Through these as well as other channels virulent poison penetrated to the marrow of the social organism.  Language itself, on which all human intercourse hinges, was twisted to suit unwholesome ambitions, further selfish interests, and obscure the vision of all those who wanted real reforms and unvarnished truth.  During the war the armies were never told plainly what they were struggling for; officially they were said to be combating for justice, right, self-determination, the sacredness of treaties, and other abstract nouns to which the heroic soldiers never gave a thought and which a section of the civil population misinterpreted.  Indeed, so little were these shibboleths understood even by the most intelligent among the politicians who launched them that one half of the world still more or less conscientiously labors to establish their contraries and is anathematizing the other half for championing injustice, might, and unveracity—­under various misnomers.

Anglo-Saxondom, taking the lead of humanity, imitated the Catholic states of by-past days, and began to impose on other peoples its own ideas, as well as its practices and institutions, as the best fitted to awaken their dormant energies and contribute to the social reconstruction of the world.  In the interval, language, whether applied to history, journalism, or diplomacy, was perverted and words lost their former relations to the things connoted, and solemn promises were solemnly broken in the name of truth, right, or equity.  For the new era of good faith, justice and morality was inaugurated, oddly enough, by a general tearing up of obligatory treaties and an ethical violation of the most binding compacts known to social man.  This happened coincidently to be in keeping with the general insurgence against all checks and restraints, moral and social, for which the war is mainly answerable, and to be also in harmony with the regular supersession of right by might which characterizes the present epoch and with the disappearance of the sense of law.  In a word, under the auspices of the amateur world-reformers, the tendency of Bolshevism throve and spread—­an instructive case of people serving the devil at the bidding of God’s best friends.

As in the days of the Italian despots, every individual has the chance of rising to the highest position in many of the states, irrespective of his antecedents and no matter what blots may have tarnished his ’scutcheon.  Neither aristocratic descent, nor public spirit nor even a blameless past is now an indispensable condition of advancement.  In Germany the head of the Republic is an honest saddler.  In Austria the chief of the government until recently was the assassin of a prime minister.  The chief of the Ukraine state was an ex-inmate of an asylum.  Trotzky, one of the Russian duumvirs, is said to have a record which might of itself have justified his change of name from Braunstein.  Bela Kuhn, the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, had the reputation of a thief before rising to the height of ruler of the Magyars....  In a word, Napoleon’s ideal is at last realized, “La carriere est ouverte aux talents.”