Article March 25, 1922 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from E. S. Martin, Frank A. Vanderlip

[E. S. Martin in Life]

Things look better.... All sorts of people have been saying that the world needed a new mind. Mr. Lodge says it has begun to get it. But how did it get it? It has been growing gradually in affliction for two years and suddenly it has become operative. We see the visible factors that have brought the delegates to the Conference and made them work together. We can give praise to Mr. Harding's gifts of urbanity and conciliation, to Mr. Hughes' bold and constructive intelligence, to the good feelings and helpfulness of the various delegates; but all that we can see does not fully explain it, because there are invisible factors that are hard to reckon with.

Mr. Root has told us the trouble with the world is the incapacity of its people to receive the blessings that are ready for them. We know that we are full of all manner of prejudices, suspicions, illusions, foolish aims, preconceptions of duty and advantage that are horribly mistaken, and of liability to awesome deliriums. We need to emerge from a lot of old ideas that are not up to these times. That is the burden of a book, "The Mind in the Making," by James Harvey Robinson. "So novel are the conditions," says Dr. Robinson, "that we must undertake the arduous task of reconsidering a great part of the opinions about man and his relations to his fellow men which have been handed down to us by previous generations who lived in far other conditions and possessed far less information about the world and themselves. We have, however, first to create an unprecedented attitude of mind to cope with unprecedented conditions, and to utilize unprecedented knowledge."

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