ANTICIPATIONS

OF THE

REACTION OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC

PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE

AND THOUGHT

BY

H. G. WELLS

AUTHOR OF

"LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM, " "THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, "AND "TALES OF SPACE AND TIME. "

_SECOND EDITION_

LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD. 

1902

CONTENTS

 I. LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1 II. THE PROBABLE DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES 33 III. DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS 66 IV. CERTAIN SOCIAL REACTIONS 103 V. THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY 143 VI. WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 176 VII. THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES 215VIII. THE LARGER SYNTHESIS 245 IX. FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC POLICY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 279

ANTICIPATIONS

I

LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement asthe necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certainspeculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which, taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go inthis new century. [1] Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces ofthe performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almostinvariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of thesatirical opportunity has been too much for the writer;[2] thenarrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculativeinductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether infavour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Ourutmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as itwere, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impendingyears. The reader is a prospective shareholder--he and his heirs--thoughwhether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief orliking is another matter. 

For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papersunfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon theprobable developments and changes of the means of land locomotionduring the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history ofthe nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences ofchanges in transit may be, and no one who has studied the militaryperformances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upontransport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues ofpolitics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populatingof America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods oflocomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of thesemethods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparativelyindependent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movementsaffected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and ofexperiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost asinevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to bepossible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, theoverthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europeby the "Yellow Peril, " might conceivably affect such details, let ussay, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but wouldprobably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotionuntouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relationto the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them, or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon hispilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and theimmemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan andAustralasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take upthe process now, even should the European let it fall. 

The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a veryinteresting phase in that great development of means of land transitthat has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of thenineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place withthe other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, ifit needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam enginerunning upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, thefirst great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode oftransit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of thiscentury's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in landlocomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin thisforecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history ofthe addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind. 

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that thesteam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in thehistory of the world?

Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for wantof a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in thedevelopment strikes one--as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwinstrikes one--as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that theneed for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and--to useone of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that everdropped from the lips of man--the demand created the supply; it wasquite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for suchthings at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to havebeen fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on theother hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chineseempires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transitthan those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steamlocomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, andsomething of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known fortwo thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors, and working toys, before the Christian era. It may be urged that thisadvance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling ofknowledge initiated by Lord Bacon and sustained by the Royal Society;but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the newhabits of mind that spread outward from that centre played their part. The men whose names are cardinal in the history of this developmentinvented, for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick'sengine was running along its rails and Evan's boat was walloping up theHudson a quarter of a century before Carnot expounded his generalproposition. There were no such deductions from principles toapplication as occur in the story of electricity to justify ourattribution of the steam engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does thisparticular invention seem to have been directly due to the newpossibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by thesubstitution of coal for wood in iron works; through the greatertemperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in thereduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities didgreatly help the steam engine in its invasion of the field of commonlife, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. Itwas, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented seriesof causes, that set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, andin another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisivefactor. One peculiar condition of its production in England seems tohave supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousandyears in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steamlocomotive could appear. 

This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple, profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steamutilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's "Rocket" indetail, as one realizes its profound complexity, one begins tounderstand how impossible it would have been for that structure to havecome into existence _de novo_, however urgently the world had need ofit. But it happened that the coal needed to replace the dwindlingforests of this small and exceptionally rain-saturated country occurs inlow hollow basins overlying clay, and not, as in China and theAlleghanies for example, on high-lying outcrops, that can be worked aschalk is worked in England. From this fact it followed that some quiteunprecedented pumping appliances became necessary, and the thoughts ofpractical men were turned thereby to the long-neglected possibilities ofsteam. Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, becauseat any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth forweeks together, whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be gotunder again. But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or twoestates in England--rather as a toy than in earnest--before the middleof the seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obviousas to be practically unavoidable. [3] The water trickling into the coalmeasures[4] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals thathave long been mixed together dry and inert. Immediately the latentreactions were set going. Savery, Newcomen, a host of other workers, culminating in Watt, working always by steps that were at least sonearly obvious as to give rise again and again to simultaneousdiscoveries, changed this toy of steam into a real, a commercial thing, developed a trade in pumping engines, created foundries and a new art ofengineering, and almost unconscious of what they were doing, made thesteam locomotive a well-nigh unavoidable consequence. At last, after acentury of improvement on pumping engines, there remained nothing butthe very obvious stage of getting the engine that had been developed onwheels and out upon the ways of the world. 

Ever and again during the eighteenth century an engine would be put uponthe roads and pronounced a failure--one monstrous Palæoferric creaturewas visible on a French high road as early as 1769--but by the dawn ofthe nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion and almostfinancially possible, and from his hands it puffed its way, slowly atfirst, and then, under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitoryempire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive--but for all that itwas primarily _a steam engine for pumping_ adapted to a new end; it wasa steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions thatwere by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that factfollowed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transportvery greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief inits practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavyfor the high road--it had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linkedare steam engines and railways in our minds that, in common languagenow, the latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result ofaccidental impediments, of avoidable difficulties that we travel to-dayon rails. 

Railway travelling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable idealof locomotive convenience, so far as travellers are concerned, is surelya highly mobile conveyance capable of travelling easily and swiftly toany desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, theordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speedand long-distance travelling to specialized ways restricted to swifttraffic, and possibly furnished with guide-rails. For the collection anddelivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system isobviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such asystem would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles thatthe stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completelyarrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put atonce upon the ways without interference with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first the traveller wouldnow be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of fromseventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of thetrouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arises between the householdor hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been atleast possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had itbeen resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromiseto compromise as it always has done and as it will do very probably formany centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with aninfinitely more practicable method of communication, but with onecapable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year. 

But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediatelycheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth CenturyProgress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in a _cul-de-sac_. The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, andtheir inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working forlightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placingthem upon the tramways that were already in existence--chiefly for thetransit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a veryinteresting and curious result. 

These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinarycart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw inthe locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or foundanything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine thedimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first thepassenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in thecarriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would haveseemed "Utopian"--a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents--topropose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge, the 4 ft. 8½ in. Gauge, _nemine contradicente_, established itself inthe world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale thatlimits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as itwere, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely totrot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatenscatastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, mostauthorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel, sofar as existing conditions go. [5] Only a revolutionary reconstruction ofthe railways or the development of some new competing method of landtravel can carry us beyond that. 

People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky;they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But ifonly they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of allinfluences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enoughthat this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the wholeworld is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains ofhorse-waggons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines uponwheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely toremain the predominant method of land locomotion--even for so short aperiod as the next hundred years?

Now, so much capital is represented by the existing type of railways, and they have so firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men, thatit is very doubtful if the railways will ever attempt any veryfundamental change in the direction of greater speed or facility, unlessthey are first exposed to the pressure of our second alternative, competition, and we may very well go on to inquire how long will it bebefore that second alternative comes into operation--if ever it is to doso. 

Let us consider what other possibilities seem to offer themselves. Letus revert to the ideal we have already laid down, and consider whathopes and obstacles to its attainment there seem to be. The aboundingpresence of numerous experimental motors to-day is so stimulating to theimagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them, that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most ofthem--their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperatingtrail of stench will not be rapidly fined away. [6] I do not think thatit is asking too much of the reader's faith in progress to assume thatso far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless, smooth-running, not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils, and altogethersuitable for high road traffic, the problem will very speedily besolved. And upon that assumption, in what direction are these new motorvehicles likely to develop? how will they react upon the railways? andwhere finally will they take us?

At present they seem to promise developments upon three distinct anddefinite lines. 

There will, first of all, be the motor truck for heavy traffic. Alreadysuch trucks are in evidence distributing goods and parcels of varioussorts. And sooner or later, no doubt, the numerous advantages of such anarrangement will lead to the organization of large carrier companies, using such motor trucks to carry goods in bulk or parcels on the highroads. Such companies will be in an exceptionally favourable position toorganize storage and repair for the motors of the general public onprofitable terms, and possibly to co-operate in various ways with themanufactures of special types of motor machines. 

In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will developthe hired or privately owned motor carriage. This, for all except thelongest journeys, will add a fine sense of personal independence to allthe small conveniences of first-class railway travel. It will be capableof a day's journey of three hundred miles or more, long before thedevelopments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One will changenothing--unless it is the driver--from stage to stage. One will be freeto dine where one chooses, hurry when one chooses, travel asleep orawake, stop and pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning and tell thecarriage to wait--unless, which is highly probable, one sleepsaboard. [7]... 

And thirdly there will be the motor omnibus, attacking or developing outof the horse omnibus companies and the suburban lines. All this seemsfairly safe prophesying. 

And these things, which are quite obviously coming even now, will beworking out their many structural problems when the next phase in theirdevelopment begins. The motor omnibus companies competing against thesuburban railways will find themselves hampered in the speed of theirlonger runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes, and they willattempt to secure, and, it may be, after tough legislative struggles, will secure the power to form private roads of a new sort, upon whichtheir vehicles will be free to travel up to the limit of their veryhighest possible speed. It is along the line of such private tracks androads that the forces of change will certainly tend to travel, and alongwhich I am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation ofmotor traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in the presentdecade. 

Once this process of segregation from the high road of the horse andpedestrian sets in, it will probably go on rapidly. It may spread outfrom short omnibus routes, much as the London Metropolitan Railwaysystem has spread. The motor carrier companies, competing in speed ofdelivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably co-operate withthe long-distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in theformation of trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitablelonger routes will be joined up--the London to Brighton, for example, inEngland. And the quiet English citizen will, no doubt, while thesethings are still quite exceptional and experimental in his lagging land, read one day with surprise in the violently illustrated popularmagazines of 1910, that there are now so many thousand miles of theseroads already established in America and Germany and elsewhere. Andthereupon, after some patriotic meditations, he may pull himselftogether. 

