The Soul of Democracy

We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman Empire was so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it. Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it overwhelms our vision. Man had been going forward steadily, inventing and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole world had been transformed. Suddenly the entire range of invention is turned against Man. The machinery of comfort and progress becomes the enginery of devastation. Under such a shock, we ask, Has civilization over-reached itself? Has the machine run away with its maker? " The imagination is staggered. We are too much in the storm to see across the storm. " This is an excerpt from The Soul of Democracy: The Philosophy of the World War in Relation to Human Liberty. Griggs explains how a world war changes our perspectives and how we cannot go back to a time before the war when we could proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards.