professed “philosopher,” and you will find the attitude of mind that looks on the war and the current beginnings of social revolution as untoward episodes, the insane creations of froward men, that only need time and patience for the crushing, to permit the world to go on again just as before, only faster and more gloriously, towards the iridescent apotheosis of democratic politics, imperial business, scientific acquisition, and the reign of reason. The incubus of the thing-that-is cannot be shifted and, as so many times before, it is only ruthless catastrophe that can bring it to an end. Similarly we do not realize how new a thing is this tyranny of the material product, this obsession of the machine and the things it produces, the ideas and habits and superstitions it generates. I am not so old a man, as lives run, but I can still remember the old patriarchal life of the New England countryside before the juggernaut that crushed wholesome society and sane living had begun its fatal course. In the year 1880, when I first knew a great city, there were only three forces then in operation which differentiated its growth that had not existed in the time of Cæsar--steam as power, the electric telegraph and the elevator, the last a novelty of less than ten years’ existence. The great forces that were to transform society had been in existence for varying periods: some from the Renaissance, some from the Reformation, some from the Civil Wars in England, some from the French Revolution, some from the mechanical discoveries between 1767 and 1830, some from our own Civil War. It is not until the latter date, however, that they became fully operative; and the incubus we would now remove, if we could, and if we fully realized its nature, is actually the creation of the last fifty years. I have said above that I clearly remember the old _régime_ as it stood at the opening of this fifty-year period of monstrous aggregation, exaggeration and acceleration, and this memory, together with some thirty years of study of Mediæval civilization, has much to do with the conviction that man cannot be free or sane or reasonably happy until he forcibly tears himself (or forcibly is torn) from the deadly evil of modernism in which he is enmeshed. The positive memory may help to show something of that to which I conceive we must return.