We may even hazard some details about these special roads. For example, they will be very different from macadamized roads; they will be usedonly by soft-tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the perpetualfilth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will neverwear them. It may be that they will have a surface like that of somecycle-racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind and weather, it is perhaps more probable they will be made of very good asphaltsloped to drain, and still more probable that they will be of some quitenew substance altogether--whether hard or resilient is beyond myforetelling. They will have to be very wide--they will be just as wideas the courage of their promoters goes--and if the first made are toonarrow there will be no question of gauge to limit the later ones. Theirtraffic in opposite directions will probably be strictly separated, andit will no doubt habitually disregard complicated and fussy regulationsimposed under the initiative of the Railway Interest by such officialbodies as the Board of Trade. The promoters will doubtless take a hintfrom suburban railway traffic and from the current difficulty of theMetropolitan police, and where their ways branch the streams of trafficwill not cross at a level but by bridges. It is easily conceivable thatonce these tracks are in existence, cyclists and motors other than thoseof the constructing companies will be able to make use of them. And, moreover, once they exist it will be possible to experiment withvehicles of a size and power quite beyond the dimensions prescribed byour ordinary roads--roads whose width has been entirely determined bythe size of a cart a horse can pull. [8]

Countless modifying influences will, of course, come into operation. Forexample, it has been assumed, perhaps rashly, that the railway influencewill certainly remain jealous and hostile to these growths: that whatmay be called the "Bicycle Ticket Policy" will be pursued throughout. Assuredly there will be fights of a very complicated sort at first, butonce one of these specialized lines is in operation, it may be that someat least of the railway companies will hasten to replace their flangedrolling stock by carriages with rubber tyres, remove their rails, broaden their cuttings and embankments, raise their bridges, and take tothe new ways of traffic. Or they may find it answer to cut fares, widentheir gauges, reduce their gradients, modify their points and curves, and woo the passenger back with carriages beautifully hung andsumptuously furnished, and all the convenience and luxury of a club. Fewpeople would mind being an hour or so longer going to Paris from London, if the railway travelling was neither rackety, cramped, nor tedious. Onecould be patient enough if one was neither being jarred, deafened, cutinto slices by draughts, and continually more densely caked in a filthydust of coal; if one could write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, have one's hair cut, and dine in comfort[9]--none of whichthings are possible at present, and none of which require any newinventions, any revolutionary contrivances, or indeed anything but anintelligent application of existing resources and known principles. Ourrage for fast trains, so far as long-distance travel is concerned, islargely a passion to end the extreme discomfort involved. It is in thedaily journey, on the suburban train, that daily tax of time, thatspeed is in itself so eminently desirable, and it is just here that theconditions of railway travel most hopelessly fail. It must always beremembered that the railway train, as against the motor, has theadvantage that its wholesale traction reduces the prime cost bydemanding only one engine for a great number of coaches. This will notserve the first-class long-distance passenger, but it may the third. Against that economy one must balance the necessary delay of arelatively infrequent service, which latter item becomes relativelygreater and greater in proportion to the former, the briefer the journeyto be made. 

And it may be that many railways, which are neither capable ofmodification into suburban motor tracks, nor of development intoluxurious through routes, will find, in spite of the loss of manyelements of their old activity, that there is still a profit to be madefrom a certain section of the heavy goods traffic, and from cheapexcursions. These are forms of work for which railways seem to beparticularly adapted, and which the diversion of a great portion oftheir passenger traffic would enable them to conduct even moreefficiently. It is difficult to imagine, for example, how any sort ofroad-car organization could beat the railways at the business ofdistributing coal and timber and similar goods, which are taken in bulkdirectly from the pit or wharf to local centres of distribution. 

It must always be remembered that at the worst the defeat of such agreat organization as the railway system does not involve itsdisappearance until a long period has elapsed. It means at first no morethan a period of modification and differentiation. Before extinction canhappen a certain amount of wealth in railway property must absolutelydisappear. Though under the stress of successful competition the capitalvalue of the railways may conceivably fall, and continue to fall, towards the marine store prices, fares and freights pursue the sweatedworking expenses to the vanishing point, and the land occupied sink tothe level of not very eligible building sites: yet the railways will, nevertheless, continue in operation until these downward limits arepositively attained. 

An imagination prone to the picturesque insists at this stage upon avision of the latter days of one of the less happily situated lines. Along a weedy embankment there pants and clangs a patched and tarnishedengine, its paint blistered, its parts leprously dull. It is driven byan aged and sweated driver, and the burning garbage of its furnacedistils a choking reek into the air. A huge train of urban dust trucksbangs and clatters behind it, _en route_ to that sequestered dumpingground where rubbish is burnt to some industrial end. But that is alapse into the merely just possible, and at most a local tragedy. Almostcertainly the existing lines of railway will develop and differentiate, some in one direction and some in another, according to the nature ofthe pressure upon them. Almost all will probably be still in existenceand in divers ways busy, spite of the swarming new highways I haveventured to foreshadow, a hundred years from now. 

In fact, we have to contemplate, not so much a supersession of therailways as a modification and specialization of them in variousdirections, and the enormous development beside them of competing andsupplementary methods. And step by step with these developments willcome a very considerable acceleration of the ferry traffic of the narrowseas through such improvements as the introduction of turbine engines. So far as the high road and the longer journeys go this is the extent ofour prophecy. [10]

But in the discussion of all questions of land locomotion one must comeat last to the knots of the network, to the central portions of thetowns, the dense, vast towns of our time, with their high ground valuesand their narrow, already almost impassable, streets. I hope at a laterstage to give some reasons for anticipating that the centripetalpressure of the congested towns of our epoch may ultimately be verygreatly relieved, but for the next few decades at least the usage ofexisting conditions will prevail, and in every town there is a certainnucleus of offices, hotels, and shops upon which the centrifugal forcesI anticipate will certainly not operate. At present the streets of manylarger towns, and especially of such old-established towns as London, whose central portions have the narrowest arteries, present a quiteunprecedented state of congestion. When the Green of some future_History of the English People_ comes to review our times, he will, fromhis standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets ofLondon quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthykennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenthcentury to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, "Why _did_people stand it?" He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence ofmud, filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclementskies, and perpetually defiled and added to by innumerable horses. Imagine his description of a young lady crossing the road at the MarbleArch in London, on a wet November afternoon, "breathless, foul-footed, splashed by a passing hansom from head to foot, happy that she hasreached the further pavement alive at the mere cost of her ruinedclothes. "... "Just where the bicycle might have served its most usefulpurpose, " he will write, "in affording a healthy daily ride to theinnumerable clerks and such-like sedentary toilers of the centralregion, it was rendered impossible by the danger of side-slip in thisvast ferocious traffic. " And, indeed, to my mind at least, this last isthe crowning absurdity of the present state of affairs, that the clerkand the shop hand, classes of people positively starved of exercise, should be obliged to spend yearly the price of a bicycle upon aseason-ticket, because of the quite unendurable inconvenience and dangerof urban cycling. 

Now, in what direction will matters move? The first and most obviousthing to do, the thing that in many cases is being attempted and in afutile, insufficient way getting itself done, the thing that I do notfor one moment regard as the final remedy, is the remedy of thearchitect and builder--profitable enough to them, anyhow--to widen thestreets and to cut "new arteries. " Now, every new artery means a seriesof new whirlpools of traffic, such as the pensive Londoner may study forhimself at the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue with Oxford Street, and unless colossal--or inconveniently steep--crossing-bridges are made, the wider the affluent arteries the more terrible the battle of thetraffic. Imagine Regent's Circus on the scale of the Place de laConcorde. And there is the value of the ground to consider; with everyincrement of width the value of the dwindling remainder in the meshesof the network of roads will rise, until to pave the widened streetswith gold will be a mere trifling addition to the cost of their"improvement. "

There is, however, quite another direction in which the congestion mayfind relief, and that is in the "regulation" of the traffic. This hasalready begun in London in an attack on the crawling cab and in the newbye-laws of the London County Council, whereby certain specified formsof heavy traffic are prohibited the use of the streets between ten andseven. These things may be the first beginning of a process ofrestriction that may go far. Many people living at the present time, whohave grown up amidst the exceptional and possibly very transientcharacteristics of this time, will be disposed to regard the traffic inthe streets of our great cities as a part of the natural order ofthings, and as unavoidable as the throng upon the pavement. But indeedthe presence of all the chief constituents of this vehiculartorrent--the cabs and hansoms, the vans, the omnibuses--everything, indeed, except the few private carriages--are as novel, as distinctivelythings of the nineteenth century, as the railway train and the needletelegraph. The streets of the great towns of antiquity, the streets ofthe great towns of the East, the streets of all the mediæval towns, werenot intended for any sort of wheeled traffic at all--were designedprimarily and chiefly for pedestrians. So it would be, I suppose, in anyone's ideal city. Surely Town, in theory at least, is a place one walksabout as one walks about a house and garden, dressed with a certainceremonious elaboration, safe from mud and the hardship and defilementof foul weather, buying, meeting, dining, studying, carousing, seeingthe play. It is the growth in size of the city that has necessitated thegrowth of this coarser traffic that has made "Town" at last so utterlydetestable. 

