ory populations ought not to be
overlooked in this connection. In all the Western nations there has been
an outstanding growth of industrial city populations due to changing
economic conditions. The steadying influences of old environments have
been lost, the influence of the new environment is too stimulating at
its best and demoralizing at its worst. Our cities are not kind to home
life; too often they do not supply a proper physical setting for it. The
specialization of hard driven industries takes the creative joy out of
work and leads to an excess of highly commercialized pleasure. The
result is the modern city worker, never living long enough in one place
to create for himself a normal social environment, always anxious about
his economic future, restless, too largely alternating between
strenuous work and highly coloured pleasure and much open, through
temperament and circumstance, to the appeal of whatever promises him a
new experience or a new freedom.

_The Lure of the Short Cut_

Dean Inge in a recent study of the contribution of the Greek temper to
religion has drawn a strong, though deeply shadowed picture of the
disorganization of modern life through such influences as these. "The
industrial revolution has generated a new type of barbarism, with no
roots in the past. For the second time in the history of Western Europe,
continuity is in danger of being lost. A generation is growing up, not
uneducated, but educated in a system which has little connection with
European culture in its historical development. The Classics are not
taught; the Bible is not taught; history is not taught to any effect.
What is even more serious, there are no social traditions. The modern
townsman is _deracine_: he has forgotten the habits and sentiments of
the village from which his forefathers came. An unnatural and unhealthy
mode of life, cut off from the sweet and humanizing influences of
nature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy mentality, to which we
shall find no parallels in the past. Its chief characteristic is
profound secularity or materialism. The typical town artisan has no
religion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond the visible and
tangible world of senses."[7]

[Footnote 7: "The Legacy of Greece," p. 38.]

Writing as an Englishman Dean Inge did not note the equally unsettling
influence of migratory races. The European peasant in Detroit or Chicago
or New York is still more _deracine_. He has no