that participation, as many of the liberal hopeful compromised intellectuals permitted themselves to perceive it, in the attractive shape of a nice trained doggy who would go fetch the world out the water and deposit it gently in their laps and there let them refashion it at their good pleasure. His sense of reality was deeper. Before the government decided a state of war he had guessed what nigger lay concealed in the woodpile of belligerency. He had done his uttermost to dissuade the new-republicans from letting themselves be used slyly by the Administration as decoys for liberal opinion. He had opposed the repressing, illiberal, reactionary movement, which was sliding the country into the trenches, with a new statement of the democratic ideal of a community of beings each one constituting a religion to himself. In the statement, he had rejected colonialism, bastard Anglo-Saxondom, and the cheap melting-pot American in favour of a transnational America; an America itself a world-federation in miniature possessed of a culture that was "a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors." The weeks which followed on the opening of hostilities merely corroborated his most sinister intuitions. The surge toward education, toward the release of the capacities for more impassioned living which had once thrilled the mind of the nation did not, he knew, express itself through forms as malevolent as those which began to crop up on every side like spearheads sown. The soldiers who tried to lynch Max Eastman proved only too well that "current patriotism was not a product of the will to remake the world." The American house itself was afire.
Behind the war, using the war as an instrument of aggression, was the obscure force which has kept the human being in ignorance and in a condition of servitude through the centuries, periodically recalling him to his bestial past and making him to destroy the capital of self-reliance assembled for him by years of comparative freedom. War was the "health of the state." War was the vitalization of herd attitudes. The mystical form made healthy by war, the imago of the father projected onto the cultural group, had always been the instrument whereby the resources of communities had been exploited for the benefit of classes. And the capture of a community by the privileged classes had invariably resulted in the spread, in the interests of privilege, of a universal passive resistance to "the effort of reason and the adventure of beauty." America was
