Our Progress-Idea and the War

Excerpt from Our Progress-Idea and the War: An Essay Concerning Recent Literature The process of retrospective inquiry set afoot by a great war has two phases: the worlds scrutiny of the nation at the centre of the struggle, and the world's scrutiny of itself. The first phase is just now fully operative, with Germany under the worlds microscope; but the second is still inchoate. Like Germany today, France seemed a century ago a thing strangely isolate: the thought of other nations was preoccupied with the astounding divergences between her ways and theirs. But presently the world found that, in scrutinizing France, it had been brought face to face with itself. Europe saw that old sins of its own were being expiated in the upheaval induced by the Revolution; and that certain ideas, more obscurely at work in its own mind, had been carried in France to their logical and violent extreme. A similar situation must presently be faced in regard to Germany. And the discovery is bound to be made that the world's responsibility, in this case, is much more extensive, inasmuch as the relationships between nations have manifoldly increased and tightened since the eighteenth century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.