Excerpt from Journal of the National Institute of Social Sciences, 1918 For students of the social sciences the word of the hour is Reconstruction. The problems of the present are those of; but the war, at least to America and her allies, is a war. for an abiding peace. No matter how great may be the victory, it will be defeat to the best hopes of humanity if the conditions that have fruited in this war be left unchanged. In no small part those conditions are social. Their reform calls for the best effort of us all. Though the end of the war may yet be far, there is no time to lose. Once before, a half-century ago at the end of a great war, that word Reconstruction was familiar to American ears; and even those who applaud on the whole the measures for which it stands are frank to deplore the errors of its haste. Happily today the wisest among us are already busy with the task. In these last months, while the members of our Institute were at work on their papers, a score of British thinkers, headed by an administrator so eminent as Earl Cromer, gave to the press a volume of studies on "After-War Problems." "In the hope," says the editor, Mr. William Harbutt Dawson, "of contributing toward the great task of after-war reconstruction this volume has been written." "We are told of what Germany is to be compelled to do, of the capitulations and penalties which are to be required of her as the price of peace; ... yet there are thousands of Englishmen, and they not the least patriotic, who are quite as eager to know what England herself is prepared to do in order to help in and sustain the coming reign of peace and goodwill." Has America less need for such a sequel of victory? And if the war end not in victory, but in a truce, her need will be the greater. For, if the war is to be fought over, the supreme aim must meanwhile be national efficiency. That efficiency cannot come from makeshifts. It will not come from adoption of the methods of autocracy. If democracy is to outlive autocracy, it can be only because her outcome proves itself a sounder national character, a truer national weal. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.