Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 132, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 June 1920 — CIVILIZATION IN PERIL SIR GEDDES WARNS [ARTICLE]

CIVILIZATION IN PERIL SIR GEDDES WARNS

Washington, D. C., May 31.—Sir Auckland Geddes, the British ambassador, speaking tonight at the ninety-ninth annual commencement of George Washington university, warned America against enmeshment in the social “disentanglements” of Europe.' “So far only the swell of the storm centered in Europe laps your coast,” the ambassador declared. “Yet your daily press is already filled with news of strikes, what is vaguely called industrial unrest. We all know that it was your tradition to keep clear of European entanglements. “Here is a European disentanglement that is already piling the waters on your social beaches, a disentanglement of the" complicated interweaving of man and man in the social fabric.” Sir Auckland told the graduates that he doubted if ever before was the future for as many nations, as many individuals, so closely shrouded in dark clouds pregnant with storm.

“In Europe we know that an age is dying,” he continued. “Here it would be easy to miss the signs of coming change, but I have little doubt that it will come. A. realization of the aimlessness of life lived to labor and to die, having achieved nothing but avoidance of starvation and the birth of children also doomed to the weary treadmill has seized the minds of millions.” . Ambassador Geddes asserted that the next fifty or sixty years “are going to be the most glorious or the most disastrous in the history of the world.” The present generation “cannot hope to see a successful end to the world revolution now in progress,” he said. The way out of world turmoil, he said, must be led by those who keep in view three essentials, which he named as beauty, services and truth. “Keeping these three in view,” he added, “civilization will safely. Let one be occulted and civilization is in danger. Let two be occulted and peril is nigh. Let three be occulted and civilization falls. Thus Babylon fell, thus Egypt, thus Rome and all the civilizations of the past fell. So today civilization totters.”