e old fumbling, half-figurative,
half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and
confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor
of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but
a curious and pleasantly faded memory. "There must be a common
training of the young," said Richover; "a frank initiation. We have
not so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps.
And it might have been so easy--it can all be done so easily."

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, "It can
all be done so easily," but when they said it then, it came to my
ears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power. It can all
be done so easily, given frankness, given courage. Time was when
these platitudes had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans--that mythical,
heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men's imaginations--was
a mere exhausted episode. A truce had already been arranged
by Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences,
set aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular
arrangements. . . . The whole scheme of the world's government had
become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as
in great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts
and municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the
interlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of
little interests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable
multitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived
like fleas in a dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies,
heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order--they
flung it all on one side.

"What are the new needs?" said Melmount. "This muddle is too rotten
to handle. We're beginning again. Well, let us begin afresh."

Section 3

"Let us begin afresh!" This piece of obvious common sense seemed
then to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words. My heart
went out to him as he spoke. It was, indeed, that day as vague as
it was valiant; we did not at all see the forms of what we were
thus beginning. All that we saw was the clear inevitableness
that the old order should end. . . .

And then in a little space of time mankind in halting but effectual
brotherhood was moving out to make its world anew. Those early
years, those first and second decades of the new