of the Anti-saloon League states, and with good show of reason, that if the amendment be passed by Congress, its ratification by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States can be only a matter of time.  What the probabilities actually are, I do not undertake to say; neither am I concerned at this moment with the merits of the issue itself.  What I am concerned with is the simple fact that in this situation, brought upon the country with dramatic suddenness, nobody seems to have been in the least startled, or so much as disturbed in his equanimity.  There will of course be a great struggle over the question, sooner or later.  But neither in Congress nor in the press has there as yet been any sign of such an assertion of the claims of personal liberty as, at any time previous to the past ten years, would have been sure to be made in such a situation.  This collective silence, on an issue affecting so intimately the lives, the habits, the traditions of millions of people, is, in my judgment, by far the most impressive proof of the degree in which the public mind has grown accustomed to the inroads of regulation upon the domain of individuality.

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A number of years ago, when the mathematical concept of space of more than three dimensions was attracting great popular interest, an ingenious writer undertook to make the idea intelligible to “the general” by picturing the state of mind in regard to three dimensions of a race of beings whose life and whose sensual experience was limited to space of two dimensions.  He gave his little book the title “Flatland,” and it gained wide attention.  In his Commencement address at Columbia last year, President Butler had the happy thought of applying the term in the characterization of certain aspects of the intellectual and political life of our time.  He was speaking particularly of that absorption in the immediate problems of the day which makes almost impossible a true study and contemplation of the lasting concerns of mankind as embodied in history and literature.  “Every ruling tendency,” he said, “is to make life a Flatland, an affair of two dimensions, with no depth, no background, no permanent root.”  That this is a literal truth probably neither Dr. Butler nor anyone else would contend; but it hits off with great force and with substantial accuracy the prevailing character of thought in the circles most active and most influential in almost every department of human activity at the present time.  And the tendency which President Butler describes as arising out of our absorption in current problems is still more manifest in the spirit of our actual dealings with those problems themselves.  On every hand we find a surprising readiness to accept views which explicitly tend to take out of life that which gives it depth and significance and richness.  Each one of the four movements we have mentioned affords an illustration of this:  in following any one of them we travel straight toward