The immense burden placed upon nations of the world with their competitive effort to make each one safe from the other is exemplified in the enormous amount spent on armaments in 1938. Germany spent £12 per head of population, Great Britain £7, Russia £6, France and Japan £5, Italy £3 and the United States £2. Mr. Charles Morgan in an essay which precedes his play, "The Flashing Stream," has many instructive things to say, and it may be appropriate to recall some of his phrases:—'"There are recurrent periods of history in which it seems that the long struggle must end in defeat, the torch be dropped and mankind relapse into barbarism. Such a period followed the collapse of Roman power but ended in Renaissance; in such a period we live now who, if we hope for a renaissance, must look for it in a different kind. Our folly is not greater than our forefathers' but the instruments of our folly are more destructive; our civilization is equipped for suicide as theirs was not, and stands in instant peril. The terror is not that men will die or that they will die uselessly and in misery, for men are replaceable; we attach overmuch importance to the preservation of our lives, which, in the reckoning of nature, are ut small account. The terror is that a sonnet of Shakespeare may be lost as the poems of Sappho have been; or the cathedral at Chartres be destroyed; or the science of mathematics, the art of mathematics, be driven back to the cutting of notches on cks. Many are persuaded by despair that against the violence of the modern world there is no remedy but to escape or to destroy; but there is another within the reach of all—of a woman at her cradle, of a man of science at his instruments, of a seaman at his wheel or a ploughman at his furrow, of young and old when they love and when they worship—the remedy of a single mind, active, passionate and steadfast, which has upheld the spirit of man through many tyrapnies and shall uphold it
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.