inorities and other political conceptions in
various states of Europe helped to loosen the cement of the
politico-social structure there.

Through these as well as other channels virulent poison penetrated to
the marrow of the social organism. Language itself, on which all human
intercourse hinges, was twisted to suit unwholesome ambitions, further
selfish interests, and obscure the vision of all those who wanted real
reforms and unvarnished truth. During the war the armies were never told
plainly what they were struggling for; officially they were said to be
combating for justice, right, self-determination, the sacredness of
treaties, and other abstract nouns to which the heroic soldiers never
gave a thought and which a section of the civil population
misinterpreted. Indeed, so little were these shibboleths understood even
by the most intelligent among the politicians who launched them that one
half of the world still more or less conscientiously labors to establish
their contraries and is anathematizing the other half for championing
injustice, might, and unveracity--under various misnomers.

Anglo-Saxondom, taking the lead of humanity, imitated the Catholic
states of by-past days, and began to impose on other peoples its own
ideas, as well as its practices and institutions, as the best fitted to
awaken their dormant energies and contribute to the social
reconstruction of the world. In the interval, language, whether applied
to history, journalism, or diplomacy, was perverted and words lost their
former relations to the things connoted, and solemn promises were
solemnly broken in the name of truth, right, or equity. For the new era
of good faith, justice and morality was inaugurated, oddly enough, by a
general tearing up of obligatory treaties and an ethical violation of
the most binding compacts known to social man. This happened
coincidently to be in keeping with the general insurgence against all
checks and restraints, moral and social, for which the war is mainly
answerable, and to be also in harmony with the regular supersession of
right by might which characterizes the present epoch and with the
disappearance of the sense of law. In a word, under the auspices of the
amateur world-reformers, the tendency of Bolshevism throve and
spread--an instructive case of people serving the devil at the bidding
of God's best friends.

As in the days of the Italian despots, every individual has the chance
of rising to the h