Of greater significance to the welfare of civilization is the complete subversion during the world war of nearly all the international laws which had been slowly built up in a thousand years.  These principles, as codified by the two Hague Conventions, were immediately swept aside in the fierce struggle for existence, and civilized man, with his liquid fire and poison gas and his deliberate; attacks upon undefended cities and their women and children, waged war with the unrelenting ferocity of primitive times.

Surely, this fierce war of extermination, which caused the loss of three hundred billion dollars in property and thirty millions of human lives, did mark for the time being the “twilight of civilization.”  The hands on the dial of time had been put back—­temporarily, let us hope and pray—­a thousand years.

Nor will many question the accuracy of the second count in Pope Benedict’s indictment.  The war to end war only ended in unprecedented hatred between nation and nation, class and class, and man and man.  Victors and vanquished are involved in a common ruin.  And if in this deluge of blood, which has submerged the world, there is a Mount Ararat, upon which the ark of a truer and better peace can find refuge, it has not yet appeared above the troubled surface of the waters.

Still less can one question the closely related third and fourth counts in Pope Benedict’s indictment, namely the unprecedented aversion to work, when work is most needed to reconstruct the foundations of prosperity, or the excessive thirst for pleasure which preceded, accompanied, and now has followed the most terrible tragedy in the annals of mankind.  The true spirit of work seems to have vanished from millions of men; that spirit of which Shakespeare made his Orlando speak when he said of his true servant, Adam: 

  “O good old man! how well in thee appears
  The constant service of the antique world. 
  When service sweat for duty, not for meed!”

The moral of our industrial civilization has been shattered.  Work for work’s sake, as the most glorious privilege of human faculties, has gone, both as an ideal and as a potent spirit.  The conception of work as a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes and in all countries.

The spirit of work is of more than sentimental importance.  It may be said of it, as Hamlet says of death:  “The readiness is all.”  All of us are conscious of the fact that, given a love of work, and the capacity for it seems almost illimitable—­as witness Napoleon, with his thousand-man power, or Shakespeare, who in twenty years could write more than twenty masterpieces.

On the other hand, given an aversion to work, and the less a man does the less he wants to do, or is seemingly capable of doing.