And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also with a hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and disingenuous factors in the life of man.  They spoke of trade, and I realized for the first time there could be buying and selling that was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrial organization, and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages.  The haze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual recognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process of the social training of men.  Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness.  These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly faded memory.  “There must be a common training of the young,” said Richover; “a frank initiation.  We have not so much educated them as hidden things from them, and set traps.  And it might have been so easy—­it can all be done so easily.”

That hangs in my memory as the refrain of that council, “It can all be done so easily,” but when they said it then, it came to my ears with a quality of enormous refreshment and power.  It can all be done so easily, given frankness, given courage.  Time was when these platitudes had the freshness and wonder of a gospel.

In this enlarged outlook the war with the Germans—­that mythical, heroic, armed female, Germany, had vanished from men’s imaginations—­was a mere exhausted episode.  A truce had already been arranged by Melmount, and these ministers, after some marveling reminiscences, set aside the matter of peace as a mere question of particular arrangements. . . .  The whole scheme of the world’s government had become fluid and provisional in their minds, in small details as in great, the unanalyzable tangle of wards and vestries, districts and municipalities, counties, states, boards, and nations, the interlacing, overlapping, and conflicting authorities, the felt of little interests and claims, in which an innumerable and insatiable multitude of lawyers, agents, managers, bosses, organizers lived like fleas in a dirty old coat, the web of the conflicts, jealousies, heated patchings up and jobbings apart, of the old order—­they flung it all on one side.

“What are the new needs?” said Melmount.  “This muddle is too rotten to handle.  We’re beginning again.  Well, let us begin afresh.”

Section 3

“Let us begin afresh!” This piece of obvious common sense seemed then to me instinct with courage, the noblest of words.  My heart went out to him as he spoke.  It was, indeed, that day as vague as it was valiant; we did not at all see the forms of what we were thus beginning.  All that we saw was the clear inevitableness that the old order should end. . . .