Our Machine
Civilization

By
RAYMOND B. FOSDICK

An Address Delivered at the
Commencement Exercises
of
Wellesley College,
June 20, 1922
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Printed through the courtesy of a friend of Wellesley

OUR MACHINE CIVILIZATION
ONE hundred years ago this summer Harvard
College graduated the class of 1822 with sixty
members. The Commencement address was given by
the Reverend John Kirkland and it was as dreary as
Commencement addresses invariably are. It con
tained all the wise counsel and pious admoni
tion which age habitually gives to youth and which
youth habitually disregards. But in the middle
of that address, which now lies mouldering in
the Harvard library as its author lies moulder
ing in his grave, the Reverend Mr. Kirkland
said a rather startling thing. He referred to
the world into which the sixty Harvard seniors
were about to step as "a complex world." He seemed
to infer that the simplicity of older days was gone
and that life had become an involved and bewilder
ing process. I am, of course, aware that this has
always been to some extent the reaction of old age.
Life seems to speed up because age is slowing down.
But with all allowance for this natural change in
speed, it does seem a bit strange, does it not, particu
larly from the standpoint of 1922, that the world of
1822 should have seemed to anybody to be complex.
For think what the world was like in 1822. In
all America, in all Europe, there was not a railroad,
nor a telephone, nor a telegraph. The steamboat had
just been tried out as a doubtful experiment. Travel
was a painful and precarious undertaking, with the
result that most people stayed home, living and dying

where they were born. Students at Harvard College
living at some distance came by way of the stage
coach or on horseback. From South Framingham
to Boston was a day's journey when the roads were
good, and they were often bad. From Boston to New
York was five days. When Samuel Morse, the
painter and inventor, tried lo get from Washington,
D. C. to New Haven, Connecticut, to the bedside of
his dying wife, it took him seven days. From one
month to three months elapsed before European
news reached the United States, and the battle of
New Orleans with all its dreadful slaughter was
fought in ignorance of the fact that weeks before,
peace had been signed between England and Amer
ica in the city of Ghent in Belgium..
But the world of 1822 had other differences. There
were no electric lights, no sewing machines, no bath
tubs, no furnaces, no hot water faucets, no asphalt
or macadam pavement, no sewer systems — in fact,
none of the conveniences which have become an ac
cepted part of the life of 1922. In those days only
a small proportion of the population lived in cities.
The farm and village housed the rest. The factory
system had only just developed — in connection with
weaving and spinning — and the home was the unit
and center of all the industrial arts. People lived
for the most part simply and quietly, engaged in a
routine of work from which, in generations, there
had been but little variation. Indeed from the days
of Rameses II and Moses down to the days of the
Reverend Mr. Kirkland and our grandfathers, amaz
ingly few fundamental changes occured in the ma
terial existence of common people. The physical
factors of life were practically stereotyped. That
long stretch of history is a story of human capacities

undeveloped and natural resources unused. Trans
portation and communication were no more rapid
a hundred years ago when the Reverend Mr. Kirk
land was exhorting the sixty Harvard seniors than
they were with the ancient Egyptians. Nothing
swifter than a horse was known to either Nebuchad
nezzar or Napoleon. The farmers around Wellesley
in 1822 used the same methods and the same instru
ments that were used in the days of Julius Caesar.
And remember this was only a hundred years ago.
I am not talking about ancient history; I am talking
of conditions of life in the days of our grandfathers.
But there were other differences between those
days and these. When Mr. Kirkland made his Com
mencement address, Charles Darwin was only thir
teen years old and the whole foundation of modern
biology and modern philosophy as Well was yet to
be laid. Agassiz was fifteen years old; Sir Charles
Lyell was twenty-five years old, and the crude geo
logical conceptions of Linnaeus and Lamarck were
still in vogue. In the general field of chemistry and
physics Michael Faraday was just beginning his
work. In the field of medicine, Jenner was still alive,
and his idea of vaccination against small-pox was
just beginning to win its way. Lord Lister and
Louis Pasteur were not yet born, and anesthetics
and antiseptic surgery were unknown to the world.
In the realm of astronomy, Pierre Laplace, who orig
inated the nebular hypothesis, was still alive, while
J. C. Adams, his successor in the field of mathemat
ical astronomy, was only three years old. Many of
the subjects which you young women have studied
in your four years at Wellesley were unheard of.
There was no such thing as experimental psychology,

