Causes of the Collapse
easily than tuberculosis. The one comes in fearful waves of death which toss humanity, the other creeps slowly; one leads to awful fear, the other gradually to indifference. The result was that men faced the one with ruthless energy, while they tried to check consumption by feeble means. Man became master of the plague, while tuberculosis became master over him.
The same thing is so of the diseases of peoples. If they do not take the form of catastrophes, men slowly begin to get used to them, and are finally destroyed by them all the more surely because gradually. It is a piece of good fortune, then, if a bitter one, when Fate decides to interfere in this slow process of decay, and with a sudden glow to display the end of the disease to the sufferer. For that is not infrequently the result of such a catastrophe. It may easily become the cause of a cure carried through with utmost determination.
But even a case of that sort presupposes a recognition of the inner causes which produced the sickness in question.
Here too, the most important thing is still to distinguish the germs from the conditions they produce. This is the more difficult the longer the virus has existed in the body politic, and the more it has come to be taken for granted as a natural part of it. For it may easily happen that after a certain length of time one will regard definitely harmful poisons as an integral part of one’s own people, or at least will tolerate them as a necessary evil, so that a motive is no longer thought necessary for searching for the extraneous germ.
Thus in the long years of peace before the war certain ills had definitely arisen and been recognized as such, although, a few exceptions aside, almost no attention was paid to what caused them. Here again the exceptions were primarily in aspects of economic life, which would strike the attention of the individual more than ills in many other fields.
There were many signs of decay which should have given food for grave thought.
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