The great material achievements of the last two generations have been mainly due to an intense concentration and specialisation of functions among both men of thought and men of action.  But the result of this has been that there have been few to attempt the vitally important task of appreciating the movement of our civilisation as a whole, and of endeavouring to determine how far the political conceptions inherited from an earlier age were valid in the new conditions.  For under the pressure of the great transformation political forces also have been transformed, and in all countries political thought is baffled and bewildered by the complexity of the problems by which it is faced.  To this in part we owe the dimness of vision which overtook us as we went whirling together towards the great catastrophe.  It is only in the glare of a world-conflagration that we begin to perceive, in something like their true proportions, the great forces and events which have been shaping our destinies.  In the future, if the huge soulless mechanism which man has created is not to get out of hand and destroy him, we must abandon that contempt for the philosopher and the political thinker which we have latterly been too ready to express, and we must recognise that the task of analysing and relating to one another the achievements of the past and the problems of the present is at least as important as the increase of our knowledge and of our dangerous powers by intense and narrow concentration within very limited fields of thought and work.

In the meantime we must observe (however briefly and inadequately), how the dazzling advances of science and industry have affected the conquest of the world by European civilisation, and why it has come about that instead of leading to amity and happiness, they have brought us to the most hideous catastrophe in human history.

Science and industry, in the first place, made the conquest and organisation of the world easy.  In the first stages of the expansion of Europe the material superiority of the West had unquestionably afforded the means whereby its political ideas and institutions could be made operative in new fields.  The invention of ocean-going ships, the use of the mariner’s compass, the discovery of the rotundity of the earth, the development of firearms—­these were the things which made possible the creation of the first European empires; though these purely material advantages could have led to no stable results unless they had been wielded by peoples possessing a real political capacity.  In the same way the brilliant triumphs of modern engineering have alone rendered possible the rapid conquest and organisation of huge undeveloped areas; the deadly precision of Western weapons has made the Western peoples irresistible; the wonderful progress of medical science has largely overcome the barriers of disease which long excluded the white man from great regions of the earth; and the methods of modern finance, organising and making available the combined credit of whole communities, have provided the means for vast enterprises which without them could never have been undertaken.