for example, and the word sociology did not exist
in the English language. The average college cur
riculum of 1822 consisted principally of Latin, Greek
and mathematics, sweetened with a dash of what
was called "natural philosophy," and accompanied
by liberal doses of the theology of Jonathan
Edwards. This, then, is what the world was like in 1822 when
the Reverend John Kirkland called it complex. It
was a world just waking from a long sleep. It was
a world that was rubbing its eyes in the presence
of new forces. If that world seemed complex to the
sixty Harvard seniors of the Class of 1822, what does
the present world seem to us !
For between that time and this, between the days
of our grandfathers and ourselves, has occurred the
mightiest revolution in history. It has completely
changed the whole complexion of human life. It
has fundamentally altered our daily habits; it has
not only modified our environment, but has thor
oughly revolutionized it; it has split the anciently
established order into a thousand fragments. Since
the days of Assyria and Babylon — indeed since the
days of our Neolithic forefathers — nothing has oc
curred which has so completely and in so short a
time changed the method and manner of living of
the human race, as the mechanical revolution of the
nineteenth century.
For think what has happened. With the advent
of steam and electricity we have annihilated the dif
ficulties of space and distance. When Napoleon was
retreating in headlong fashion from Moscow, it took
him 312 hours to complete the last leg of his journey
from Vilna to Paris. Any traveller can now do it
in less than 48 hours by railroad or in 8 hours by

airplane. We cross the ocean in five days, where a
century ago it took two months. We fly by airplane
from one city to another, from one country to an
other, in a few hours' time. Our fast mails go by
airplane. In our automobiles we pass from state to
state and see in a day more than our grandfathers
could have covered in a month. By cable and wire
less we are in immediate and constant touch with
the uttermost parts of the earth. With our own
voices we talk to our friends a thousand miles away.
Seated in our own libraries we hear concerts and
lectures that are hurled to us through the air from
500 miles or more away. We hear Galli-Curci and
Sembrich in our own homes, and Caruso returns
from the dead to sing to us. Events that few could
witness are brought to the whole human race on the
celluloid film: we see the King of England walk
through Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath on the
tomb of the unknown soldier, and we see and hear
the President of the United States speaking in Arling
ton Cemetery. If the Reverend Mr. Kirkland, who
winced at the complexity of 1822, could return to us
today, what would he think of our generation!
But the scientific revolution has done a thousand
other things. It has given us not only new commodi
ties but new substances. We juggle with the atoms
of carbon and hydrogen and the rest, and create ma
terials that Nature herself has not formed. We
make carborundum and acetylene gas and celluloid
and hundreds of other compounds which we use in
our daily lives. What we formerly obtained from
plants and animals we now manufacture. We make
dyes and medicines from coal tar; we extract sugar
from beets; we make perfume out of garbage, and
foodstuffs out of sewage. From corn we take a'hun-

dred useful products ranging all the way from salad
oil for our tables to the erasers on our pencils. Lux
uries that were formerly the monopoly of the privi
leged few are now the common property of every
body. Medicines such as a prince could not have
had a century ago are now at hand to cure the pauper.
Vegetables and fruits, exotic and out of season, are
upon our dinner table. Our daily food is brought
from China, from the West Indies, and from the
far islands of the Pacific. The royal purple of the
ancients, and dyes far more beautiful than they
knew, are now to be had on the bargain counter.
But the scientific revolution has not only added to
our conveniences; it has altered our methods of liv
ing. Our populations are no longer predominantly
rural. They live in huge cities, crowded together
in communities such as the world never knew be
fore. The day of individual work, for one's own
needs, in one's own way and in one's own time, has
gone. Instead, men work in vast factories, engaged
on minute contributions to the finished article. Hun
dreds of thousands of men work underground, dig
ging the coal to feed the monster industrial machine.
Millions of men, women and children toil feverishly
to keep it going, and the whole system is so incon
ceivably intricate and so closely articulated that dis
location in one part of it affects all the rest, and in
dustrial cohesiveness has come to be a more essen
tial factor in the world than political cohesiveness.
For example, you cannot have clothes without a
cotton mill; you cannot have a cotton mill without
machinery; you cannot have machinery without
steel; you cannot have steel without iron; you can
not smelt iron without coal; you cannot have coal

