The age of superstition in which we live

Where is the simple dream world we witnessed before 1914? Wherever you turned, you saw new governments, but wherever you looked, you found them composed of foreign men thrown into power, newly emerged classes or races, speaking a new language in every sense of the word. Government became something different from what it had been before. Before 1914, in the eyes of the West, government was committed to maintaining law and order and consolidating security, and it could not go beyond that. By 1918, and people awoke groggily from the nightmare of war, governments began to interfere significantly in the lives of their subjects: they imposed duties upon themselves, created tools, and accumulated power and burdens unprecedented before.