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AM sitting down to write this paper only a few hours after having accepted the presidency of the University of Wisconsin. As I said in a statement to the press at the time I accepted this post, it was no easy matter to break the ties that bind me to the congenial and challenging field of journalism. But the decision has been made for reasons that seem sound to me, and now for the first time, as I begin the writing of this paper, it fully dawns upon me that for only a few more issues will I have the privilege of talking over with the readers of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE from month to month what seem to me to be the really significant issues of American life and of the Western civilization of which we are part.

I have come to feel an almost personal acquaintanceship with the readers of the magazine, especially with the many readers who have always written to me so frankly their approval or disapproval of the things I have written and of the things that have been printed in the magazine during the years that I, along with my colleagues, have been privileged to edit it. It would be keeping back the truth not to say that I envy the new hands that will direct and the fresh voices that will speak through THE CENTURY

MAGAZINE. They will have the challenging job of ministering to one of the most-alert minded and stimulating bodies of readers in the world. I could not wish for any man or any group of men a happier or more invigorating relationship than the relationship I have sustained to the readers of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, to the other members of the staff, and to The Century Co., the trustees and president of which have always displayed those qualities of intellectual honesty, tolerance, and courage which have made possible a wholly unhampered editorial freedom in this office during the last four years.

But I do not want to fall into ill advised reminiscence. I cannot, however, resist glancing retrospectively over the seventy-five issues of the magazine in which I have written editorial essays ranging from twentyfive hundred to twelve thousand words each. At no time have these essays been written in carefully planned sequence. Only occasionally has the same topic been pursued for a series of issues. I have been, perhaps, unpardonably casual in the month-tomonth selection of topics. But, as I glance over these seventy-five numbers of the magazine, I sense a rather decently sustained attempt to consider

the problems of contemporary society from the point of view of what, for want of a better phrase, I may call scientific humanism, as distinguished from sentimental humanitarianism.

I do not mean that I see in these hastily written essays any body of nicely articulated social doctrines to which I wish to make fixed and final commitment. I have, on the contrary, consistently fought against the plague of premature conclusions, in the bog of which so much of our thinking is sunk. These essays have been little more than a record of the tentative approaches and suspended judgments of one American who has been trying to make himself at home in the modern world, trying to orientate himself among the new forces that are making this time what it is.

On a far smaller scale and in terms of a much shorter adventure, I have something of the feeling H. G. Wells had when recently he read the proofs of the Atlantic edition of his works. "The total effect of these articles and these books of mine on my mind," he said, "is of a creature trying to find its way out of a prison into which it has fallen. I recall how in my boyhood I made a little prison of paper and cardboard for a beetle, and how I heard the poor perplexed beast incessantly crawling and scratching and fluttering inside. I forget what became of it. Perhaps I gave it its freedom; perhaps it pressed and worried at the corners where the light came through, and made an enlarged hole and worried its own way out. But I remember the dirty scratches and traces of its explorations on the unfolded paper cage. To a larger mind these books and articles of mind will seem very like those markings."

These papers of mine have been, at best, only beetle scratchings. But for me, at least, if not for the readers, the beetle has caught glimpses of light through some of the corners and crevices, and unless I am wrong in thinking that these papers have more coherence than their publication without topical sequence may have suggested, I doubt that I can do better during the few remaining months of my editorship than to pull together and to weave into something of a pattern the scattered threads of thinking that have run through these pages during the last four years.

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I shall take as the nucleating center of this summary or rehearsal the problem with which so many of these essays have dealt directly or indirectly -The outlook for Western civilization. I shall, in the main, restate and clarify, condensing here and amplifying there as occasion may seem to require, but I shall not hesitate to quote literally any statement which I find it impossible to improve at the moment. Unless the run of the material makes other formulations advisable, I shall review this four-year record of observations under three successive headings:

First, I shall review in this issue the observations I have made from time to time upon the dangers and fears that had led many of the most astute and incisive intelligences of our time to believe that Western civilization is doomed, and that a new dark age lies ahead.

Second, I shall review in the August issue the observations I have made from time to time upon the unused assets of Western civilization, the unharnessed forces of health, the raw

materials of renewal that have led a few venturesome minds to believe that the foundations have been largely laid for a new renaissance, and that before long we may see a fresh and fruitful advance of the human spirit.

Third, I shall review in the September issue the observations I have made from time to time upon the leadership of any such renewal of Western civilization, the sources, the problems, and the technic of such leadership.

I turn now to the first of these three reviews to a review of the literature of despair that has been written by our prophets of doom, reluctant heralds of a new dark ages for Western civilization.

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Since the war there has been pouring from our presses a plentiful and popular literature of despair. Every age, of course, has had its prophets of doom and its literature of despair, but it is our own that we are studying here, and it has its own specific background which must be sketched, if we are readily to catch its particular meaning for us.

At the risk of over-simplification, I suggest that contemporary pessimism regarding Western civilization should be examined in its relation to three brief, but distinct, periods that have culminated in the present spiritual crisis of the Western world. These three periods are:

The new materialism of the immediate pre-war period is now so starkly evident that no labored proof or indictment is needed to recall it to our minds. Pre-war politics was dominated by a passion for power at any price; pre-war business was dominated by a passion for profits at any price; prewar society was dominated by a passion for pleasure at any price. These three passions had produced the perilous trinity of imperialism, industrialism, and hedonism which cast over Western civilization the shadow of a bleak and barren materialism.

