Problems of a New World
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Hobson, John Atkinson, PUBLISHER: General Books, Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD The war has been " a school of character " in more than one sense. Its " bracing experience " shook the upper classes of our people out of the mood of reckless hedonism which insecure prosperity engendered, and drew out their rich endowments for adventure and leadership. It sobered the fractious unrest of the workers, laid the rising passion of " a class struggle," and inspired a fresh sentiment of national unity. The continuous efforts and sacrifices of whole peoples, consciously devoted to the achievement of a national end of novel and transcendent value, seemed to disclose and educate new powers of unselfish co-operation capable of achieving great and lasting improvements in the character and conduct of society. The war showed that our wealthy leisured classes were not so sunk in luxury and ease, our business men not so immersed in selfish greed, our working classes not so reckless of the commonweal, the nation as a whole not so abandoned to materialism and intellectual inefficiency, as their enemies and some of their censorious friends had depicted them. The tough fibre, the indomitable courage and endurance, the high adaptability and power of initiative, the comradeship, which our fighting men displayed on land, at sea, in air, our civil population also showed in meeting the strains of war upon their spiritual and physical resources. Our powers to improvise and " carry on," in the formation and equipment of our new forces, in the conduct of industries, the economy of our consumption and notably in the organization of the numerous home services, exceeded all our expectations. In dispelling the notion that we had become a soft, a frivolous, a luxurious and in general a " decadent " nation, the war may thus be said to have re-established...