Points of Friction
mostly inexorable, always irresponsible, and entirely inaccessible to the personal appeals which have sometimes moved the obsolete tyrant to pity. In its selfishness and meanness it is largely the legislated and organized ideal of the lowest and stupidest of its citizens, whose daily life is nearest the level of barbarism."
I am not without hope that the events of the past ten years modified Mr. Howells's point of view. If the German State revealed itself as something perilously close to barbarism, the Allied States presented a superb concentration of their peoples' unfaltering purpose. That the world was saved from degradation too deep to be measured was due to individual heroism, animated, upheld, and focused by the State. Though temperamentally conservative, I feel no shadow of regret for the "obsolete" and very picturesque tyrant who softened or hardened by caprice. I would rather trust our stupid and venal authorities,
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