is no going back and beginning over again. The
social life, like the religious life, must grow and change until the
human story is at an end.

So that this war involves, in this as in so many matters, no fundamental
set-back, no reversals nor restorations. At the most it will but realise
things already imagined, release things latent. The nineteenth century
was a period of unprecedented modification of social relationships; but
great as these changes were, they were trivial in comparison with the
changes in religious thought and the criticism of moral ideals. Hell was
the basis of religious thinking in A.D. 1800, and the hangman was at the
back of the law; in 1900 both Hell and the hangman seemed on the verge
of extinction. The creative impulse was everywhere replacing fear and
compulsion in human motives. The opening decade of the twentieth century
was a period of unprecedented abundance in everything necessary to human
life, of vast accumulated resources, of leisure and release. It was
also, because of that and because of the changed social and religious
spirit, a period of great social disorganisation and confused impulses.

We British can already look back to the opening half of 1914 as to an
age gone for ever. Except that we were all alive then and can remember,
it has become now almost as remote, almost as "historical," as the days
before the French Revolution. Our days, our methods and reactions, are
already so different. The greater part of the freedom of movement, the
travel and going to and fro, the leisure, the plenty and carelessness,
that distinguished early twentieth century life from early nineteenth
century life, has disappeared. Most men are under military discipline,
and every household economises. The whole British people has been
brought up against such elementary realities of need, danger, and
restraint as it never realised before. We discover that we had been
living like Olympians in regard to worldly affairs, we had been
irresponsibles, amateurs. Much of that fatness of life, the wrappings
and trimmings of our life, has been stripped off altogether. That has
not altered the bones of life; it has only made them plainer; but it has
astonished us as much as if looking into a looking-glass one suddenly
found oneself a skeleton. Or a diagram.

What was going on before this war in the relations of men and women is
going on still, with more rapidity perhaps, and certainly with more
thoroughness. The w