At the present moment the first of these two phenomena has shown itself. Whether it is in Russia or in the fragments of the despoiled Central Empires where the ominous horror of Bolshevism riots in a carnival of obscene destruction, or in the governments and “interests” and amongst the peoples of the Allies, there is now, corporately, no evidence of anything but a general break-down of ideals, and either an accelerating plunge into something a few degrees worse than barbarism, with the Dark Ages as its inevitable issue, or an equally fatal return to the altogether hopeless, indeed the pestilential, standards and methods of the fruition of modernism in the world-before-the-war. The new warfare is between these, the malignant old Two Alternatives; fear of one encompasses the other, and in each case all that is done is with the terror of Bolshevism conditioning all on the one hand, terror of reactionism on the other. Expediency, desperate self-preservation, is the controlling passion, and the principles of justice, right and reason are no longer operative. As this is written there is no sure indication as to which of these alternatives is to prevail, but it is for the moment quite clearly indicated that it will be the one or the other,--either the tyranny of the degraded, Bolshevism, universal anarchy, with the modernist reversal of all values succeeded by the post-modernist destruction of all values, or the triumph of reaction, with a return to the world-before-the-war for a brief period of profligate excess along all materialistic, intellectual and scientific lines not unlike the Restoration period of Charles II, with the same ruin achieved in the end though after a certain interlude. And yet the third alternative is theoretically possible: escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of error through the opportune development of the second phenomenon, the reasonable certainty of which is indicated by history--the appearance of those leaders of vision and power who had been generated through the alchemy of war.