without railroads to bring it to you; you cannot have
railroads without involving a hundred occupations
and enterprises. Civilization has in fact become a
great machine, the wheels of which must be kept
turning, or the people starve. For millions of human
beings it is a vast treadmill, worked by weary feet
to grind the corn that makes the bread that gives
them strength to walk the treadmill.
And with it all has come the speeding up of life,
and the spirit of hurry and worry such as our grand
fathers with all their lack of conveniences never
dreamed of even in their nightmares. The human
race lives by schedule, according to a stereotyped
routine. Life has become more and more a stand
ardized process, in which there is little of serenity
or of leisure. We hurry from birth to death, goaded
only to greater haste by our increasingly speedy con
veyances, feverishly trying to catch up with the ma
chinery which we have ourselves created. Truly
this is a complex world. The sixty Harvard seniors
of the Class of 1822 would stand aghast at our hectic
civilization. And with the increase of machinery has come the
increase of human knowledge. Rather it is the in
crease of knowledge that has made all these inven
tions possible. For the scientific revolution of the
nineteenth century was born of a great intellectual
curiosity and a new method of approach. When
Francis Bacon first emphasized the importance of
the experimental method as an approach to human
knowledge, he was sowing the seed which began to
develop to its full fruition in the nineteenth century.
The old accepted facts of nature were tested and
analyzed. Nature herself was put in the witness box
and experiment was the interrogating counsel. AU

the phenomena of life, whether pertaining to the
body, the brain, or the soul, were haled for exam
ination before the court. Under the stimulus of this
method, we have pushed back the boundaries of
human knowledge far, far beyond where they were
a century ago. In biology, in surgery, in medicine,
in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and in a score of
other sciences, we have wrenched the facts from
nature by a process of cross-examination which
would not be denied. As the inquiries have grown
in detail and complexity, dozens of new sciences
have been added to the list. The body of knowledge
has developed bewilderingly. The long-hidden se
crets of life are slowly becoming ours. We have
traced man back to the Tertiary Period and we are
reaching long fingers of inquiry into the universe of
which we form so minute a part, and beyond this
universe into other universes, where life and intelli
gence may exist, far transcending our tiny compre
hension. We are almost intoxicated with the new
knowledge. We stand on tiptoe before each new
promise of discovery, feverishly awaiting its out
come. The telescope, the microscope, the spectro
scope, are daily bringing us information that leaves
us gasping; and we are stunned by the realization
that in this thirsty search for knowledge we are just
at the beginning of the way. Ahead of us lies a long,
rising road, with ever-broadening outlooks on either
side. This is the kind of complex world into which your
class is stepping. A hundred years ago it is conceiv
able that a man might acquire and digest a fairly
substantial proportion of the body of human knowl
edge. At least he could easily find a point of orien
tation from which he could intelligently survey the

course, and keep up with the progress of the march.
Today this is utterly impossible. In the growing
complexity of knowledge one can scarcely find his
way. Whole groups of conclusions must be accepted
without analysis or examination, and most of the
departments of learning we cannot even enter. In
your four years at Wellesley you young women have
scarcely touched the garment's hem of human knowl
edge. If you have obtained the scantiest outline, or
a point of view, or a method of approach, you have
gotten all that any college can hope to give to its
graduates. I wonder if you have seen in this long analysis that
I have made where my thought is leading. Compara
tively speaking, what a simple task those sixty
Harvard seniors faced when they stepped out into
the world a hundred years ago and upon what simple
responsibilities they entered! The environment of
their lives was so easily understood and controlled.
The problems of daily existence were so reasonably
adapted to their capacities. You young women, on
the other hand, are projected into a world so com
plex, into an environment so baffling, that few in
dividuals can understand it all, and fewer still can
control it. You have been educated for leadership
at a time when leadership is increasingly vital in the
service of men and increasingly difficult to establish.
You will be tested with cruel burdens in a way your
grandfathers never were tested. You must carry re
sponsibilities that would have broken the backs of
your forebears a century ago. This is the price that
you pay for your privileges here at Wellesley; this
is the penalty of education in this generation. The
thing that you win today is not a reward, but a re-

