Nor is education--free, universal, secular and “efficient”--an universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history, initiated by the most highly and generally educated of all peoples, by them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but for the omnipresent horror. And the same is true both of industrialism and democracy, for both have belied the promises of their instigators and have brought in, not peace and plenty and liberty, but universal warfare, outrageous poverty, and the tyranny of the ignorant and the unfit. Before the revelations of war, while the curious superstitions of the nineteenth century were still in vogue, it was widely held that evolution, education and democracy were irresistible, and that progress from then on must be continuous and by arithmetical if not geometrical progression. When the war came and the revelations began to unfold themselves, it was held with equal comprehensiveness that even if our civilization had been an illusion, our trinity of mechanistic saviours but a bundle of broken reeds, the war itself would prove a great regenerative agency, and that out of its fiery purgation would issue forth a new spirit that would redeem the world. It is a fair question to ask whether those that once saw this bow of promise in the red skies have found the gold at the rainbow’s end or are now even sure the radiance itself has not faded into nothingness. Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism and self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation developed during the fight, and the emergence sooner or later of isolated personalities who have retained the ardour of spiritual regeneration, who seem indeed to epitomize it within themselves, and who struggle, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure, to bring the mass of people back to their lost ideals and embody these in a better type of society. Apparently success or failure depends on whether the particular war in question came on the rise or the fall of the rhythmical curve that conditions all history.