in the streets, the breakfast-table of the prosperous home is spread, the professor begins his lecture, the shop assistants greet their first customers.... Outwardly it is very like the world before the war. And yet it is profoundly different. The sense of inevitable routines that held all the world in thrall six years ago has gone. And the habitual assurance of security has gone too. The world has been roused—for a time at least—to great dangers and great desires. These minds, this innumerable multitude of minds, are open to fresh ideas of association and duty and relationship as they were never open before. The old confused and divided world is condemned; it is going on provisionally under a sentence of great and as yet incalculable change.
Every one of these hundred of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness, is driven by complex and conflicting motives, is guided by habits, is swayed by base cravings, by endless suggestions, by passions and affections, by vague exalted ideas. Every one of them is capable of cruelties and fine emotions, of despairs and devotions and self-forgetful effort. All of them forget; all of them become slack with fatigue and fearful or mean or incapable under a sufficient strain. The follies of vanity entrap them all into absurdities. Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile. Every one of them can be unhappy, every one can feel disappointment and remorse. Not a single one but has at some time wept. And in every one of them is a streak of divinity. Each one for all the obsessions of self is yet dimly aware of something in common, of something that could make a unity out of our infinite diversity. And they are everyone more aware of this than in 1913. Through all the world grows the realization that there can be no securely happy individual life without a righteous general life. Through all the world spreads the suspicion that this scheme of things might be remade, and remade better, and that our present evils need not be. Our lives, we see with a growing certitude, are fretted and shadowed and spoilt because there is as yet no worldwide law, no certain justice. Yet there is nothing absolutely unattainable in world law and world justice. More men are capable of realizing this than was ever possible at any previous time. And to be aware of a need is to be half-way towards its satisfaction.
