Excerpt from The Onlooker, Vol. 1: A Literary Journal of Independent Critical Opinion on Public Affairs; Toronto, April, 1921
What the entire world is suffering from at this hour is an international blockade of credit, or rather of trust. Nature is just as bountiful as ever - streams flow, fields, forests and mines produce, the ocean is an open, free highway to all shipping, the harvest of the sea is only limited by human endeavor, science stands waiting to confer immeasurable blessings, and yet a large part of the world"s industrial life is at pause. What is the cause of this unparalleled stagnation?
It is perhaps impossible to designate clearly and definitely the exact source of the world"s present condition. The disruption of confidence is of such vast extent, on such a colossal scale that it would seem modest and reasonable to fall back upon the common conclusion and exclaim: "The War!" But such a solution seems too easy, and, in fact, gets us nowhere. The war was the remote cause, but the war is over, and we are in the third year of reconstruction. If the war were going on at this hour the explanation would suffice. One cannot deny the devastation wrought by an earthquake or expect to find the world quite the same after a deluge. It is, however, the peculiarity of human development that even great disasters are reacted upon by the race-consciousness and that adjustments take place with lightning-like rapidity. Prosperity or adversity, hope or despair, the true cause is always psychological. We are reacting to a new condition, and have not yet succeeded in the establishment of a firm foothold. What is really lacking is faith; faith, not in nature, but in the capacity of human nature to pull through.
The most of our writers and thinkers are still engaged in describing the stages of decline into the present impasse. We are told that what has happened is just what was to be expected. No doubt they are right. But what does not seem to have occurred to the average man at all is that we are face to face with a situation which calls for the sternest repression of egotism, the practice of the most stringent economy, the discountenancing of novel, untried social theories, the overcoming of selfish, predatory groups. The enemy to be fought is political disunion within; the reconstruction to be carried out the reconstruction of ourselves.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Onlooker, Vol. 1