It is no part of my task to elaborate this thesis, and still less to magnify its perils.  Enough has been said and written on this subject during the last two years; more than enough, perhaps, and in any case no thinking person is unaware of the conditions that exist, whatever may be his estimate of their significance, his interpenetration of their tendency.  I have set myself the task of trying to suggest some constructive measures that we may employ in laying the foundations for the immediate future; they may be wrong in whole or in part, but at least my object and motive are not recrimination or invective, but regeneration.  Nevertheless, as a foundation the case must be stated, and as a necessary preparation to any work that looks forward we must have at least a working hypothesis as to how the conditions that need redemption were brought about.  I state the case thus, therefore:  That human society, even humanity itself, is now in a state of flux that at any moment may change into a chaos comparable only with that which came with the fall of classical civilization and from which five centuries were necessary for the process of recovery.  Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history.  How has this been possible, what has been the sequence of events that has brought us to this pass?

It is of course the result of the interaction of certain physical, material facts and certain spiritual forces.  Out of these spiritual energies come events, phenomena that manifest themselves in political, social, ecclesiastical transactions and institutions; in wars, migrations and the reshaping of states; in codes of law, the organization of society, the development of art, literature and science.  In their turn all these concrete products work on the minds and souls of men, modifying old spiritual impulses either by exaltation or degradation, bringing new ones into play; and again these react on the material fabric of human life, causing new combinations, unloosing new forces, that in their turn play their part in the eternal process of building, unbuilding and rebuilding our unstable and fluctuant world.

Underlying all the varied material forms of ancient society, as this developed around the shores of the Mediterranean, was the great fact of slavery:  Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, all were small, sometimes very small, minorities of highly developed, highly privileged individuals existing on a great sub-stratum of slaves.  All the vast contributions of antiquity in government and law, in science, letters, art and philosophy, all the building of the culture and civilization that still remain the foundation stones of human society, was the work of the few free subsisting on the many un-free.  But freedom, liberty, is an attribute of the soul and it may exist even when the body is in bondage.  The slaves of antiquity were free neither in body