THE DAY OF JUDGMENT - Primera edición

The universal industrial crisis for which we wait will prove to be a judgment of the world. And it is the most significant and fateful judgment before which mankind has stood. It will define and determine the human future as no other crisis has ever done. In truth, we may say that this is the first time that the world as a whole has been consciously weighed in the balance. There have been crises of empires, states, -religions, and civilizations. Not once nor twice only have prophets come proclaiming the end of the world; and not once nor twice only has the world come to an end. The break-up of the Roman Empire, with the obscuring and disintegrating of Greek culture, and the volcanic breaking forth of a fresh and primal world in the form of the barbarian hordes, is the nearest approach to an anal yfor what awaits us. The rejection of the unfit Roman world, and the creation of a new world out of the Slavonic and Teutonic deluge, was certainly a judgment of the race. Still, we have had nothing so universal or determinative as the industrial crisis will prove to be; nothing so weighted with the weal or woe of the whole human family; nothing so decisive or creative of the channel in which history shall run for a long time to come. It is the first time that mankind has been summoned to anything like a choice concerning its own destiny; the first time that man has had the opportunity for even rudely attempting to make his own world; the first time the human will has, or may, become a directing force in evolution. This is because the world is more directly organized by its mode of production than ever before. Never before has mankind been so universally organized by a single economic system. The present world-organization is not political or military, as was the case with the Roman world, but industrial and financial. Kings and parliaments, presidents and congresses
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)