But if one reflects, it becomes clear that, save for the vans of goods, this moving tide of wheeled masses is still essentially a stream ofurban pedestrians, pedestrians who, by reason of the distances they haveto go, have had to jump on 'buses and take cabs--in a word, to bring inthe high road to their aid. And the vehicular traffic of the street isessentially the high road traffic very roughly adapted to the new needs. The cab is a simple development of the carriage, the omnibus of thecoach, and the supplementary traffic of the underground and electricrailways is a by no means brilliantly imagined adaptation of thelong-route railway. These are all still new things, experimental to thehighest degree, changing and bound to change much more, in the period ofspecialization that is now beginning. 

Now, the first most probable development is a change in the omnibus andthe omnibus railway. A point quite as important with these means oftransit as actual speed of movement is frequency: time is wastedabundantly and most vexatiously at present in waiting and inaccommodating one's arrangements to infrequent times of call anddeparture. _The more frequent a local service, the more it comes to berelied upon. _ Another point--and one in which the omnibus has a greatadvantage over the railway--is that it should be possible to get on andoff at any point, or at as many points on the route as possible. Butthis means a high proportion of stoppages, and this is destructive tospeed. There is, however, one conceivable means of transit that is notsimply frequent but continuous, that may be joined or left at any pointwithout a stoppage, that could be adapted to many existing streets atthe level or quite easily sunken in tunnels, or elevated above thestreet level, [11] and that means of transit is the moving platform, whose possibilities have been exhibited to all the world in a sort ofmean caricature at the Paris Exhibition. Let us imagine the inner circleof the district railway adapted to this conception. I will presume thatthe Parisian "rolling platform" is familiar to the reader. The districtrailway tunnel is, I imagine, about twenty-four feet wide. If we supposethe space given to six platforms of three feet wide and one (the mostrapid) of six feet, and if we suppose each platform to be going fourmiles an hour faster than its slower fellow (a velocity the Parisexperiment has shown to be perfectly comfortable and safe), we shouldhave the upper platform running round the circle at a pace oftwenty-eight miles an hour. If, further, we adopt an ingenioussuggestion of Professor Perry's, and imagine the descent to the linemade down a very slowly rotating staircase at the centre of a bigrotating wheel-shaped platform, against a portion of whose rim theslowest platform runs in a curve, one could very easily add a speed ofsix or eight miles an hour more, and to that the man in a hurry would beable to add his own four miles an hour by walking in the direction ofmotion. If the reader is a traveller, and if he will imagine that blackand sulphurous tunnel, swept and garnished, lit and sweet, with a trainmuch faster than the existing underground trains perpetually ready to gooff with him and never crowded--if he will further imagine this train aplatform set with comfortable seats and neat bookstalls and so forth, hewill get an inkling in just one detail of what he perhaps misses byliving now instead of thirty or forty years ahead. 

I have supposed the replacement to occur in the case of the London InnerCircle Railway, because there the necessary tunnel already exists tohelp the imagination of the English reader, but that the specificreplacement will occur is rendered improbable by the fact that thecircle is for much of its circumference entangled with other lines ofcommunication--the North-Western Railway, for example. As a matter offact, as the American reader at least will promptly see, the much morepracticable thing is that upper footpath, with these moving platformsbeside it, running out over the street after the manner of the viaductof an elevated railroad. But in some cases, at any rate, thedemonstrated cheapness and practicability of tunnels at a considerabledepth will come into play. 

Will this diversion of the vast omnibus traffic of to-day into the airand underground, together with the segregation of van traffic tospecific routes and times, be the only change in the streets of the newcentury? It may be a shock, perhaps, to some minds, but I must confess Ido not see what is to prevent the process of elimination that isbeginning now with the heavy vans spreading until it covers all horsetraffic, and with the disappearance of horse hoofs and the necessaryfilth of horses, the road surface may be made a very different thingfrom what it is at present, better drained and admirably adapted for thesoft-tired hackney vehicles and the torrent of cyclists. Moreover, therewill be little to prevent a widening of the existing side walks, and theprotection of the passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or sucharcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir F. Bramwell's upper footpaths onthe model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no reason but theexisting filth why the roadways should not have translucent _velaria_ topull over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably needless labour to manipulate such contrivances than is required at presentfor the constant conflict with slush and dust. Now, of course, wetolerate the rain, because it facilitates a sort of cleaning process.... 

Enough of this present speculation. I have indicated now the generallines of the roads and streets and ways and underways of the TwentiethCentury. But at present they stand vacant in our prophecy, not onlyawaiting the human interests--the characters and occupations, andclothing of the throng of our children and our children's children thatflows along them, but also the decorations our children's children'staste will dictate, the advertisements their eyes will tolerate, theshops in which they will buy. To all that we shall finally come, andeven in the next chapter I hope it will be made more evident howconveniently these later and more intimate matters follow, instead ofpreceding, these present mechanical considerations. And of the beliefsand hopes, the thought and language, the further prospects of thismultitude as yet unborn--of these things also we shall make at lastcertain hazardous guesses. But at first I would submit to those who mayfind the "machinery in motion" excessive in this chapter, we must havethe background and fittings--the scene before the play. [12]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the earlier papers, of which this is the first, attention will begiven to the probable development of the civilized community in general. Afterwards these generalizations will be modified in accordance withcertain broad differences of race, custom, and religion. 

[2] Of quite serious forecasts and inductions of things to come, thenumber is very small indeed; a suggestion or so of Mr. HerbertSpencer's, Mr. Kidd's _Social Evolution_, some hints from Mr. ArchdallReid, some political forecasts, German for the most part (Hartmann's_Earth in the Twentieth Century_, e. G. ), some incidental forecasts byProfessor Langley (_Century Magazine_, December, 1884, e. G. ), and suchisolated computations as Professor Crookes' wheat warning, and thevarious estimates of our coal supply, make almost a completebibliography. Of fiction, of course, there is abundance: _Stories of theYear_ 2000, and _Battles of Dorking_, and the like--I learn from Mr. Peddie, the bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of thatdescription. But from its very nature, and I am writing with theintimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in thisapplication. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits ofno open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude ofdemonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch ofspeculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed, very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons theprophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents. 

[3] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the firstcentury, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed. 

[4] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted. 

[5] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies, we should be travelling now in railway carriages to hold two each sideat a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly anyreason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriageshould not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width, that is, of thesmallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springsand wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnishedwith all the equipment of comfortable chambers. 

[6] Explosives as a motive power were first attempted by Huyghens andone or two others in the seventeenth century, and, just as with theturbine type of apparatus, it was probably the impetus given to thedevelopment of steam by the convenient collocation of coal and water andthe need of an engine, that arrested the advance of this parallelinquiry until our own time. Explosive engines, in which gas andpetroleum are employed, are now abundant, but for all that we can regardthe explosive engine as still in its experimental stages. So far, research in explosives has been directed chiefly to the possibilities ofhigher and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect of themechanical application of this class of substance being largely due tothe fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineerschemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of whichwould evolve energy, or--what is, from the practical point of view, muchthe same thing--an easily portable substance, which could be decomposedelectrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine andsupply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston, or as anelectric current, would be infinitely more convenient for all locomotivepurposes than the cumbersome bunkers and boilers required by steam. Thepresumption is altogether in favour of the possibility of suchsubstances. Their advent will be the beginning of the end for steamtraction on land and of the steam ship at sea: the end indeed of the Ageof Coal and Steam. And even with regard to steam there may be a curiouschange of method before the end. It is beginning to appear that, afterall, the piston and cylinder type of engine is, for locomotivepurposes--on water at least, if not on land--by no means the mostperfect. Another, and fundamentally different type, the turbine type, inwhich the impulse of the steam spins a wheel instead of shoving apiston, would appear to be altogether better than the adapted pumpingengine, at any rate, for the purposes of steam navigation. Hero, ofAlexandria, describes an elementary form of such an engine, and theearly experimenters of the seventeenth century tried and abandoned therotary principle. It was not adapted to pumping, and pumping was theonly application that then offered sufficient immediate encouragement topersistence. The thing marked time for quite two centuries and a half, therefore, while the piston engines perfected themselves; and only inthe eighties did the requirements of the dynamo-electric machine open a"practicable" way of advance. The motors of the dynamo-electric machinein the nineteenth century, in fact, played exactly the _rôle_ of thepumping engine in the eighteenth, and by 1894 so many difficulties ofdetail had been settled, that a syndicate of capitalists and scientificmen could face the construction of an experimental ship. This ship, the_Turbinia_, after a considerable amount of trial and modification, attained the unprecedented speed of 34½ knots an hour, and His Majesty'snavy has possessed, in the _Turbinia's_ younger and greater sister, the_Viper_, now unhappily lost, a torpedo-destroyer capable of 41 miles anhour. There can be little doubt that the sea speeds of 50 and even 60miles an hour will be attained within the next few years. But I do notthink that these developments will do more than delay the advent of the"explosive" or "storage of force" engine. 

[7] The historian of the future, writing about the nineteenth century, will, I sometimes fancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It isthe custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has everseen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and thememory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form ofstupidity prevailing to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an"Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as that politicalpoint goes, the Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic thanthe European. But the world, by a series of gradations into error, hascome to use "Democratic" as a substitute for "Wholesale, " and as anopposite to "Individual, " without realizing the shifted application atall. Thereby old "Aristocracy, " the organization of society for theglory and preservation of the Select Dull, gets to a flavour even offreedom. When the historian of the future speaks of the past century asa Democratic century, he will have in mind, more than anything else, theunprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps--we read inepidemics; clothed ourselves, all over the world, in identical fashions;built and furnished our houses in stereo designs; and travelled--thatnaturally most individual proceeding--in bales. To make the railwaytrain a perfect symbol of our times, it should be presented asuncomfortably full in the third class--a few passengers standing--andeverybody reading the current number either of the _Daily Mail_, _Pearson's Weekly_, _Answers_, _Tit Bits_, or whatever Greatest Novel ofthe Century happened to be going.... But, as I hope to make clearer inmy later papers, this "Democracy, " or Wholesale method of living, likethe railways, is transient--a first makeshift development of a great andfinally (to me at least) quite hopeful social reorganization. 

