§ 15
This Outline of our history would not be complete without at least a few words by way of a stock-taking of the state of mind in which we leave mankind to-day. For the history of our race for the last few thousand years is no more than a history of the development and succession of states of mind and of acts arising out of them. Human history is in essence a history of ideas, and these tremendous experiences of the war constitute a crowning epoch. In the past six years there must have been a destruction of fixed ideas, prejudices, and mental limitations unparalleled in all history. Never before can there have been so great and so universal an awakening from assumed and accepted things. Never before have men stood so barely face to face with the community of their interests and their common destiny. We do not begin to realize yet how much of the pre-war world is done with for good and all, and how much that is new is beginning. Few of us have attempted to measure yet the change in our own minds.
And on the whole and in spite of much eddying and backwash of motives and thought, there does seem to have been a step forward towards the consciousness of a collective need and of the possibility of a collective effort embracing all mankind. Death, waste, hunger, and disease are very rife to-day; the world is full of physical evils, but there is this mental awakening to set against them.
In all material things the year 1913 seems now, to a European at least, a year of amazing and unattainable plenty. But it was a year of great social discontent and of waste, of vice and an extravagant search for personal indulgence on the part of the free and wealthy classes. The Great War was visibly approaching; yet there was neither will nor understanding to prevent the catastrophe; smart and fashionable life capered to nigger dance tunes, and that hectic generation was disposed to welcome even a universal war as a fresh and crowning excitement. War did not seem real to the moods of that time; nothing seemed real to the moods of
not against the enemy's army… but against the civil population, in order to compel it to accept the will of the attacker."
For a good, well-balanced account of what modern war really means, see Philip Gibbs, Realities of War, already cited in two footnotes to § 8.
