Article November 12, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Walter Rathenau, Sherman Miles, Rufus M. Jones, John Jay Chapman, Margaret sherwood

[From "In Days To Come," by Walter Rathenau, Minister of Reconstruction in the German Cabinet]

"The sacrifices that will be demanded in days to come will be greater, the service will be more arduous, the material reward will be less considerable, than in the socialist commonwealth; for in days to come there will be required something more than the renunciation of material goods. We shall have to put away from ourselves our dearest vanities, weaknesses, vices, and passions; upon us will be imposed the duty of cherishing sentiments and performing deeds, which to-day we esteem in theory while despising them in practice; we shall have to learn by hard experience that our aim in life must not be happiness but fulfillment, that we have to live not for our own sake but for the sake of God."

"The consciousness must awaken that responsibility to God and gratitude to God make the cause of each the cause of all and the cause of all the cause of each. The consciousness must awaken that there can be no misfortune and no crime for which we do not share a common responsibility; that there can be neither right nor duty nor happiness nor power apart from the fate of all. Should mechanization, too, become permeated with this spiritual consciousness, it will no longer be an empirical condition of equilibrium."

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