[8] So we begin to see the possibility of laying that phantom horse thathaunts the railways to this day so disastrously. 

[9] A correspondent, Mr. Rudolf Cyrian, writes to correct me here, and Icannot do better, I think, than thank him and quote what he says. "It ishardly right to state that fifty miles an hour 'is the limit of ourspeed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go. ' As far asEnglish traffic is concerned, the statement is approximately correct. Inthe United States, however, there are several trains running now whichaverage over considerable distances more than sixty miles an hour, stoppages included, nor is there much reason why this should not beconsiderably increased. What especially hampers the development ofrailways in England--as compared with other countries--is the fact thatthe rolling-stock templet is too small. Hence carriages in England haveto be narrower and lower than carriages in the United States, althoughboth run on the same standard gauge (4 feet 8½ inches). The result isthat several things which you describe as not possible at present, suchas to 'write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, haveone's hair cut, and dine in comfort, ' are not only feasible, butactually attained on some of the good American trains. For instance, onthe _present_ Empire State Express, running between New York andBuffalo, or on the _present_ Pennsylvania, Limited, running between NewYork and Chicago, and on others. With the Pennsylvania, Limited, travelstenographers and typewriters, whose services are placed at the disposalof passengers free of charge. But the train on which there is the leastvibration of any is probably the new Empire State Express, and on thisit is certainly possible to write smoothly and easily at a steadytable. "

[10] Since this appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ I have had thepleasure of reading 'Twentieth Century Inventions, ' by Mr. GeorgeSutherland, and I find very much else of interest bearing on thesequestions--the happy suggestion (for the ferry transits, at any rate) ofa rail along the sea bottom, which would serve as a guide to swiftsubmarine vessels, out of reach of all that superficial "motion" that isso distressing, and of all possibilities of collision. 

[11] To the level of such upper story pavements as Sir F. Bramwell hasproposed for the new Holborn to Strand Street, for example. 

[12] I have said nothing in this chapter, devoted to locomotion, of thecoming invention of flying. This is from no disbelief in its finalpracticability, nor from any disregard of the new influences it willbring to bear upon mankind. But I do not think it at all probable thataeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification oftransport and communication--the main question here under consideration. Man is not, for example, an albatross, but a land biped, with aconsiderable disposition towards being made sick and giddy by unusualmotions, and however he soars he must come to earth to live. We mustbuild our picture of the future from the ground upward; of flying--inits place. 

II

THE PROBABLE DIFFUSION OF GREAT CITIES

Now, the velocity at which a man and his belongings may pass about theearth is in itself a very trivial matter indeed, but it involves certainother matters not at all trivial, standing, indeed, in an almostfundamental relation to human society. It will be the business of thischapter to discuss the relation between the social order and theavailable means of transit, and to attempt to deduce from the principleselucidated the coming phases in that extraordinary expansion, shiftingand internal redistribution of population that has been so conspicuousduring the last hundred years. 

Let us consider the broad features of the redistribution of thepopulation that has characterized the nineteenth century. It may besummarized as an unusual growth of great cities and a slight tendency todepopulation in the country. The growth of the great cities is theessential phenomenon. These aggregates having populations of from eighthundred thousand upward to four and five millions, are certainly, so faras the world outside the limits of the Chinese empire goes, entirely anunprecedented thing. Never before, outside the valleys of the threegreat Chinese rivers, has any city--with the exception of Rome andperhaps (but very doubtfully) of Babylon--certainly had more than amillion inhabitants, and it is at least permissible to doubt whether thepopulation of Rome, in spite of its exacting a tribute of sea-borne foodfrom the whole of the Mediterranean basin, exceeded a million for anygreat length of time. [13] But there are now ten town aggregates having apopulation of over a million, nearly twenty that bid fair to reach thatlimit in the next decade, and a great number at or approaching aquarter of a million. We call these towns and cities, but, indeed, theyare of a different order of things to the towns and cities of theeighteenth-century world. 

Concurrently with the aggregation of people about this new sort ofcentre, there has been, it is alleged, a depletion of the countryvillages and small townships. But, so far as the counting of heads goes, this depletion is not nearly so marked as the growth of the great towns. Relatively, however, it is striking enough. 

Now, is this growth of large towns really, as one may allege, a resultof the development of railways in the world, or is it simply a change inhuman circumstances that happens to have arisen at the same time? Itneeds only a very general review of the conditions of the distributionof population to realize that the former is probably the true answer. 

It will be convenient to make the issue part of a more generalproposition, namely, that _the general distribution of population in acountry must always be directly dependent on transport facilities_. Toillustrate this point roughly we may build up an imaginary simplecommunity by considering its needs. Over an arable country-side, forexample, inhabited by a people who had attained to a level ofagricultural civilization in which war was no longer constantlyimminent, the population would be diffused primarily by families andgroups in farmsteads. It might, if it were a very simple population, bealmost all so distributed. But even the simplest agriculturists find acertain convenience in trade. Certain definite points would beconvenient for such local trade and intercourse as the people founddesirable, and here it is that there would arise the germ of a town. Atfirst it might be no more than an appointed meeting place, a marketsquare, but an inn and a blacksmith would inevitably follow, an altar, perhaps, and, if these people had writing, even some sort of school. Itwould have to be where water was found, and it would have to begenerally convenient of access to its attendant farmers. 

Now, if this meeting place was more than a certain distance from anyparticular farm, it would be inconvenient for that farmer to get himselfand his produce there and back, and to do his business in a comfortabledaylight. He would not be able to come and, instead, he would eitherhave to go to some other nearer centre to trade and gossip with hisneighbours or, failing this, not go at all. Evidently, then, there wouldbe a maximum distance between such places. This distance in England, where traffic has been mainly horse traffic for many centuries, seems tohave worked out, according to the gradients and so forth, at from eightto fifteen miles, and at such distances do we find the country towns, while the horseless man, the serf, and the labourer and labouring wenchhave marked their narrow limits in the distribution of the interveningvillages. If by chance these gathering places have arisen at pointsmuch closer than this maximum, they have come into competition, and onehas finally got the better of the other, so that in England thedistribution is often singularly uniform. Agricultural districts havetheir towns at about eight miles, and where grazing takes the place ofthe plough, the town distances increase to fifteen. [14] And so it is, entirely as a multiple of horse and foot strides, that all the villagesand towns of the world's country-side have been plotted out. [15]

A third, and almost final, factor determining town distribution in aworld without railways, would be the seaport and the navigable river. Ports would grow into dimensions dependent on the population of theconveniently accessible coasts (or river-banks), and on the quality andquantity of their products, and near these ports, as the conveniences ofcivilization increased, would appear handicraft towns--the largestpossible towns of a foot-and-horse civilization--with industries of sucha nature as the produce of their coasts required. 

It was always in connection with a port or navigable river that thegreater towns of the pre-railway periods arose, a day's journey awayfrom the coast when sea attack was probable, and shifting to the coastitself when that ceased to threaten. Such sea-trading handicraft townsas Bruges, Venice, Corinth, or London were the largest towns of thevanishing order of things. Very rarely, except in China, did theyclamber above a quarter of a million inhabitants, even though to some ofthem there was presently added court and camp. In China, however, agigantic river and canal system, laced across plains of extraordinaryfertility, has permitted the growth of several city aggregates withpopulations exceeding a million, and in the case of the Hankow trinityof cities exceeding five million people. 

In all these cases the position and the population limit was entirelydetermined by the accessibility of the town and the area it coulddominate for the purposes of trade. And not only were the commercial ornatural towns so determined, but the political centres were also finallychosen for strategic considerations, in a word--communications. And now, perhaps, the real significance of the previous paper, in which seavelocities of fifty miles an hour, and land travel at the rate of ahundred, and even cab and omnibus journeys of thirty or forty miles, were shown to be possible, becomes more apparent. 

At the first sight it might appear as though the result of the newdevelopments was simply to increase the number of giant cities in theworld by rendering them possible in regions where they had hitherto beenimpossible--concentrating the trade of vast areas in a manner that hadhitherto been entirely characteristic of navigable waters. It might seemas though the state of affairs in China, in which population has beenconcentrated about densely-congested "million-cities, " with paupermasses, public charities, and a crowded struggle for existence, for manyhundreds of years, was merely to be extended over the whole world. Wehave heard so much of the "problem of our great cities"; we have theimpressive statistics of their growth; the belief in the inevitablenessof yet denser and more multitudinous agglomerations in the future is sowidely diffused, that at first sight it will be thought that no othermotive than a wish to startle can dictate the proposition that not onlywill many of these railway-begotten "giant cities" reach their maximumin the commencing century, but that in all probability they, and notonly they, but their water-born prototypes in the East also, aredestined to such a process of dissection and diffusion as to amountalmost to obliteration, so far, at least, as the blot on the map goes, within a measurable further space of years. 

In advancing this proposition, the present writer is disagreeably awarethat in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those henow propounds; and in setting forth the following body ofconsiderations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At theoutset he took for granted--and, very naturally, he wishes to imaginethat a great number of other people do also take for granted--that thefuture of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to asort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population ofLondon has been multiplied by seven, then in two hundred years--! Andone proceeds to pack the answer in gigantic tenement houses, loomingupon colossal roofed streets, provide it with moving ways (the onlyavailable transit appliances suited to such dense multitudes), anddevelop its manners and morals in accordance with the laws that willalways prevail amidst over-crowded humanity so long as humanity endures. The picture of this swarming concentrated humanity has some effectivepossibilities, but, unhappily, if, instead of that obvious rule-of-threesum, one resorts to an analysis of operating causes, its plausibilitycrumbles away, and it gives place to an altogether different forecast--aforecast, indeed, that is in almost violent contrast to the firstanticipation. It is much more probable that these coming cities will notbe, in the old sense, cities at all; they will present a new andentirely different phase of human distribution. 