sponsibility; not an easy entrance to a quiet and
agreeable life, but a crushing obligation to lead your
generation in such fashion that it may indeed be
come the master of its environment.
I wish I could paint the nature of that obligation
as I see it this morning without seeming to use merely
resounding and empty words. Perhaps I can illus
trate what I mean by an example from the field of
government, although this is just one department of
life in which difficulties are multiplying. Govern
ment a hundred years ago was a comparatively sim
ple affair. It dealt with matters that were easily
within the scope of intelligence of the average man.
In its practical aspects there was little that was tech
nical about it. Locally it had to do with good roads
and water supply and common lands and other mat
ters, which could readily be considered in town
meeting and upon which the least intelligent could
have an opinion that might be valuable. Even in its
national aspect government was not complex. There
were few technical bureaus and those that existed
did not affect the daily lives of the citizens. There
was no problem of transportation, because there
were no railroads; there was no perilous conflict be
tween capital and labor, because there were no ma
chines, no mass production, and no specialization of
industry. The scope of government in those days
was largely negative. It was built around the prin
ciple of thou shalt not, and was based on simple
moralities which appealed to the understanding and
reason of the average man.
But those days are gone. The scientific revolution
has wiped them out as completely as if they had
never existed. Government has become infinitely
complex and technical. It has to do for the most
10

part with matters which are far beyond the intelli
gence of the average citizen. It deals with compli
cated bond issues, with subtle transportation prob
lems, with involved plans of taxation and tariff,
with technical educational projects, and with a hun
dred other matters, which directly affect our lives
and happiness, and in regard to which we are called
upon to express our opinion as citizens. Conse
quently, the breach between the citizenship and its
government is widening as science increases the com
plexity of its operations. Our elections, many of
them, are fought out on the basis of issues about
which we voters have no intelligent conception what
soever, nor could a majority of us acquire such a con
ception even if there were time and machinery for
our education. Frankly the situation has gotten
beyond us. Even in my time in New York City I
have seen the function of government increase in
elaborateness and complexity until now there are
few people who really understand all its technical
complications. Government is getting out of the
hands of the people, not in the sense that anybody
is taking it away from them, but in the sense that
with the rapid extension of its technical aspects, it
is becoming more and more difficult to comprehend
and control.
It is right at this point that we often make a fun
damentally erroneous assumption. We assume that
man's capacity keeps up with his inventions. We
assume that as civilization becomes great, the human
stock which is building it also becomes great; that
somehow or other, by some alchemy or other, there
is a rise in individual capacity from generation to
generation to match the increasing complexity of
our physical environment. We seem to take it for
li

granted that there is some sure inhibition that would
prevent men from creating machines which they
could not control; and that the very fact that they
have created them is proof of their ability to man
age them.
But this is not the fact. Knowledge may mean
power, but it does not necessarily mean capacity.
We cannot be dogmatically sure that there has been
substantial improvement in the human stock since
the days of the Egyptians or the Greeks. The men
who labored with their hands to build Cheops' pyra
mid probably had wit enough and intelligence enough
to use a steam hoist and a concrete-mixer if these
inventions had been given to them. Even less sure
can we be that this last century which has added
so tremendously to our mechanical environment has
brought a corresponding improvement in human
capacity. In fact we know that it is not true. Men
were no less able in the days of Washington and
Hamilton, and Channing and Fox than they are to
day. We have come into our new inheritance with
no greater abilities than our grandfathers had. The
difference between the Harvard Class of 1822 and the
Wellesley Class of 1922 lies not in their respective
capacities, but in the loads which those capacities
must bear.
In this field of government, therefore, our task is
to control complex functions like subways and street
railroad financing with the same intelligence that
was adapted to the spade and the blacksmith shop.
The machinery of our environment is increasing in
complexity, but the tools of control remain largely
the same.
And how faulty those tools may be we are only
just now beginning to realize. We have always
12

thought of the American people — our own people —
as being peculiarly intelligent. We have had a con
scious pride in the ability of the average man and in
our great experiment of democracy, based on the
principle of equality of responsibility. And now
come the statistics of the government gathered from
our army during the war, when for the first time we
had the opportunity of testing by modern scientific
methods the intelligence of a substantial cross-sec
tion of our people. Of the white draft — that is, the
white soldiers as opposed to negroes — thirty per cent
were found to be unable to read and understand
newspapers or to write letters home.- Forty-seven
and three-tenths per cent of the white draft fell be
low the mental age of thirteen years, only one year
over the maximum mental age of what are generally
known as morons. Forty-seven and three-tenths per
cent! Sixty-six and two-thirds per cent of the white
draft tested below a percentage that marked the
minimum capacity necessary to carry on the so-
called paper work of the army — that is, making re
ports and keeping the files. Out of all those millions
of drafted men just a third had ability enough to
carry on this by no means laborious type of mental
work. The appalling significance of these statistics it is
impossible to escape. They cannot be explained
away. We had the best blood of America in the
army. Those men represented certainly our average
intelligence and capacity. They reflected our citizen
ship with substantial accuracy. And yet thirty per
cent of them were unable to read and write, and
nearly fifty per cent fell below a mental age of thir
teen years! These are the people upon whom our
complex life is placing its gigantic responsibilities.
13

