That in the end they will come we need not doubt, but in the meantime an errant world, leaderless and ungoverned, is urged swiftly on towards catastrophe of either one sort or another, nor will it wait the coming of the indispensable leaders. It is not from the men whose potential greatness was perfected and revealed by war, Cardinal Mercier, for example, or Marshal Foch, great leaders absolutely of the first class, that solution is to be sought, for in their age is sufficient inhibition. It is rather from those whose character has actually been made by war, youths perhaps, who have fought and found, either in the armies or the navies or in the air, or even in some of the non-combatant branches of the Service. Boys they are now, perhaps, in years, but into them has been poured the energizing power that leads to mastership; to them is given the first fire of progressive revelation. Somewhere, in the still active units, on the way back to their homes and to civil life, or already mingled in the activities from which they were called for their great testing, are those who sooner or later will find themselves the leaders of the quest for a new life for the world. The Divine finger-touch has been granted them, the spark of inspiration has lightened in their souls, but seldom is the generation swift; it may be years before it is effected, and meanwhile only the Two Alternatives remain. For my own purpose in this book, perhaps indeed so far as society itself is concerned, it is a matter of indifference which is the victor in the fight for supremacy; the ultimate issue will be the same though the roads are various. Universal beastliness issuant of Russia, or universal materialism _redivivus_, the conditions of life will be intolerable, and in the end a new thing will be built up as different on the one hand to anarchy as on the other it is different to the industrial-democratic-materialist _régime_ of the immediate past. With the former we are assured some five hundred years not unlike those that followed the fall of Rome; with the latter we at least are given the respite of a brief Restoration, during which the war-bred potencies may mature, and at the end of the few gross years which would be allotted to this _status quo ante_-civilization, become operative to avert the horror of a recrudescent Bolshevism. At least so we may hope; on the other hand it may be doubted whether, after all, a revived and intensified materialism such as that which the reactionary element is attempting, would not afford an even less favourable and stimulating soil for fostering the possible war-potentialities than would red anarchy, for the suffocating qualities of gross luxuriance are sometimes more fatal than the desperate sensations of danger, adversity and shame. In any case, the immediate future is not one to be anticipated with enthusiasm or confidence and we shall do well to consider the course to be followed by those who reject the Two