columns the probable future of Western civilization. I have attempted a sort of running commentary on the current literature of forecast. I have tried to shadow the more important of our contemporary prophets, to eavesdrop their varied fears and hopes, and to chart the grounds of their outlook. I have reviewed in turn predictions of an era of decline, an era of frivolity, and an era of renewal. At least in the touch-and-go fashion that is inseparable from editorials written in the midst of other distracting duties, I have tried to make a decently realistic assessment of the forces of health and the forces of disease in the existing social order of the Western nations.

I have been prompted to these studies by more than a merely professional desire for good copy. My mind has stayed tethered to this question by the conviction that the general problem of the probable ruin or possible renewal of Western civilization is a very personal problem for every man and every woman now living. The Spenglers, the Inges, the Wellses, the Petries, the Ellises, and all the other major and minor prophets of our time are dealing with an issue that concerns the policeman on his beat as intimately as it concerns the philosopher in his

fear, into the era of frivolity that Mr. Wells predicts, or into the new renaissance of Mr. Orage's confident guess is not merely a nut for academicians to crack; it is a practical issue alike for Main Street and for Wall Street. If you are a business man, you cannot wisely determine your future policies without taking into account the present drift toward disorder and disaster that is apparent throughout Western civilization. The issues of world peace and social coherence are as fundamental to your business plans as are costs of production. If you are an educator, you must reckon with the possibility of an era in which mankind, its mind sodden with despair and its total energies consumed in fighting for the scraps of bread scattered sparsely through the social debris of a falling order, will pay little attention to the claims of mind and spirit. If you are a minister, you must face the possibility of a period of social decline in which mankind will renounce the ethics of a humaner era, and embrace, in its struggle for mere existence, the unqualified code of the jungle. If you are a man of means, looking forward to spending the years of your retirement surrounded by a happy and well supported family, you must shake

yourself into a realization of the fact that unless mankind effects some fairly sharp turn in human affairs, it is not at all impossible that you may have to spend your declining years in poverty and, as Mr. Wells has suggested, probably perish in some quite miserable fashion, as thousands of just your sort of family have already perished in Austria and Russia.

I have returned to this problem month after month, therefore, because I have felt that we Americans, living a bit outside the main current of world affairs, need to be reminded again and again that the present plight of European civilization and of the entire Western world will sooner or later color and control, down to the most intimate detail, the personal lives of all of us. But an even more personal reason has held me to this issue. During the last five years, in common with thousands of other men here and in Europe, I have had to put up a persistent fight to prevent myself from falling into a purely fatalistic philosophy as I have faced the highly problematic future of Western civilizations which at the moment sees its social fabric disintegrating, its economic machine running down, its political leadership paralyzed or prostituted, its spirit soiled by hatred and harried by fear, its noblest traditions repudiated, and the development of centuries abruptly broken off. The various editorials I have written in this field during the last two years represent, therefore, the diary of one man's attempt to find some valid ground for courage as he faced the possibility of having to live out the rest of his life in the chill and shadow of a disarticulate and despiritualized world.

Normal interest in the intelligent

opinion of my time and the habit of following rather closely the generalizations that emerge from the various sciences have made me a fairly careful reader of the literature of despair that has been pouring from our presses in an increasing stream since the war. Month by month I have read grimly detailed forecasts of a new dark age in which all civilized values will disappear and the race be plunged back into the precarious existence of our primitive ancestors without their primitive strength to meet its challenge. Now, a man several years past his majority can read all this with a measure of confidence that, even if the direst of current predictions come true, there will remain, for his lifetime at least, scattered oases of civilization to which he might turn as to cities of refuge or, as Havelock Ellis puts it, "cloisters wherein life would yet be full of joy for men and women determined by their vocation to care only for beauty and knowledge, and so to hand on to a future race the living torch of civilization." But for some time now I have had an uneasy fear that, if all this literature of despair be finally true, my son may, when he is old enough to understand, damn me for having given him life so late that he will be obliged to lay the foundations of his career in the bleak twilight of 1950.

An hour ago I re-read Oswald Spengler's forecast of what he thinks the state of civilization will be like in Western Europe and America by the year 2000. Let me quote its final paragraph.

"States have disappeared," says Mr. Spengler, writing as of the year 2000, "and even history has sunk into slumber. Man has become a simple plant, clinging desperately to the soil

that bore him. Villages, which belong to no epoch, survive. Peasants bear children and sow their fields. Peoples have become a harried, frugal herd, through whom sweeps, from time to time, the tempest of an imperial soldatésca. Here and there remain ancient cities, formerly great metropolises, now vacant receptacles of extinguished souls, where nests a race of human beings without a history. Men live from day to day, contented with a parsimonious and modest felicity. The headless masses are lacerated and crushed under the feet of armies fighting for power and booty. Those who survive fill up the gaps with primitive fecundity, and continue to endure and suffer. Rulers alternately conquer and are conquered. The blind and unquestioning faith of a new religiosity spreads among the masses. Only in souls possessed of that faith is there the ghost of peace."

