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two years the tendency has been to ascribe all that has happened inEurope to an explosion of human wickedness, and it has seemednecessary to bring the economic factors back to their place in thepicture. Many diverse forces, of course, influence the course ofhuman events. In other periods of social change different socialenergies have in turn exerted a dominating influence—religion, politics,dynastic ambitions, waves of moral disease or resurgence. In thepresent era doubtless it has been the economic disorder which hasbeen predominant. But it is not the only one. This era may perhapsbe compared to the long period that marked the end of feudalismand the rise of capitalism. Society seems to be struggling towardsome new form of economic organization. Whether or not moderncapitalism is in its death throes, as so many assure us, I do not undertaketo decide. But certainly the economic society which we somewhatloosely term capitalism is passing through a crisis now whichmay be the culminating crisis in a long series of convulsions of increasingintensity. It may, in a sense, be described as a period ofeconomic decay, presenting all the symptoms of anemia and generaldebility. Such a period makes a rich breeding ground for otherparasitic diseases of the spirit, which have nothing essentially to dowith economics, but which thrive in the soil of economic distress.I have already referred to Ortega's theory of the revolt of themasses. The nineteenth century, he maintains, had produced a newman and infused into him formidable appetites and growing meansof satisfying them. These include social, political, economic, andtechnical instruments that armed him with a new efficiency in hisstruggle with nature. His inability to use these instruments as successfullyas he hoped has produced in him a quality of "indocility."Docility and indocility—-these are the words which describe thedifference between the masses of the eighteenth and those of thetwentieth century.Against these expectations of the masses, the failure of theirorganized societies to realize them stands in dark and menacingcontrast. The unwillingness of the masses to submit to this failureled to a serious loosening of their adhesion to the political principlesof government on which these societies were based. Impatience grewto exasperation and to a search for some other instruments of social118