the Meaning of America, the
Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy,
Humanity--this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet
had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on
apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon
as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed
to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of
reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory
which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was
being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in
Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth
and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.

But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old
order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions,
ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first
decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been
precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and
the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of
civilization.

It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of
the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new
inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we
saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the
upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of
attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their
ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of
reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We
are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is
such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic
and political equality.

Even the cheapness of motor-cars will overtake the champions of
industrial monopoly, who at the first used them for the hoarding of
social power. The submarine can at the first only be turned against the
freedom of the seas during times of peace. The aeroplane and the
airship, more than any other instruments of locomotion, will assist in
the diffusion of initiative among all the outlying and small nations of
the earth. More than anything else they will assist the weak and the
meek of the earth to rush together to