Alternatives and refuse to have any part in either. II It is not my intention to write another in the long list of Utopias with which man has amused himself, from Plato to H. G. Wells. Where the preceding volumes in this series have been frankly destructive, I would make this volume constructive, if only by suggestion. It is in no sense a programme, it is still less an effort at establishing an ideal. Let us call it “a way out,” for it is no more than this; not “the” way, nor yet a way to anything approaching a perfect State, still less a perfect condition of life, but rather a possible issue out of a present _impasse_ for some of those who, as I have said, peremptorily reject both of the intolerable alternatives now offered them. What I have to propose is based on acceptance, at least substantially, of the criticisms of modernism that appear in “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” and in “The Sins of the Fathers”; it also assumes the general accuracy of the interpretation of history attempted in “The Great Thousand Years,” and the estimate of certain historic religio-social forces therein described. To those who dissent from these opinions this volume will contain nothing and they will be well advised if they pursue it no further. Since it is written for those who have done me the honour to read these previous books, I shall not try to epitomize them here, assuming as I do a certain familiarity with their general argument. All that it is necessary to say is that the assumption is made that “modern civilization” was essentially an inferior product; that it could have had no other issue than precisely such a war as occurred; that its fundamental weaknesses were its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard; that the particular type of “democracy” for which the world was to be made safe was and is a menace to righteous society, since it had lowered and reversed all standards, established the reign of the venal, the incapable and the unfit, and had destroyed all competent leadership while preventing its generation, and that the only visible hope of recovery lay in a restoration of the unit of human scale, the passion for perfection, and a certain form of philosophy known as sacramentalism, with the precedents of the monastic method used as a basis of operation, and the whole put in process through the leadership of great captains of men such as always in the past have accomplished the building up of society after cataclysms similar to that which during five years has brought modernism to an end.