at war, therefore, with its own forces of spiritual release; with whatever outstreaming generous forces the breasts of its people still contained. It thought it was coming to the rescue of liberty; for its leaders said it was going to make the world a safe place. But it was deceived. In going to war, it had itself been captured by the ancient tyrannies of the old world: nationalism, patriotism, militarism, state-mysticism, formulas by means of which the hu- man spirit had been held in an undeveloped, dependent, childish condition, and in the bonds of an animal past.
The dreary war years and the drearier after world of war, a shattered European life and an American harried by frights and intolerances and mob-fanaticisms, were about Bourne in those early weeks as though there were no time. Experience made him clairvoyant. Experience made him discover, under the disguises they wore, the forces which repress and withhold the human spirit from fresh, quick, significant forms of cultural expression; to scent out their presence with the instinct of the animal wary of the beasts that exist by preying on its kind. For he himself, all his short life, had been in mortal conflict with the shrinking dissipating powers of fear and hate and whatever else dissuades the spirit from its trials of strength. He had come into the dead becalmment of American life. And like the others of his group and time he had suffered in dumb blindness year long from the curious inertia of it. The teeming world had been a great parching emptiness around him. The "bright" bustling activity of American civilization did not exist for him. It was merely a kind of thin surface; and underneath the hammering and speeding and quiver of electric wires there lay, still as an Atlantis at the bottom of an oceanic valley, a world hardened in a dull, ugly shape. And, for all the bright commercial expansion, each year seemed to harden it the more. The earth was noisy and broken with meaningless, endless, directionless activity. Iron ribs of buildings were being lifted at a thousand points into the air amid the metallic pecking of the steel-riveter; every year there were hundreds of new factories, skyscrapers, lofts, stores, hotels, garages, flats. The trains and ferries and tunnels leading into Manhattan were thick black every morning with crowds streaming into the city to work; and every night the wave swept back during hours across the Jersey suburbs, and spilt itself in thick-set leagues of houses; and every year there were new hun-