The determining factor in the appearance of great cities in the past, and, indeed, up to the present day, has been the meeting of two or moretransit lines, the confluence of two or more streams of trade, and easycommunication. The final limit to the size and importance of the greatcity has been the commercial "sphere of influence" commanded by thatcity, the capacity of the alluvial basin of its commerce, so to speak, the volume of its river of trade. About the meeting point so determinedthe population so determined has grouped itself--and this is the point Ioverlooked in those previous vaticinations--in accordance with _lawsthat are also considerations of transit_. 

The economic centre of the city is formed, of course, by the wharves andlanding places--and in the case of railway-fed cities by thetermini--where passengers land and where goods are landed, stored, anddistributed. Both the administrative and business community, traders, employers, clerks, and so forth, must be within a convenient access ofthis centre; and the families, servants, tradesmen, amusement purveyorsdependent on these again must also come within a maximum distance. At acertain stage in town growth the pressure on the more central area wouldbecome too great for habitual family life there, and an office regionwould differentiate from an outer region of homes. Beyond these twozones, again, those whose connection with the great city was merelyintermittent would constitute a system of suburban houses and areas. But the grouping of these, also, would be determined finally by theconvenience of access to the dominant centre. That secondary centres, literary, social, political, or military, may arise about the initialtrade centre, complicates the application but does not alter theprinciple here stated. They must all be within striking distance. Theday of twenty-four hours is an inexorable human condition, and up to thepresent time all intercourse and business has been broken into spells ofdefinite duration by intervening nights. Moreover, almost all effectiveintercourse has involved personal presence at the point whereintercourse occurs. The possibility, therefore, of going and coming anddoing that day's work has hitherto fixed the extreme limits to which acity could grow, and has exacted a compactness which has always beenvery undesirable and which is now for the first time in the world'shistory no longer imperative. 

So far as we can judge without a close and uncongenial scrutiny ofstatistics, that daily journey, that has governed and still to a veryconsiderable extent governs the growth of cities, has had, and probablyalways will have, a maximum limit of two hours, one hour each way fromsleeping place to council chamber, counter, workroom, or office stool. And taking this assumption as sound, we can state precisely the maximumarea of various types of town. A pedestrian agglomeration such as wefind in China, and such as most of the European towns probably werebefore the nineteenth century, would be swept entirely by a radius offour miles about the business quarter and industrial centre; and, underthese circumstances, where the area of the feeding regions has been verylarge the massing of human beings has probably reached its extremelimit. [16] Of course, in the case of a navigable river, for example, thecommercial centre might be elongated into a line and the circle of thecity modified into an ellipse with a long diameter considerablyexceeding eight miles, as, for example, in the case of Hankow. 

If, now, horseflesh is brought into the problem, an outer radius of sixor eight miles from the centre will define a larger area in which thecarriage folk, the hackney users, the omnibus customers, and theirdomestics and domestic camp followers may live and still be members ofthe city. Towards that limit London was already probably moving at theaccession of Queen Victoria, and it was clearly the absolute limit ofurban growth--until locomotive mechanisms capable of more than eightmiles an hour could be constructed. 

And then there came suddenly the railway and the steamship, the formeropening with extraordinary abruptness a series of vast through-routesfor trade, the latter enormously increasing the security and economy ofthe traffic on the old water routes. For a time neither of theseinventions was applied to the needs of intra-urban transit at all. For atime they were purely centripetal forces. They worked simply to increasethe general volume of trade, to increase, that is, the pressure ofpopulation upon the urban centres. As a consequence the social historyof the middle and later thirds of the nineteenth century, not simply inEngland but all over the civilized world, is the history of a giganticrush of population into the magic radius of--for most people--fourmiles, to suffer there physical and moral disaster less acute but, finally, far more appalling to the imagination than any famine orpestilence that ever swept the world. Well has Mr. George Gissing namednineteenth-century London in one of his great novels the "Whirlpool, "the very figure for the nineteenth-century Great City, attractive, tumultuous, and spinning down to death. 

But, indeed, these great cities are no permanent maëlstroms. These newforces, at present still so potently centripetal in their influence, bring with them, nevertheless, the distinct promise of a centrifugalapplication that may be finally equal to the complete reduction of allour present congestions. The limit of the pre-railway city was the limitof man and horse. But already that limit has been exceeded, and each daybrings us nearer to the time when it will be thrust outward in everydirection with an effect of enormous relief. 

So far the only additions to the foot and horse of the old dispensationthat have actually come into operation, are the suburban railways, whichrender possible an average door to office hour's journey of ten or adozen miles--further only in the case of some specially favouredlocalities. The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrustingout arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which everyknot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressurethus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented roundedcontours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City lookslike something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. But, as our previous paper has sought to make clear, these suburban railwaysare the mere first rough expedient of far more convenient and rapiddevelopments. 

We are--as the Census Returns for 1901 quite clearly show--in the earlyphase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities. And since ithas been shown that a city of pedestrians is inexorably limited by aradius of about four miles, and that a horse-using city may grow out toseven or eight, it follows that the available area of a city which canoffer a cheap suburban journey of thirty miles an hour is a circle witha radius of thirty miles. And is it too much, therefore, in view of allthat has been adduced in this and the previous paper, to expect thatthe available area for even the common daily toilers of the great cityof the year 2000, or earlier, will have a radius very much larger eventhan that? Now, a circle with a radius of thirty miles gives an area ofover 2800 square miles, which is almost a quarter that of Belgium. Butthirty miles is only a very moderate estimate of speed, and the readerof the former paper will agree, I think, that the available area for thesocial equivalent of the favoured season-ticket holders of to-day willhave a radius of over one hundred miles, and be almost equal to the areaof Ireland. [17] The radius that will sweep the area available for suchas now live in the outer suburbs will include a still vaster area. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the London citizen of the year2000 A. D. May have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south ofNottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb, and that the vast stretchof country from Washington to Albany will be all of it "available" tothe active citizen of New York and Philadelphia before that date. 

This does not for a moment imply that cities of the density of ourexisting great cities will spread to these limits. Even if we were tosuppose the increase of the populations of the great cities to go on atits present rate, this enormous extension of available area would stillmean a great possibility of diffusion. But though most great cities areprobably still very far from their maxima, though the network of feedingrailways has still to spread over Africa and China, and though hugeareas are still imperfectly productive for want of a cultivatingpopulation, yet it is well to remember that for each great city, quiteirrespective of its available spaces, a maximum of population is fixed. Each great city is sustained finally by the trade and production of acertain proportion of the world's surface--by the area it commandscommercially. The great city cannot grow, except as a result of somequite morbid and transitory process--to be cured at last by famine anddisorder--beyond the limit the commercial capacity of that commandedarea prescribes. Long before the population of this city, with its innercircle a third of the area of Belgium, rose towards the old-fashionedcity density, this restriction would come in. Even if we allowed forconsiderable increase in the production of food stuffs in the future, itstill remains inevitable that the increase of each city in the worldmust come at last upon arrest. 

Yet, though one may find reasons for anticipating that this city will inthe end overtake and surpass that one and such-like relativeprophesying, it is difficult to find any data from which to infer theabsolute numerical limits of these various diffused cities. Or perhapsit is more seemly to admit that no such data have occurred to thewriter. So far as London, St. Petersburg, and Berlin go, it seems fairlysafe to assume that they will go well over twenty millions; and that NewYork, Philadelphia, and Chicago will probably, and Hankow almostcertainly, reach forty millions. Yet even forty millions over thirty-onethousand square miles of territory is, in comparison with four millionsover fifty square miles, a highly diffused population. 

How far will that possible diffusion accomplish itself? Let us first ofall consider the case of those classes that will be free to exercise achoice in the matter, and we shall then be in a better position toconsider those more numerous classes whose general circumstances arepractically dictated to them. What will be the forces acting upon theprosperous household, the household with a working head and four hundreda year and upwards to live upon, in the days to come? Will the resultantof these forces be, as a rule, centripetal or centrifugal? Will suchhouseholders in the greater London of 2000 A. D. Still cluster for themost part, as they do to-day, in a group of suburbs as close to Londonas is compatible with a certain fashionable maximum of garden space andair; or will they leave the ripened gardens and the no longer brilliantvillas of Surbiton and Norwood, Tooting and Beckenham, to other and lessindependent people? First, let us weigh the centrifugal attractions. 

The first of these is what is known as the passion for nature, thatpassion for hillside, wind, and sea that is evident in so many peoplenowadays, either frankly expressed or disguising itself as a passion forgolfing, fishing, hunting, yachting, or cycling; and, secondly, there isthe allied charm of cultivation, and especially of gardening, a charmthat is partly also the love of dominion, perhaps, and partly a personallove for the beauty of trees and flowers and natural things. Throughthat we come to a third factor, that craving--strongest, perhaps, inthose Low German peoples, who are now ascendant throughout theworld--for a little private _imperium_ such as a house or cottage "inits own grounds" affords; and from that we pass on to the intense desireso many women feel--and just the women, too, who will mother thefuture--their almost instinctive demand, indeed, for a household, aseparate sacred and distinctive household, built and ordered after theirown hearts, such as in its fulness only the country-side permits. Add tothese things the healthfulness of the country for young children, andthe wholesome isolation that is possible from much that irritates, stimulates prematurely, and corrupts in crowded centres, and the chiefpositive centrifugal inducements are stated, inducements that noprogress of inventions, at any rate, can ever seriously weaken. What noware the centripetal forces against which these inducements contend?