Richard Grützmacher interprets Spengler as estimating the present period of our civilization in the following terms: "We have already reached the point where we are producing no new tissue in the field of ethical and systematic philosophy, nor shall we be capable of doing so hereafter. Art has reached the end of its creative period. In economics and politics we are now under the domination of democracy or money. We have already reached that transitory epoch between a civilization that is dying and a civilization that is being born, which is marked by wars of extermination, the rise of imperialism, and the eve of Cæsarism."

As I read this I had difficulty in believing that this could ever be true of our American civilization. William Hazlitt began his essay on the feeling

of immortality in youth by saying that "No young man believes he shall ever die." Nor does a young civilization. There is a strange passion for persistence in men and in nations-a passion that expresses itself in the desire for longevity and the hunger for immortality. From Ponce de León's quest for the fountain of youth to Bernard Shaw's "Back to Methuselah," the Steinach operation, and the grand adventure of gland-grafting, the race has sought for sources of rejuvenation. Men want to live as long as possible in this world, and when death proves inevitable, they want assurance that they will live forever in the next world. When Steinach fails them, they want to feel, with Goethe, that life is the childhood of immortality. But convinced as we are that men must sooner or later die, we have never quite convinced ourselves that civilizations must necessarily die. We have persistently searched for the causes of the decline and fall of the ancient civilizations. We have felt that nations fall because men blunder in their administration. to-day we are concerned to be forehanded in the face of the threatened decline of our own civilization. The student of world affairs to-day is not a political Job asking, "If a nation dies, will it live again?" He is asking, "Must my nation die at all?"

And

This was the mood in which I read Spengler's dark forecast. And by happy coincidence I turned to Dr. Raymond Pearl's new book on "The Biology of Death." In this book Dr. Pearl asks and attempts to answer two questions: first, Why does man die? and, second, What can be done to, postpone death? Analogy is, I know, the most dangerous method of reason

ing, but I cannot avoid the conclusion that this book, dealing the issues of life and death for the individual, throws a searching light on the issues of life and death for civilizations. In In short, I think this book on biology is a political and sociological document of singular importance.

To summarize that part of Dr. Pearl's treatise which seems to me to have important social implications, I cannot do better than to quote Mr. H. L. Mencken's extremely clear statement of its main thesis. He says,

But man

. . death is by no means a biological necessity. The cells that man is made up of are all theoretically immortal. In a suitable medium, a suitable medium, properly fed, warmed, and protected against accident, every one of them might go on dividing and subdividing for all eternity. always dies. Why? Simply, says Dr. Pearl, because the cells from which he springs, in the course of their multiplication and differentiation to form the various parts of his body, have become so highly interdependent that it is now more and more difficult for some of them to function and keep alive. A brain cell, for example, cannot exist for more than a few moments unless there is a heart cell somewhere pumping food to it and carrying away its excreta. If that service ceases, it will die either of starvation or of auto-intoxication. All the other cells in the enormously complex cell community called the human body are similarly dependent upon the efforts of others for their existence. Most of them must have food of a highly specialized sort; nearly all need heat as well as nourishment; very few have private means of getting rid of their own slops. Thus damage

to be followed by damage to other groups, and so the whole machine goes to pieces and the man dies. But not all at once. When the cells which make up the heart muscles cease to function, what we call death ensues instantly, but there are other parts of the body that do not actually die until the parts already dead begin to poison them, or the embalmer douses them with formaldehyde, or the grave worms gobble them. These parts, theoretically, might be kept alive forever. Some of them have been kept alive for a dozen years."

This seems to me such a strikingly accurate and suggestive picture of the present status of our Western civilization that I think a copy of Dr. Pearl's treatise should be sent to President Coolidge and to every member of the Senate. If they would only read it and see the point, specially marked copies should be sent to the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and to certain senators who, by their parochialism and demagoguery, have robbed world reconstruction of its biggest potential inspiration and removed the chief moral restraint from the imperialistic purposes and militaristic passions of Europe.

I do not want to belabor the point or ride the analogy too far into the enemy country of details, but I do want to call the attention of our political leadership to the fact that the private ability of any single cell or group of cells to keep alive cannot prevent the death of the human body. Life can be assured only at the price of maintaining a working harmony between all the interdependent cells of the body. No single cell can save even itself by declaring a policy of

splendid isolation. No dignified senatorial cell can win immortality by trying to avoid entangling alliances with the other cells of the body. Only single celled creatures can entertain the notion of isolation.

Biology thus classifies Senator Lodge and his kind where they belong, as the amoeba of politics, strange survivals from a prehistoric era of the lowest form of political intelligence. The nations of the world are to-day as interdependent as the cells of the human body. And in politics as in biology it seems that the wages of complexity is death. Any security that America may attain apart from a reconstructed Europe will be only the security of one healthy cell extracted

from a dying body and artificially kept alive in a laboratory. We might achieve existence entirely apart from the rest of the world for a brief period, but if we want life, rich and full, we must find it in a healthy functioning of all the interdependent nation-cells that make up the body of Western civilization. This is the challenge to our political leadership. A whole nation cannot turn ascetic. The diseases of civilization can cross every ocean, filter through every foreign policy, and overleap every barricade. We must master the perils of interdependence or be mastered by them. Foreign policy is no longer a matter of party politics; it is a matter of life or death.