These are the human tools through which we fondly
hope that all this unintelligible machinery of civiliza
tion may somehow or other be intelligently con
trolled. I say therefore that you young women are facing
the supreme challenge of human history, and I re
peat that your diploma today is not a reward but a
crushing obligation. The future looms like an angry
cloud, and whatever of leadership and spiritual
force you have gained here at Wellesley is needed
now more than at any other moment in the progress
of the race.
For it cannot be denied that humanity stands to
day in a position of peril. One great, unanswered
question is written across the future in letters of fire :
Is man to be the master of the civilization he has
created, or is he to be its victim? Can he control
the forces which he has himself let loose? Will this
intricate machinery which he has built up and this
vast body of knowledge which he has appropriated
be the servant of the race, or will it be a Frankenstein
monster that will slay its own maker? In brief, has
man the capacity to keep up with his own machines?
This is the supreme question before us. All other
problems that confront us are merely its corrollaries.
And the necessity of a right answer is perhaps more
immediate than we realize. For science is not stand
ing still. In speaking of the scientific revolution I
was not speaking of a phenomenon that was confined
to the nineteenth century. Bather we are just at the
beginning of the revolution. We could not stop it if
we would. It is advancing by leaps and bounds, gain
ing in impetus with each year. It is giving us more
machines, faster machines, machines increasingly
more intricate and complex. Life in the future will
14

be speeded up infinitely beyond the present. Sources
of energy will be tapped and harnessed far out-rival
ling what we have today. There lies in full view
before us a realm of discovery in physical science till
now untrodden by mortals even in their dreams. The
pioneers are already upon the road to this promised
land. In California at the present moment a com
bined attack, financed and equipped on a huge scale,
is being launched on the problem of the structure of
matter; and the same search is being feverishly
prosecuted in laboratories all over the world. We
now know that in atoms of matter there exists a
store of energy incomparably more abundant and
powerful than any over which we have thus far ob
tained control. If once we can liberate this force,
what machines we can build! Steam and electricity
will be an anachronism at which our children will
laugh as we laugh at the hand-loom and the spinning
wheel. With a pound weight of this radioactive sub
stance we will get as much energy as we now obtain
from 150 tons of coal. Or another pound weight
can be made to do the work of 150 tons of dynamite.
Aye, there's the rub. One hundred and fifty tons
of dynamite — enough to blow the city of Boston into
oblivion — compressed to a pound weight which might
be held in the hand! Do you wonder that a sober-
thinking scientist like Professor Frederick Soddy of
Oxford University should say "I trust this discovery
will not be made until it is clearly understood what
is involved." "And yet," he goes on to say, "it is
a discovery that is sooner or later bound to come.
Conceivably it might be made tomorrow."
You see what the problem is. Science will not
wait for man to catch up. It does not hold itself
responsible for the morals or capacities of its human
15

employers. It gives us a fire engine with which to
throw water to extinguish a fire; if we want to use
the engine to throw kerosene on the fire, that is our
lookout. The engine is adapted to both purposes.
With the same hand, science give us X-rays and ma
chine guns, modern surgery and high explosives,
anesthetics and poison gas. In brief, science has mul
tiplied man's physical powers ten thousand fold and
in like ratio has increased his capacity both for con
struction and destruction. How is that capacity to
be used in the future? How can we hold in check
the increasing physical power of disruptive influ
ences? Have we spiritual assets enough to counter
balance the new forces? How can we breed a greater
average intelligence? Can education run fast enough,
not only to overcome the lead which science has
obtained, but to keep abreast in the race?
These are ugly questions and they carry with them
a perilous significance. They are hurled as a chal
lenge lo your generation, and upon their answer de
pends the whole future of the race. And what are
the answers? Let us be perfectly frank about the
matter: No intelligent person in my generation — if
for a moment I may associate myself with the elder
statesmen — pretends to know. We are wandering in
heart-breaking perplexity, swamped with the para
phernalia of living, weighed down by mountains of
facts, trying to find some sure way out of this jungle
of machinery and untamed powers. And the tragedy
of it all is that there was a time when we thought
we knew the answers to the riddles that this modern
life of ours was propounding. Up until 1914 most of
us were fairly confident of the result, fairly easy
about the future. We talked glibly of the direction
16

