[DuncanWaring]

You’re probably correct.

If you read Rudyard Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, published in 1919, it’s fairly obvious something was going horribly wrong, even without the war.

[Ohioan]

You cite the poem, which provided the theme for my novel, Return Of The Gods.

If you look more closely--for example the haunting line about the lights going out in Rome, you will note that the poem is not intended to be time specific. It addresses the endlessly repeated process of people following the marketers of slogan & fantasy. Of course 20th Century egalitarian socialist movements would be an example of that recurring phenomenon, of people following the "Gods of the Market."

Kipling Poem