In the first place, there are a group of forces that will diminish instrength. There is at present the greater convenience of "shopping"within a short radius of the centre of the great city, a very importantconsideration indeed to many wives and mothers. All the inner and manyof the outer suburbs of London obtain an enormous proportion of theordinary household goods from half a dozen huge furniture, grocery, anddrapery firms, each of which has been enabled by the dearness andinefficiency of the parcels distribution of the post-office and railwaysto elaborate a now very efficient private system of taking orders anddelivering goods. Collectively these great businesses have been able toestablish a sort of monopoly of suburban trade, to overwhelm the smallsuburban general tradesman (a fate that was inevitable for him in someway or other), and--which is a positive world-wide misfortune--tooverwhelm also many highly specialized shops and dealers of the centraldistrict. Suburban people nowadays get their wine and their novels, their clothes and their amusements, their furniture and their food, fromsome one vast indiscriminate shop or "store" full of respectablemediocre goods, as excellent a thing for housekeeping as it isdisastrous to taste and individuality. [18] But it is doubtful if thedelivery organization of these great stores is any more permanent thanthe token coinage of the tradespeople of the last century. Just as itwas with that interesting development, so now it is with parcelsdistribution: private enterprise supplies in a partial manner a publicneed, and with the organization of a public parcels and goods deliveryon cheap and sane lines in the place of our present complex, stupid, confusing, untrustworthy, and fantastically costly chaos of post-office, railways, and carriers, it is quite conceivable that Messrs. Omnium willgive place again to specialized shops. 

It must always be remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postaland telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and conveniencefight in these departments against the tradition of official leisure anddignity. There is no reason now, except that the thing is not yetproperly organized, why a telephone call from any point in such a smallcountry as England to any other should cost much more than a postcard. There is no reason now, save railway rivalries and retailideas--obstacles some able and active man is certain to sweep awaysooner or later--why the post-office should not deliver parcels anywherewithin a radius of a hundred miles in a few hours at a penny or less fora pound and a little over, [19] put our newspapers in our letter-boxesdirect from the printing-office, and, in fact, hand in nearly everyconstant need of the civilized household, except possibly butcher'smeat, coals, green-grocery, and drink. And since there is no reason, butquite removable obstacles, to prevent this development of thepost-office, I imagine it will be doing all these things within the nexthalf-century. When it is, this particular centripetal pull, at any rate, will have altogether ceased to operate. 

A second important centripetal consideration at present is thedesirability of access to good schools and to the doctor. To leave thegreat centres is either to abandon one's children, or to buy air forthem at the cost of educational disadvantages. But access, be it noted, is another word for transit. It is doubtful if these two needs will somuch keep people close to the great city centres as draw them togetherabout secondary centres. New centres they may be--compare Hindhead, forexample--in many cases; but also, it may be, in many cases the morehealthy and picturesque of the existing small towns will develop a newlife. Already, in the case of the London area, such once practicallyautonomous places as Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, and Godalming havebecome economically the centres of lax suburbs, and the same fate mayvery probably overtake, for example, Shrewsbury, Stratford, and Exeter, and remoter and yet remoter townships. Indeed, for all that thisparticular centripetal force can do, the confluent "residential suburbs"of London, of the great Lancashire-Yorkshire city, and of the Scotchcity, may quite conceivably replace the summer lodging-housewatering-places of to-day, and extend themselves right round the coastof Great Britain, before the end of the next century, and every openspace of mountain and heather be dotted--not too thickly--with clumps ofprosperous houses about school, doctor, engineers, book and provisionshops. 

A third centripetal force will not be set aside so easily. The directantagonist it is to that love of nature that drives people out to moorand mountain. One may call it the love of the crowd; and closely alliedto it is that love of the theatre which holds so many people in bondageto the Strand. Charles Lamb was the Richard Jefferies of this group oftendencies, and the current disposition to exaggerate the oppositionforce, especially among English-speaking peoples, should not bind us tothe reality of their strength. Moreover, interweaving with theseinfluences that draw people together are other more egotistical andintenser motives, ardent in youth and by no means--to judge by theFolkestone Leas--extinct in age, the love of dress, the love of thecrush, the hot passion for the promenade. Here, no doubt, what one mayspeak of loosely as "racial" characteristics count for much. The commonactor and actress of all nationalities, the Neapolitan, the modernRoman, the Parisian, the Hindoo, I am told, and that new and interestingtype, the rich and liberated Jew emerging from his Ghetto and free nowabsolutely to show what stuff he is made of, flame out most gloriouslyin this direction. To a certain extent this group of tendencies may leadto the formation of new secondary centres within the "available" area, theatrical and musical centres--centres of extreme Fashion andSelectness, centres of smartness and opulent display--but it is probablethat for the large number of people throughout the world who cannotafford to maintain households in duplicate these will be for many yearsyet strictly centripetal forces, and will keep them within the radiusmarked by whatever will be the future equivalent in length of, say, thepresent two-shilling cab ride in London. 

And, after all, for all such "shopping" as one cannot do by telephone orpostcard, it will still be natural for the shops to be gathered togetherin some central place. And "shopping" needs refreshment, and mayculminate in relaxation. So that Bond Street and Regent Street, theBoulevard des Capuchins, the Corso, and Broadway will still be brilliantand crowded for many years for all the diffusion that is hereforecast--all the more brilliant and crowded, perhaps, for the lack of athronging horse traffic down their central ways. But the very fact thatthe old nucleus is still to be the best place for all who trade in aconcourse of people, for novelty shops and art shops, and theatres andbusiness buildings, by keeping up the central ground values will operateagainst residence there and shift the "masses" outwardly. 

And once people have been driven into cab, train, or omnibus, the onlyreason why they should get out to a residence here rather than there isthe necessity of saving time, and such a violent upward gradient offares as will quite outbalance the downward gradient of ground values. We have, however, already forecast a swift, varied, and inevitablycompetitive suburban traffic. And so, though the centre will probablystill remain the centre and "Town, " it will be essentially a bazaar, agreat gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous, apedestrian place, its pathways reinforced by lifts and moving platforms, and shielded from the weather, and altogether a very spacious, brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration. 

Enough now has been said to determine the general nature of theexpansion of the great cities in the future, so far as the moreprosperous classes are concerned. It will not be a regular diffusionlike the diffusion of a gas, but a process of throwing out the "homes, "and of segregating various types of people. The omens seem to pointpretty unmistakably to a wide and quite unprecedented diversity in thevarious suburban townships and suburban districts. Of that aspect ofthe matter a later paper must treat. It is evident that from the outsetracial and national characteristics will tell in this diffusion. We aregetting near the end of the great Democratic, Wholesale, or Homogeneousphase in the world's history. The sport-loving Englishman, the sociableFrenchman, the vehement American will each diffuse his own great city inhis own way. 

And now, how will the increase in the facilities of communication wehave assumed affect the condition of those whose circumstances are morelargely dictated by economic forces? The mere diffusion of a largeproportion of the prosperous and relatively free, and the multiplicationof various types of road and mechanical traction, means, of course, thatin this way alone a perceptible diffusion of the less independentclasses will occur. To the subsidiary centres will be drawn doctor andschoolmaster, and various dealers in fresh provisions, baker, grocer, butcher; or if they are already established there they will flourishmore and more, and about them the convenient home of the future, withits numerous electrical and mechanical appliances, and the variousbicycles, motor-cars, photographic and phonographic apparatus that willbe included in its equipment will gather a population of repairers, "accessory" dealers and working engineers, a growing class which fromits necessary intelligence and numbers will play a very conspicuous partin the social development of the twentieth century. The much moreelaborate post-office and telephone services will also bring intelligentingredients to these suburban nuclei, these restorations of the oldvillages and country towns. And the sons of the cottager within theaffected area will develop into the skilled vegetable or flowergardeners, the skilled ostler--with some veterinary science--and soforth, for whom also there will evidently be work and a living. Anddotted at every convenient position along the new roads, availingthemselves no doubt whenever possible of the picturesque inns that theold coaching days have left us, will be wayside restaurants and teahouses, and motor and cycle stores and repair places. So much diffusionis practically inevitable. 

In addition, as we have already intimated, many Londoners in the futuremay abandon the city office altogether, preferring to do their businessin more agreeable surroundings. Such a business as book publishing, forexample, has no unbreakable bonds to keep it in the region of high rentand congested streets. The days when the financial fortunes of booksdepended upon the colloquial support of influential people in a smallSociety are past; neither publishers nor authors as a class have anyrelation to Society at all, and actual access to newspaper offices isnecessary only to the ranker forms of literary imposture. That personalintercourse between publishers and the miscellaneous race of authorswhich once justified the central position has, I am told, long sinceceased. And the withdrawing publishers may very well take with them theprinters and binders, and attract about them their illustrators anddesigners.... So, as a typical instance, one--now urban--trade maydetach itself. 

Publishing is, however, only one of the many similar trades equallyprofitable and equally likely to move outward to secondary centres, withthe development and cheapening of transit. It is all a question oftransit. Limitation of transit contracts the city, facilitation expandsand disperses it. All this case for diffusion so far is built upentirely on the hypothesis we attempted to establish in the first paper, that transit of persons and goods alike is to become easier, swifter, and altogether better organized than it is at present. 

