“Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end, giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as they left the town far behind. McCann’s eyebrows were knotted in a scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing solemnly the town he had left: ‘I hope from my soul that I may live to see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl though the ruin of that “thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis”; when the very name it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for horror and despair!’ Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and felt better.”[A] [A] “The Decadent,” 1893. I What is the way out? The question that was universal during the war, “How has this thing come?” gives place to the other that is no less poignant and no less universal, “What is the way out?” There must be a way; this coil of uttermost confusion must be solvable, must be solved--_if only we knew the way!_ There can be no going back, of that we are sure, and the industry of the serious-minded men, busy with set faces and a brave optimism, in their cheerful efforts to restore the old course of events after an accidental interlude, fills us with a kind of shame that people who have lived through the war should have learned so little both of the war and from it. Four years have ended the work of four centuries and--there is no going back. “Finis” has been written at the end of a long episode and there is no way by which we can knit together again the strands that are severed forever. There is even less desire than ability. It does not show very well in the red light of war, that act in the great world-drama that opened with the dissolution of Mediævalism and the coming of the Renaissance; that developed through the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the sequent industrialism, to its climax and catastrophe in war. There is little in it we would have back if we could, but the unstable equilibrium in which we hang for the moment, poised between reactionism and universal anarchy, cannot last; already the balance is inclining towards chaos, and in the six months that will intervene between the writing of this and its publication it may very well be that the decision of inertia will be made and the plunge effected that will bring us down into that unintelligent repetition of history now so