And so it was with the Puritans, who were themselves the children of the
revolt against social corruption. They fondly believed that a new era was
to be ushered in by the rule of the Cromwellian saints. What the
Cromwellian saints did in truth usher in, was the carnival of debauchery
of Charles II, in its turn to be succeeded by the capitalistic competitive
age which we have known, and which has abutted in the recent war.
Man can never hope to change his physical necessities, and therefore his
moral nature must always remain the same in essence, if not in form. As
Washington truly said, "The motives which predominate most in human
affairs are self-love and self-interest," and "nothing binds one country
or one state to another but interest."
If, then, it be true, that man is an automatic animal moving always along
the paths of least resistance toward predetermined ends, it cannot fail to
be useful to us in the present emergency to mark, as distinctly as we can,
the causes which impelled Germany, at a certain point in her career, to
choose the paths which led to her destruction rather than those which, at
the first blush, promised as well, and which seemed to be equally as easy
and alluring. And we may possibly, by this process, expose certain
phenomena which may profit us, since such an examination may help us to
estimate what avenues are like to prove ultimately the least resistant.
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