In poetry, where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal.

In commerce, the revolt is against the purity of standards and the integrity of business morals.

Who can question that this is pre-eminently the age of the sham and the counterfeit?

But when in the history of American business was there such a volume of broken faith as in the drastic deflation of 1920?

In the greater sphere of social life, we find the same revolt against the institutions which have the sanction of the past.

Social laws, which mark the decent restraints of print, speech and dress, have in recent decades been increasingly disregarded.

The very foundations of the great and primitive institutions of mankind--like the family, the Church, and the State--have been shaken.

Thus, the fundamental difference of sex is disregarded by social and political movements which ignore the permanent differentiation of social function ordained by Nature.

All these are but illustrations of the general revolt against the authority of the past--a revolt that can be measured by the change in the fundamental presumption of men with respect to the value of human experience.

In all former ages, all that was in the past was presumptively true, and the burden was upon him who sought to change it.

To-day, the human mind apparently regards the lessons of the past as presumptively false--and the burden is upon him who seeks to invoke them.

I trust that I have already shown that the challenge to authority is universal and is not confined to that of the political state.

Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering.

Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt.

If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among the most enlightened peoples, the underground rumblings of revolution may be…

But the insurrection against the political state in England was more political than it was economic.

It marked, on the part of millions of men, a portentous decay of belief in representative government and its chosen organ--the ballot box.

Great and powerful groups had suddenly discovered--and it may be the most portentous political discovery of the twentieth century--that the power involved in their control over the necessaries of life, as compared with the power of the…

Of greater significance to the welfare of civilization is the complete subversion during the world war of nearly all the international laws which had been slowly built up in a thousand years.

The war to end war only ended in unprecedented hatred between nation and nation, class and class, and man and man.

Victors and vanquished are involved in a common ruin.

And if in this deluge of blood, which has submerged the world, there is a Mount Ararat, upon which the ark of a truer and better peace can find refuge, it has not yet appeared above the troubled surface of the waters.

The moral of our industrial civilization has been shattered.

Work for work's sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit.

The conception of work as a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes and in all countries.