The telephone will almost certainly prove a very potent auxiliary indeedto the forces making for diffusion. At present that convenience is stillneedlessly expensive in Great Britain, and a scandalously stupidbusiness conflict between telephone company and post-office delays, complicates, and makes costly and exasperating all trunk communications;but even under these disadvantages the thing is becoming a factor in thelife of ordinary villadom. Consider all that lies within itspossibilities. Take first the domestic and social side; almost all thelabour of ordinary shopping can be avoided--goods nowadays can beordered and sent either as sold outright, or on approval, to any placewithin a hundred miles of London, and in one day they can be examined, discussed, and returned--at any rate, in theory. The mistress of thehouse has all her local tradesmen, all the great London shops, thecirculating library, the theatre box-office, the post-office andcab-rank, the nurses' institute and the doctor, within reach of herhand. The instrument we may confidently expect to improve, but even nowspeech is perfectly clear and distinct over several hundred miles ofwire. Appointments and invitations can be made; and at a cost varyingfrom a penny to two shillings any one within two hundred miles of homemay speak day or night into the ear of his or her household. Were it notfor that unmitigated public nuisance, the practical control of ourpost-office by non-dismissable Civil servants, appointed so young as tobe entirely ignorant of the unofficial world, it would be possible nowto send urgent messages at any hour of the day or night to any part ofthe world; and even our sacred institution of the Civil Service canscarcely prevent this desirable consummation for many years more. Thebusiness man may then sit at home in his library and bargain, discuss, promise, hint, threaten, tell such lies as he dare not write, and, infact, do everything that once demanded a personal encounter. Already fora great number of businesses it is no longer necessary that the officeshould be in London, and only habit, tradition, and minor considerationskeep it there. With the steady cheapening and the steady increase inefficiency of postal and telephonic facilities, and of goods transit, itseems only reasonable to anticipate the need for that expensive officeand the irksome daily journey will steadily decline. In other words, what will still be economically the "city, " as distinguished from the"agricultural" population, will probably be free to extend, in the caseof all the prosperous classes not tied to large establishments in needof personal supervision, far beyond the extreme limits of the daily hourjourney. 

But the diffusion of the prosperous, independent, and managing classesinvolves in itself a very considerable diffusion of the purely "working"classes also. Their centres of occupation will be distributed, and theirfreedom to live at some little distance from their work will beincreased. Whether this will mean dotting the country with dull, uglylittle streets, slum villages like Buckfastleigh in Devon, for example, or whether it may result in entirely different and novel aspects, is apoint for which at present we are not ready. But it bears upon thequestion that ugliness and squalor upon the main road will appeal to themore prosperous for remedy with far more vigour than when they arestowed compactly in a slum. 

Enough has been said to demonstrate that old "town" and "city" will be, in truth, terms as obsolete as "mail coach. " For these new areas thatwill grow out of them we want a term, and the administrative "urbandistrict" presents itself with a convenient air of suggestion. We mayfor our present purposes call these coming town provinces "urbanregions. " Practically, by a process of confluence, the whole of GreatBritain south of the Highlands seems destined to become such an urbanregion, laced all together not only by railway and telegraph, but bynovel roads such as we forecast in the former chapter, and by a densenetwork of telephones, parcels delivery tubes, and the like nervous andarterial connections. 

It will certainly be a curious and varied region, far less monotonousthan our present English world, still in its thinner regions, at anyrate, wooded, perhaps rather more abundantly wooded, breakingcontinually into park and garden, and with everywhere a scattering ofhouses. These will not, as a rule, I should fancy, follow the fashion ofthe vulgar ready-built villas of the existing suburb, because thefreedom people will be able to exercise in the choice of a site will robthe "building estate" promoter of his local advantage; in many cases thehouses may very probably be personal homes, built for themselves as muchas the Tudor manor-houses were, and even, in some cases, as æstheticallyright. Each district, I am inclined to think, will develop its owndifferences of type and style. As one travels through the urban region, one will traverse open, breezy, "horsey" suburbs, smart white gates andpalings everywhere, good turf, a Grand Stand shining pleasantly;gardening districts all set with gables and roses, holly hedges, andemerald lawns; pleasant homes among heathery moorlands and golf links, and river districts with gaily painted boat-houses peeping from theosiers. Then presently a gathering of houses closer together, and apromenade and a whiff of band and dresses, and then, perhaps, a littleisland of agriculture, hops, or strawberry gardens, fields ofgrey-plumed artichokes, white-painted orchard, or brightly neat poultryfarm. Through the varied country the new wide roads will run, herecutting through a crest and there running like some colossal aqueductacross a valley, swarming always with a multitudinous traffic of bright, swift (and not necessarily ugly) mechanisms; and everywhere amidst thefields and trees linking wires will stretch from pole to pole. Ever andagain there will appear a cluster of cottages--cottages into which weshall presently look more closely--about some works or workings, works, it may be, with the smoky chimney of to-day replaced by a gaily paintedwindwheel or waterwheel to gather and store the force for the machinery;and ever and again will come a little town, with its cherished ancientchurch or cathedral, its school buildings and museums, itsrailway-station, perhaps its fire-station, its inns and restaurants, andwith all the wires of the countryside converging to its offices. Allthat is pleasant and fair of our present countryside may conceivablystill be there among the other things. There is no reason why theessential charm of the country should disappear; the new roads will notsupersede the present high roads, which will still be necessary forhorses and subsidiary traffic; and the lanes and hedges, the field pathsand wild flowers, will still have their ample justification. A certainlack of solitude there may be perhaps, and--

Will conspicuous advertisements play any part in the landscape?... 

But I find my pen is running ahead, an imagination prone to realisticconstructions is struggling to paint a picture altogether prematurely. There is very much to be weighed and decided before we can get from ourpresent generalization to the style of architecture these houses willshow, and to the power and nature of the public taste. We have laid downnow the broad lines of road, railway, and sea transit in the comingcentury, and we have got this general prophecy of "urban regions"established, and for the present that much must suffice. 

And as for the world beyond our urban regions? The same line ofreasoning that leads to the expectation that the city will diffuseitself until it has taken up considerable areas and many of thecharacteristics, the greenness, the fresh air, of what is now country, leads us to suppose also that the country will take to itself many ofthe qualities of the city. The old antithesis will indeed cease, theboundary lines will altogether disappear; it will become, indeed, merelya question of more or less populous. There will be horticulture andagriculture going on within the "urban regions, " and "urbanity" withoutthem. Everywhere, indeed, over the land of the globe between the frozencircles, the railway and the new roads will spread, the net-work ofcommunication wires and safe and convenient ways. To receive the dailypaper a few hours late, to wait a day or so for goods one has ordered, will be the extreme measure of rusticity save in a few remote islandsand inaccessible places. The character of the meshes in that widernetwork of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from theurban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure ofthe land--will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. Butthroughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort oftown to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people weare immediately to consider will be scattered, must be borne in mind. 

 * * * * *

[At the risk of insistence, I must repeat that, so far, I have beenstudiously taking no account of the fact that there is such a thing as aboundary line or a foreigner in the world. It will be far the best thingto continue to do this until we can get out all that will probablyhappen universally or generally, and in particular the probable changesin social forces, social apparatus and internal political methods. Weshall then come to the discussion of language, nationality andinternational conflicts, equipped with such an array of probabilitiesand possibilities as will enable us to guess at these special issueswith an appearance of far more precision than would be the case if weconsidered them now. ]

FOOTNOTES:

[13] It is true that many scholars estimate a high-water mark for theRoman population in excess of two millions; and one daring authority, bythrowing out suburbs _ad libitum_ into the Campagna, suburbs of which notrace remains, has raised the two to ten. The Colosseum could, no doubt, seat over 80, 000 spectators; the circuit of the bench frontage of theCircus Maximus was very nearly a mile in length, and the Romans ofImperial times certainly used ten times as much water as the modernRomans. But, on the other hand, habits change, and Rome as it is definedby lines drawn at the times of its greatest ascendancy--the city, thatis, enclosed by the walls of Aurelian and including all the regiones ofAugustus, an enclosure from which there could have been no reason forexcluding half or more of its population--could have scarcely containeda million. It would have packed very comfortably within the circle ofthe Grands Boulevards of Paris--the Paris, that is, of Louis XIV. , witha population of 560, 000; and the Rome of to-day, were the houses thatspread so densely over the once vacant Campus Martius distributed in thenow deserted spaces in the south and east, and the Vatican suburbreplaced within the ancient walls, would quite fill the ancient limits, in spite of the fact that the population is under 500, 000. But these areincidental doubts on a very authoritative opinion, and, whatever theirvalue, they do not greatly affect the significance of these new greatcities, which have arisen all over the world, as if by the operation ofa natural law, as the railways have developed. 

[14] It will be plain that such towns must have clearly defined limitsof population, _dependant finally on the minimum yearly produce of thedistrict they control_. If ever they rise above that limit the naturalchecks of famine, and of pestilence following enfeeblement, will comeinto operation, and they will always be kept near this limit by thenatural tendency of humanity to increase. The limit would rise withincreasing public intelligence, and the organization of the towns wouldbecome more definite. 

[15] I owe the fertilizing suggestion of this general principle to apaper by Grant Allen that I read long ago in _Longman's Magazine_. 

[16] It is worth remarking that in 1801 the density of population in theCity of London was half as dense again as that of any district, even ofthe densest "slum" districts, to-day. 

[17] Be it noted that the phrase "available area" is used, and variousother modifying considerations altogether waived for the present. 

[18] Their temporary suppression of the specialist is indeed carried tosuch an extent that one may see even such things as bronze ornaments andpersonal jewellery listed in Messrs. Omnium's list, and stored in listdesigns and pattern; and their assistants will inform you that theirbrooch, No. 175, is now "very much worn, " without either blush or smile. 

