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In a period of depression—and we have had this now for fourteenyears—facts become after a while exceedingly irksome andbleak companions. Poverty, unemployment, bitter controversy,hatreds, the frustration of the middle classes, the seemingly hopelessstruggle between labor and capital, all floating upon a precarioustide of government debt which might run out on us any minute leavingus stranded on the beach—the whole thing seems so difficult, soimpossible, so insoluble that men run away from these facts after awhile. Young people who in 1929 were twenty years old are nowthirty-five. These fairest years of their lives have slipped away fromthem—the opportunity to build, to make homes, to have children,to get definitely started in some hopeful direction is gone. Littlebusinessmen who for fifteen years have struggled to hold onto theirshops and their stores, who were twenty-eight or thirty when thedepression started and were moving toward that state of securitywhich is their great objective, are now past forty, moving intomiddle age. Hundreds of thousands of them have gone under. Hundredsof thousands more have gotten nowhere and middle age approacheswith the dream of security almost completely broken andthe future for them darker than ever. These are the conditions whichmake the going easy for the romanticist. Men who run away fromfacts, from these dark and foreboding facts, do not like to runaway frankly. They prefer to give their retreat the character of agreat advance in another direction. It is the advance to "greatness."When the romantics leap up with their bugle calls and banners inscribedwith florid slogans summoning to greatness, to high adventure,it is possible to perceive the incredible spectacle of men whohave failed to operate their own society and are now in defeat andretreat sounding the drums and raising the banners for a greatcrusade to do for the whole world what they could not do forthemselves.Thus we find these very poorly disguised admirations of AdolfHitler:A few years ago the "practical men" and the economic scholars weresaying that Hitler was the greatest money crank of all. They announcedthat he had bankrupted Germany. In fact, he had bankrupted the expertsand the practical men. Today in the dark continent of his contriving the"3