostility towards established and traditional institutions, it is not only a matter of mere caution, but also essentially scientific to suspect a certain amount of physical as well as psychical exhaustion. Modern mankind is tired, both bodily and spiritually. The pale fireless eyes of our urban adults alone ought to make us suspect the truth about this matter. Two thousand years of the increasing complication of Life, during which man’s attention has had ever more and more detail to occupy it, together with a feeling of very genuine disillusionment on the part of the most enlightened regarding the highest ideals of the past; two thousand years, moreover, of progressive debilitation, during which the resisting powers of exuberant health have gradually and steadily been worn down--must have had their effect upon recent generations, and materially impaired their ability to face the institutions of their forefathers with their forefathers’ spirit, health and understanding. It cannot be repeated too often that it would be gravely unscientific, nay imprudent, to proceed to an examination of the modern hostility to traditional ideas and principles without taking into account [p28] the attitude of mind, the tone of mind, and the degree of health, of those who represent this hostility. The fact that modern books on political questions usually take as their data the very conclusions to which this hostility has led, without previously determining the validity of the whole standpoint, or discovering the kind of minds that are responsible for it, need not deter us from departing from the customary method. Nor can our superior caution in this respect be fairly interpreted as bias. It must surely be clear to most of us that, not only we ourselves, but all our contemporaries as well, are radically and incurably weary. Our physical resistance against disease is as seriously in peril as is our spiritual resistance against error, or against those ideals and desires that can appeal only to invalids. Where life is ebbing, however, her most fundamental principles, her most inexorable demands, must be losing the force of their appeal. An ear is therefore lent ever more willingly and eagerly to doctrines and precepts which are non-vital, which already have about them the bitter effluvia of death; and it becomes ever more and more difficult to withstand the fascination of this new persuasiveness. But because Man has reached a degree of lassitude that induces him to listen more patiently and submissively than of yore, to doctrines and precepts of decline and decay, it does not follow that these doctrines are irresistible either in their rational or emotional appeal. It does not even follow that their _rational_ dressing is any more [p29] above suspicion than they are themselves. The attempt intellectually to justify and bolster up a sickly tenet may be as unhealthy as that tenet itself.