The spiritual fires of Western civilization were banked, if not burned out. And, as I said three years ago in these pages, in this reluctant indictment of Western civilization, little, if any, discrimination can be made between allied, enemy, and neutral peoples. We were all in the grip of a sordid materialism. We practised materialism while we professed Christianity. All of Western civilization was thus a sort of corporate hypocrisy. And so it had no inner peace. For a generation before the war it stirred restlessly in its dreams, and pricked by an accusing conscience, it shivered with a sense of impending disaster.

And then the war came. In the light of bursting star shells we saw the nakedness of our souls. The rather sudden realization of our spiritual bankruptcy scared us into a new idealism. In the light of Versailles and after, we now see that it was a rather hastily improvised idealism that had many of the marks of a death-bed

Third, the post-war period, which has been chilled and arrested by a new pessimism.

cynical. Despite the sordid aftermath of the war, there was much of beauty and sincerity in this transient idealism. The ghost of Machiavelli haunted the

corridors of many foreign offices during the war, and sat as an accredited delegate in the peace conference; but for millions of inarticulate men and women throughout America and Europe world politics seemed for the moment to have become the supreme spiritual adventure of mankind. Before the war these millions had felt the chill of materialism, but they had managed to keep reasonably warm under the cloak of an uncritical optimism, a naïve belief in the myth of automatic progress. During the war they kept their spirits alive by an equally uncritical idealism. Hard fighting, victory, and then a new world! They did not stop to ask whether, after all, it is possible to create new worlds by such methods. They were in the grip of the will-tobelieve that the most ruthless war of history would result in the spiritual regeneration of Western civilization.

But these mute millions were doomed to disillusionment. They fought hard, victory was achieved, but the new world eluded their grasp. Despite previous commitment to a program dictated by the new idealism, the victors tricked and traded as victors have tricked and traded since human history began. But I have said this so many times in these columns that I need do no more than state it here. The new materialism was temporarily disavowed in the interest of a new idealism only to be succeeded by a new pessimism; for, to use a threadbare phrase, as soon as men realized that we had won the war, but lost the peace, they began speculating upon the possible breakdown of Western civilization. And out of these speculations has come the current literature of despair that I want now to describe and to analyze.

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Since the war we have been deluged with a literature of forecast. The largest section of this literature of forecast has been written by our prophets of doom, by men who doubt that we shall be able to liquidate the treacherous condition into which an inadequate political, economic, and spiritual leadership has plunged Western civilization. These prophets of doom seem to hold the center of the stage for the moment. The professional optimism of doctrinaires thinking in a vacuum was never so seriously discounted as it is to-day.

This literature of despair has been written from varying levels of disillusionment, ranging from the philosophical acceptance of the situation by Professor George Santayana to the deep gloom of Dean Inge.

In his "Character and Opinion in the United States," Professor Santayana ventures the prophecy that "Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. A flood of barbarism from below may soon level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood two thousand years ago leveled those of the ancients. Romantic Christendom-picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode may be coming to an end." But even such a black future is, for Professor Santayana, touched with light, even if it be a distant light, reaching us only in fitful and fragile rays. "Such a catastrophe," he bravely asserts, with the calm of a philosopher who can afford to wait, "would be no reason for despair. Nothing lasts forever; but the elasticity of life is wonderful, and even if the world lost its memory it would not lose

its youth. Under the deluge, and watered by it, seeds of all sorts would survive against the time to come, even if what might eventually spring from them, under the new circumstances, should wear a strange aspect."

Professor Santayana feels the warning frost that heralds a spiritual winter which may freeze the fountains of enterprise and aspiration, but he does not doubt that another springtime lies ahead in the human cycle.

Dean Inge is a more nearly unqualified prophet of doom. As I have so often quoted, he frankly asserts his belief that "We are witnessing the suicide of a social order, and our descendants will marvel at our madness."

In another of his essays, Dean Inge says, as I quoted him in these pages in 1922, "I have, I suppose, made it clear that I do not consider myself specially fortunate in having been born in 1860, and that I look forward with great anxiety to the journey through life which my children will have to make."

The net effect, then, of this literature of despair is to say that we are facing a long spiritual winter, a new dark ages. If this literature of despair consisted entirely of such generalizations, even generalizations by such distinguished minds as Professor Santayana and Dean Inge, we might feel justified in taking it with a rather large grain of salt, and attributing it to the special temperament, the faulty digestion, the insomnia, or the postwar weariness of the prophet in question. But this becomes impossible when we realize that the major part of the literature of despair has been written, or at least inspired, not by generalizers, but by specialists, by biologists, psychologists, economists, administrators, statesmen, historians,

moralists, and other men who have given their lives to the intensive study of particular fields of human society.

Dean Inge, for instance, is not a lonely prophet of doom crying his pronouncements in a wilderness of Polyannas; he is simply the director of a vast chorus of despair, a chorus of specialists. I think I have followed this literature of despair with a fair faithfulness since the war. I do not pretend to have subjected it to an exhaustive or scholarly research, but I have read it with something more than a casual effort to clarify my own mind regarding the current drift of Western civilization. And I think I am at least within hailing distance of accuracy when I say that this literature has been inspired by at least seven distinct fears that have arisen out of seven distinct fields of research and experience. These fears are:

1. The biological fear.
2. The psychological fear.
3. The political fear.
4. The economic fear.
5. The historical fear.
6. The administrative fear.
7. The moral fear.

Let me briefly review these seven fears in turn, and then inquire into the astounding popularity of the literature they have inspired.

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First, the biological fear. I mean by this the fear that biologically mankind is plunging downward, that we are reproducing from our less and least fit human stocks rather than from our better and best human stocks, that the best blood of the race, particularly of the white race, is turning to water. In simple terms this means that, in