Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look, like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment. Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could find its head again.