Harper’s pictorial library of the world war,

In various ways, as this volume shows, the war has profoundly affected our economic and political life. War has ever been a disturber and innovator, always leaving after it a different world from that which existed previous to it. On account of our tremendously complex economic organization?the specialization of industry among nations, and the network of commerce?war today causes more profound changes than ever before. There can not be a human being in the world today whose life is not altered by the war through which we have just passed. In trying, now that the war is over, to stop drifting, and to think our way out of the bent (or broken) remains of the ante bellum life, the world is confronted by a maze of problems and a still greater maze of proffered solutions. Many of these proposals are, unfortunately, of the nature of treatment directed not at fundamental conditions, but merely at symptoms. We should be past the stage, in our social science, as we are in medicine, where we treat symptoms without a thorough diagnosis of the fundamental causes. And yet it is just this thorough diagnosis that we lack. What, then, are the changes brought about by the war which most deeply affect "the body politic," and by meeting which the most far reaching improvements can be made?