St Louis University - Archive Yearbook (St Louis, MO)

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TH£ ARC«IV£ Of ST. LOUIS UNIV€«SITY

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H AO I ONG centuries ago the tribes of earth attempted to build a tower to I the heavens, to reach God, and to make themselves equal to Him. Man must ever be rearing towers of Babel, hisolently, egotistically, foolishly, he builds, even as he built the materialist machine age in which we gloried. It took years of careful planning, of gradual exclusion of the supernatural, years of development of invention after invention, until man and machine ruled together in a world devoid of God. We have only to go back in history to explain our world of today and yesterday. Back to the birth of reason, the Renaissance, and see the ugly thread of matei-ialism vv hich once lined the tapestry of life now dominate its very fiber. Men lost a clear vision in those days and were cursed vith a near- sightedness which made the things of touch seem all important, those of the spirit distant and useless. To such as these the hidustrial Revolution came as a logical step; improved methods of production seemed a natural means of enslaving, not of freeing, man. Conjure now with great names, names of pseudo-scientists and foolish philosophers, because sage thinkers, high priests of the new religion, arose to justify existing conditions by vapid theorizing. And thus we improved and approved our system, moved steadily away from the bed rock of honesty, of charity, of depend- ence on a Deity. The entire order gained inomentuiTi — mass prodviction; no consumption by the masses; capital into more factories, fewer mouths; industrialism and capitalism and materialism and atheism and . . CHAOS. America dates her crash from October of 1929. But America — and the world vith her — had been crashing for years. The World War was the last mad moveinent in a symphony of destruction, for capitalism com- mitted suicide when it ran a world into a crowning commercial conflict. It has not yet died; in fact, it is displaying sudden vigor and seeming new life in its death-throes. But capitalism — classical capitalism — has all but disappeared. And what is to take its place? The little crystal ball that w as the vorld of the old order has been shattered; man must pick up the pieces of that little globe, and with his usual colossal ignorance he has done just that, attem,pted to reconstruct. Every corner of the earth teems w ith activity — mad, furious activity. Action and reaction, force and counter-force play in Russia, Italy, Ger- many, Mexico, in the entire changing world. In wild stacatto come the mingled cries from chaos. . . Union of Socialistic Soviet Republics. . . proletariat over the bourgeoisie . . . class war and world revolution . . . machinery and the common good deified . . . Five-Year Plans unending . . .