At the present historical moment the Free World is playing for truly enormous stakes. A few false moves can lead to a yawning abyss. No course of action holds out great hopes of success. Yet one would not arrive at that conclusion by listening to the speeches of our statesmen, or looking into the faces of our citizens, or scanning the pages of our newspapers. We are not dancing on the edge of a volcano: we are sitting and grinning, good-naturedly but idiotically, at the very rim of hellfire.
Why can we not see it? The world, to our minds, is in an age of bustle, programs, platforms, scientific progress, humanitarianism, and revolutions which improve nothing, an age of progressive degradation. The show is multicolored but boring, exciting but meaningless, entertaining but not rousing.
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