What was true of Germany, however, was true--although in lesser degree--of all civilized nations. In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his nobler self.
This may explain the paradox of so-called "progress." It may be likened to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented catastrophe. As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.
Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind. It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact--mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress--but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would propel man forward.
A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass. Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra.
One can see the tragedy of the time, as a few saw it, in comparing the first _Locksley Hall_ of Alfred Tennyson, written in 1827, with its abiding faith in the "increasing purpose of the ages" and its roseate prophecies of the golden age, when the "war-drum would throb no longer and the battle flags be furled in the Parliament of Man and the Federation of the World," and the later _Locksley Hall_, written sixty years later, when the great spiritual poet of our time gave utterance to the dark pessimism which flooded his soul:
"Gone the cry of 'Forward, Forward,' lost within a growing gloom; Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.
Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!