ALREADY many platitudes of the war period are fading rapidly into a past which, like all of the human past, is crowded with both seeming disappointments and seeming successes. To many who are to-day examining and commenting on this recent history, it seems almost incomprehensible that so much shallow thinking should ever have been current, that catch phrases with no foundation in truth should have stimulated such excesses of zeal, and that such masses of people should have been so readily and thoroughly mesmerized by the suggestions of terror. Now after more than two years since the close of the fighting, it is important to consider, with a better perspective, how much reasoning in accord with Principle was developed during the whole experience, in spite of grossly confused thinking on the part of both leaders and populace in all countries.
Principle has never ceased to operate, even amid the most deplorable human lack of understanding of its operation. This was the truth during the war and is the truth now. Only the understanding of this truth can satisfy the puzzled seeker for enduring righteousness. Any discernment of this truth that there ever has been is of permanent universal benefit. If a process of disillusionment is to be valuable, it must be accompanied by the discernment and practice of the spiritual reality which has remained untouched by the disintegration of the mortal dreams that materialism could ever be satisfactory.
Every one knows that, as the war went on, there was formulated by numerous idealists and publicists a sort of creed that the war itself was for the purpose of freeing the world. Since the German system of government and thinking, along with various other systems, was essentially autocratic, it became evident to those fighting Germany that the war was being waged for the overthrow of autocracy. How tame these familiar words seem to-day in the midst of a world which still finds many problems to solve! The human concept of autocracy has indeed been one of bondage. So for the time it seemed simple enough to free the world once and for all by the substitution of democracy for autocratic control.