and goal of human evolution, and of the bright pros
pects of the race. But now we know that we did not
know. We were misled by superficial hopes, blinded
by false assumptions. Those four years of slaughter,
and those added four years of chaos and misery that
have followed since the Armistice, have given us a
perspective we did not have before. We see now the
abyss upon the edge of which the race is standing.
We see the inevitable doom that lies ahead unless
we can achieve a measure of social control far
greater than any which we have hitherto exercised.
Bewildered and disillusioned, my generation turns
to yours — and upon your shoulders falls the weary
weight of all this unintelligible world. Out of all
times and peoples, a capricious fate seems to have
singled your day and your generation upon which
to center its heaviest responsibilities.
I do not know how you are going to attack this
problem of strengthening the social controls. I have
no specific advice to offer. With the tragic failures
of my own generation in mind, I would have some
reluctance about lecturing you on the principles of
success, even if I knew what they were. My genera
tion has been far more modest since 1914, far less
confident and dogmatic. I presume, however, that
in your program, education will play an increasingly
important part, although what kind of education is
best adapted to this crisis, and how it is to be applied,
my generation cannot tell you. Surely let us hope
that in your time no such damning charge will be
leveled against you as has been brought against us :
that thirty per cent of the people of free America are
unable to read and write, and that nearly half our
population has a mental age of less than thirteen

17

And after education, what? Frankly I do not
know. In the confused councils of my generation
many things are being advocated. There are those
who claim that the environmental attack upon which
my generation has put such emphasis cannot pos
sibly succeed and that the only hope of the future
lies in improving the quality of the human stock by
the introduction of better strains. Consequently the
science of eugenics is attracting ever wider attention.
There are others who claim that the hope of the
world does not lie in democracy — because the com
plications of civilization make mass-verdict of value
only in the simpler issues — but lies rather in an aris
tocracy of leadership, recruited from all classes of
society on the basis of merit. There are still others
who look for social control only in a fundamental
reorganization of human society, with the purpose
of revising the attitude of men toward wealth pro
duction and distribution. Still others are looking for
a solution in social cooperation — if only it can be
brought about — not only as between individuals
within a class, but as between classes within a nation
and nations within a league. Again, there are many
of us who fervently believe that the spirit of Chris
tianity contains the key to the solution of this great
crisis, if only that spirit can be practically applied.
How this is to be done in comprehensive fashion,
however, my generation cannot tell you, and we hang
our heads in shame at our own failure.
You see with what confusion the discussion is being
carried on in the councils of my generation. There
is no unanimity of opinion; indeed, very little co
herence of'opinion. Like those who built the Tower
of Babel in the land of Shinar, we are smitten with
many tongues and many counsels. 18

But one thing we know : the way out of this morass,
if it is found, will be found by a leadership of intel
ligence. It will be discovered by knowledge con
sciously applied to the task. For that leadership and
that knowledge we cannot look to the many. We
must look to the few. We must look largely to that
handful of men and women who each year come
from our universities. That is why your graduation
today is so significant an event. It contains a prom
ise for the future; it holds out a hope of healthier
days. There is here in your group the possibility of
vision and creative leadership such as the world
needs now more than at any time in its history.
So I welcome you to the grim struggle that awaits
you. You are joining the ranks of a gallant army —
the army of the Kingdom of the Spirit. It has fought
in many ages on many a field and has many times
been vanquished. Just now it is desperately hard-
pressed. Its ranks are torn and its flags are going
down. It is being attacked by an enemy far more
powerful and determined than any with which it has
previously fought. It badly needs the reinforcement
which you are bringing. If you can come with more
intelligence, more resourcefulness, and more devo
tion than previous generations have shown, the day
may be saved. But if your generation fails, as the
generation for which I speak failed in all the years
that led up to 1914, then there is little hope, "and we
are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
God give you high courage in the army of the King
dom of the Spirit!

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