Evening star., 1945-04-01
The Strain Of Life
In the Modern Era
Has Any Byeone Age Been
Troubled as Deeply as Our Own?
BIZ William H. Harrison.

Troubled as Deeply as Our Own!
By William H. Harrison.
IT suppose" said Prime Minister
Churchill recently, "that during these
last three winter months the human
race all the world over have UNDER
gone more physical agony and misery
than at any other period through which
this planet has passed. In the Stone
Age numbers we're fewer and primitive
creatures little removed from animal
origin knew no better. We suffer more.
We feel more"
Mr.. Churchill's observation limited
itself merely to the past winter, but
there seems no reason why the specu-
lation involved should not be extended
to cover the whole modern era, par
ticularly from the year 1914 up to now.
Has any age in the history OF man
been tried as sorely as our own? Has
any lived under as great and as all
inclusive a strain? Was there ever an
earlier time when the individual human
being was faced with the same measure
of physical and mental harassment as
has faced him in this century?
1893
In 1900 life was relatively simple. The
world then, as compared to the world
today, was pleasant and nonquarrel-
some and geared to a leisurely pace,
and continents could live pretty much
apart from each other, not feeling, as
they do now, inextricably bound to-
gether in a global community grown so
small that no nation can escape being
fenced in within it. BY contrast the
old days were placid. The First World
War had not yet happened. The auto
mobile, the airplane, the cinema, the
radio and the technology of mass pro-
duction had still to make their full
revolutionary impact on social, political
and economic history.
But since 1914 this century has been
a century of complex and painful ex-
perience, a paradoxical century of want
amid abundance and of new forms of
barbarism amid vast industrial and
scientific progress. After the immense
blood Letting of the First World War,
there were wounds that would not heal,
rivalries that would not down, deep
dislocations that would not be righted.
Disillusionment. embittered and wide
spread, left the peace sicklied DER al
most as soon as the statesmen had
signed it, and imitation. varying from
mild to catastrophe, took its toll nearly
everywhere Then for time-spec-
tacularly so in the United States-there
was dream period. No adult American
can have forgotten it: The strange era
when old social conventions were
laughed away, when prohibition was
our main worry, when the chief in
terests of the hour were Freud, hathtub
gin, Ouija boards, dappers, endurance
swimmers and a host of similar oddities,
and when materialism ran riot and
every one was speculating in the stock
market, thinking he was becoming rich
and that not much mattered beyond
that.
The boom ended soon enough, and
from the giddy heights of paper prosper
ity America and the world plunged into
grim depression. Difhcult new prob
lens then began to pile one on top
of the other-not simple problems like
prohibition, which could be defined
easily and comprehended without much
trouble, but enormously complex ones
like tariffs, foreign exchange, over
production, underconsumption, the
armies of the unemployed and multi
tude Of other interrelated issues affect
ing not one nation alone but every
nation. In the United States the aver
age citizen now found his mind bat
tered by something almost too big and
complicated for any mans understand
ing. by "the problem of all the prob
lems," by more than decade OF swift
and convulsive social political and eco
nomic aevelopments-ma pro-
grams from apple-selling to WPA. new
business and agricultural controls, giant
power projects, the rise OF organized
labor. higher and higher trade barriers,
autarchy, the growth Of Naziism and
Fascism, the expanding aggressions OF
Japan and finally the Second World
War, the costliest, the bloodiest the
most total and cruelest Of ordeals ever
to afiict mankind.
Considering the revolutionary changes,
the two terrible wars and the general
spiritual bleakness of the period, good
argument can be made for the thesis
that man in the Goth century has
had less peace of mind and more
woe than ever before in history. Yet.
if he could speak to us now, the primi-
tive creature Of the Stone Age might
insist that In relation to the back
ground and conditions Of his time, the
happiness and unhappiness he knew
were essentially neither more nor less
than what has been experienced in our
time. So, too, might speak the ghosts
of those who lived in Sparta or under
the Roman Empire or in the days OF
the decimating Black Death or dur
ing the 80 Years War or the American
Civil War or any other period OF
extraordinary human activity, trial or
upheaval.
That I'VE suffer more" that I'VE feel
more" may be merely an illusion oc-
casioned in part by the fact that edu-
| cation and modern communications
have made this uniquely articulate
| era and that the worlds ills are there
| fore aired and discussed far more ex-
tensively than in any prior age. In
| other words, though the strain Of hv-
ing now encompasses vastly greater
numbers, people in bygone centuries