Above all, they are the signal to us of how in the final catastrophe the malady of the body passes over into malady of the mind.

Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little.
Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish,[156] but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis.

Then man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed.

The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air.

As I write, the flames of Russian Bolshevism seem, for the moment at least, to have burnt themselves out, and the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are held in a dreadful torpor.