clearly indicated in Russia, Austria, Germany. We can neither return nor remain but--would we go on, at least along the lines that are at present indicated? Are we tempted by the savage and stone-age ravings and ravenings of Bolshevism? Have we any inclination towards that super-imperialism of the pacifist-internationalist-Israelitish “League of Free Nations” that comes in such questionable shape? Does State Socialism with all its materialistic mechanisms appeal to us? Other alleviation is not offered and in these we can see no encouragement. It is the eternal dilemma of the Two Alternatives, which is nevertheless no more than a vicious sophism: “Either you will take this or you must have that,” the starling-cry of partizan politics by which “democracies” have lived. In all human affairs there are never only two alternatives, there is always a third and sometimes more; but this unrecognized alternative never commands that popular leadership which “carries the election,” and it does not appeal to a public that prefers the raw obviousness of the extremes. Yet it is the third alternative that is always the right one, except when the God-made leaders, the time having come for a new upward rush of the vital force in society, put themselves in the vanguard of the new advance and lift the world with them, as it were by main force. Reactionism or Bolshevism: “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” We are told that the old world of before-the-war must be restored in its integrity or we must fall a victim to the insane anarchy of a proletariat in revolt, and for many of us there is little to choose between the two. We have seen how fragile, artificial and insecure is civilization, how instantly and hopelessly it can crumble into a sort of putrid dissolution the moment its conventions are challenged and the ultimate principles of democracy are put in practice, and we do not like it. We have seen Russia, Germany, Hungary, and sporadic but disquieting examples in every State, no matter how conservative it may be or how successful in a first stamping out of the flame. On the other hand, we saw the triumph of “Modern Civilization” in the twenty-five years preceding the Great War, and as we realize now what it was, through the revelations it has made of itself during the last five years, we like it quite as little as the other. We see it now as an impossible farrago of false values, of loud-mouthed sentimentality and crude, cold-blooded practices; of gross, all-pervading injustice sicklied o’er with the pale cast of smug humanitarianism; a democracy of form that was without ideal or reality in practice; imperialism, materialism and the quantitative standard. Is there no alternative other than this, restored in its unvarying ugliness of fact and of manifestation, or the imitative era of a new Dark Ages which will be brought to pass by the new hordes of Huns and Vandals that again, after fifteen centuries, menace a greater