IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 355 



structive instruments the world has ever seen, and 

 gave them unlimited opportunities to use them for 

 good or evil, as they saw fit. It was not merely that 

 the ancient implements of social conveyance had grown 

 into steel-clad cars, battle-ships, submarines, and air- 

 ships; into newspaper, cinema, and international postal 

 service. Far more significant than these events, great 

 as they were, was the fact that the vital spots of the 

 whole social system were left open to mental and phys- 

 ical attacks capable of at once destroying countless 

 human beings, and of reducing the survivors to the 

 old levels of barbarism. For the cohesion of this new 

 system was no longer resident in a rigid mental con- 

 servatism, or in stable chemical affinities, or in long 

 established social relations of man to man, or to his 

 physical environment; but to good will, to mutual con- 

 fidence, and to a clear understanding of the new con- 

 ditions that had brought this new social life into exis- 

 tence and which were essential to its endurance. 



And meantime social officers virtually, if not in 

 reality, had been degraded to the ranks because they 

 had lost that distinctive saving power which sanctions 

 authority. The divinity that hedged about the king 

 and priest had disappeared; the gaudy covering of 

 paint and feathers, and the coating of tinselled tradi- 

 tion that served to conceal and protect the social para- 

 site and profiteer, became as transparent and penetrable 

 as air to the newly armed and bespectacled masses. 

 The modern political and business barons, and the law- 

 clad knights of militarism and diplomacy, for their 

 own selfish purposes, had put the all powerful instru- 

 ments of science into the hands of their retainers in 

 place of the flail, the hammer, and the scythe ; and had 