[19] The present system of charging parcels by the pound, when goods aresold by the pound, and so getting a miserly profit in the packing, issurely one of the absurdest disregards of the obvious it is possible toimagine. 

III

DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS

The mere differences in thickness of population and facility of movementthat have been discussed thus far, will involve consequences remarkableenough, upon the _facies_ of the social body; but there are certainstill broader features of the social order of the coming time, lessintimately related to transit, that it will be convenient to discuss atthis stage. They are essentially outcomes of the enormous development ofmechanism which has been the cardinal feature of the nineteenth century;for this development, by altering the method and proportions of almostall human undertakings, [20] has altered absolutely the grouping andcharacter of the groups of human beings engaged upon them. 

Throughout the world for forty centuries the more highly developedsocieties have always presented under a considerable variety ofsuperficial differences certain features in common. Always at the baseof the edifice, supporting all, subordinate to all, and the mostnecessary of all, there has been the working cultivator, peasant, serf, or slave. Save for a little water-power, a little use of windmills, thetraction of a horse or mule, this class has been the source of all thework upon which the community depends. And, moreover, whatever labourtown developments have demanded has been supplied by the muscle of itsfecund ranks. It has been, in fact--and to some extent still is--themultitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried, cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owningthis human machinery, there has always been a superior class, boundusually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, oftenequestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it isrepresented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and inChina--the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organizedsocial system the old order ever developed--it finds its equivalent inthe members of a variously buttoned mandarinate, who ride, not onhorses, but on a once adequate and still respectable erudition. Thesetwo primary classes may and do become in many cases complicated bysubdivisions; the peasant class may split into farmers and labourers, the gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders, kings, dukes, earls, and the like, but the broad distinction remains intact, as though itwas a distinction residing in the nature of things. [21]

From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism inthe eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universalorganization of all but savage humanity, and the chief substance ofhistory until these later years has been in essence the perpetualendeavour of specific social systems of this type to attain in everyregion the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those twoinveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secularincrease in population that security permits. The imperfection of themeans of communication rendered political unions of a greater area thanthat swept by a hundred-mile radius highly unstable. It was a world ofsmall states. Lax empires came and went, at the utmost they were thelinking of practically autonomous states under a common _Pax_. Wars wereusually wars between kingdoms, conflicts of this local experiment insocial organization with that. Through all the historical period thesetwo well-defined classes of gentle and simple acted and reacted uponeach other, every individual in each class driven by that same will tolive and do, that imperative of self-establishment and aggression thatis the spirit of this world. Until the coming of gunpowder, the man onhorseback--commonly with some sort of armour--was invincible in battlein the open. Wherever the land lay wide and unbroken, and the greatlines of trade did not fall, there the horseman was master--or theclerkly man behind the horseman. Such a land was aristocratic and tendedto form castes. The craftsman sheltered under a patron, and in guilds ina walled town, and the labourer was a serf. He was ruled over by hisknight or by his creditor--in the end it matters little how thegentleman began. But where the land became difficult by reason ofmountain or forest, or where water greatly intersected it, the pikemanor closer-fighting swordsman or the bowman could hold his own, and ademocratic flavour, a touch of repudiation, was in the air. In suchcountries as Italy, Greece, the Alps, the Netherlands, and GreatBritain, the two forces of the old order, the aristocrat and the commonman, were in a state of unstable equilibrium through the whole period ofhistory. A slight change[22] in the details of the conflict forexistence could tilt the balance. A weapon a little better adapted toone class than the other, or a slight widening of the educational gap, worked out into historically imposing results, to dynastic changes, class revolutions and the passing of empires. 

Throughout it was essentially one phase of human organization. When onecomes to examine the final result, it is astonishing to remark the smallamount of essential change, of positively final and irreparablealteration, in the conditions of the common life. Consider, for example, how entirely in sympathy was the close of the eighteenth century withthe epoch of Horace, and how closely equivalent were the various socialaspects of the two periods. The literature of Rome was living reading ina sense that has suddenly passed away, it fitted all occasions, itconflicted with no essential facts in life. It was a commonplace of thethought of that time that all things recurred, all things circled backto their former seasons; there was nothing new under the sun. But nowalmost suddenly the circling has ceased, and we find ourselves breakingaway. Correlated with the sudden development of mechanical forces thatfirst began to be socially perceptible in the middle eighteenth century, has been the appearance of great masses of population, having quitenovel functions and relations in the social body, and together with thisappearance such a suppression, curtailment, and modification of theolder classes, as to point to an entire disintegration of that system. The _facies_ of the social fabric has changed, and--as I hope to makeclear--is still changing in a direction from which, without a totaldestruction and rebirth of that fabric, there can never be any return. 

The most striking of the new classes to emerge is certainly theshareholding class, the owners of a sort of property new in the world'shistory. 

Before the eighteenth century the only property of serious importanceconsisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond thesethings were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, thesurface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships, weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to beactually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately inconnection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it onlyprecariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of itto him at a distance was a difficult and costly proceeding. To prevent aconstant social disturbance by lapsing and dividing property, and in theabsence of any organized agency to receive lapsed property, inheritanceand preferably primogeniture were of such manifest advantage that theold social organization always tended in the direction of theseinstitutions. Such usury as was practised relied entirely on the landand the anticipated agricultural produce of the land. 

But the usury and the sleeping partnerships of the Joint Stock Companysystem which took shape in the eighteenth and the earlier half of thenineteenth century opened quite unprecedented uses for money, andcreated a practically new sort of property and a new proprietor class. The peculiar novelty of this property is easily defined. Given asufficient sentiment of public honesty, share property is property thatcan be owned at any distance and that yields its revenue without thoughtor care on the part of its proprietor; it is, indeed, absolutelyirresponsible property, a thing that no old world property ever was. But, in spite of its widely different nature, the laws of inheritancethat the social necessities of the old order of things established havebeen applied to this new species of possession without remark. It isindestructible, imperishable wealth, subject only to the mutations ofvalue that economic changes bring about. Related in its character ofabsolute irresponsibility to this shareholding class is a kindred classthat has grown with the growth of the great towns, the people who liveupon ground rents. There is every indication that this element ofirresponsible, independent, and wealthy people in the social body, people who feel the urgency of no exertion, the pressure of no specificpositive duties, is still on the increase, and may still for a long timeincreasingly preponderate. It overshadows the responsible owner of realproperty or of real businesses altogether. And most of the oldaristocrats, the old knightly and landholding people, have, so to speak, converted themselves into members of this new class. 

It is a class with scarcely any specific characteristics beyond itsdefining one, of the possession of property and all the potentialitiesproperty entails, with a total lack of function with regard to thatproperty. It is not even collected into a distinct mass. It graduatesinsensibly into every other class, it permeates society as threads andveins of gold permeate quartz. It includes the millionaire snob, thepolitical-minded plutocrat, the wealthy sensualist, open-handedreligious fanatics, the "Charitable, " the smart, the magnificently dull, the great army of timid creatures who tremble through life on a safebare sufficiency, [23] travellers, hunters, minor poets, sportingenthusiasts, many of the officers in the British Army, and all sorts andconditions of amateurs. In a sense it includes several modern royalties, for the crown in several modern constitutional states is a _corporationsole_, and the monarch the unique, unlimited, and so far as necessitygoes, quite functionless shareholder. He may be a heavy-eyed sensualist, a small-minded leader of fashion, a rival to his servants in the gayscience of etiquette, a frequenter of race-courses and music-halls, aliterary or scientific quack, a devotee, an amateur anything--the pointis that his income and sustenance have no relation whatever to hisactivities. If he fancies it, or is urged to it by those who haveinfluence over him, he may even "be a king!" But that is not compulsory, not essential, and there are practically no conditional restrictionswhatever laid upon him. 

Those who belong to this shareholding class only partially, whopartially depend upon dividends and partially upon activities, occur inevery rank and order of the whole social body. The waiter one tipsprobably has a hundred or so in some remote company, the will of theeminent labour reformer reveals an admirably distributed series ofinvestments, the bishop sells tea and digs coal, or at any rate gets aprofit from some unknown persons tea-selling or coal-digging, to eke outthe direct recompense of his own modest corn-treading. Indeed, above thelabouring class, the number of individuals in the social body whosegross income is entirely the result of their social activities is verysmall. Previously in the world's history, saving a few quite exceptionalaspects, the possession and retention of property was conditional uponactivities of some sort, honest or dishonest, work, force, or fraud. Butthe shareholding ingredient of our new society, so far as itsshareholding goes, has no need of strength or wisdom; the countlessuntraceable Owner of the modern world presents in a multitudinous formthe image of a Merovingian king. The shareholder owns the world _dejure_, by the common recognition of the rights of property; and theincumbency of knowledge, management, and toil fall entirely to others. He toils not, neither does he spin; he is mechanically released from thepenalty of the Fall, he reaps in a still sinful world all the practicalbenefits of a millennium--without any of its moral limitations. 

It will be well to glance at certain considerations which point to theby no means self-evident proposition, that this factor of irresponsibleproperty is certain to be present in the social body a hundred yearsahead. It has, no doubt, occurred to the reader that all the conditionsof the shareholder's being unfit him for co-operative action in defenceof the interests of his class. Since shareholders do nothing in common, except receive and hope for dividends, since they may be of any class, any culture, any disposition, or any level of capacity, since there isnothing to make them read the same papers, gather in the same places, orfeel any sort of sympathy with each other beyond the universal sympathyof man for man, they will, one may anticipate, be incapable of anyconcerted action to defend the income they draw from society against anyresolute attack. Such crude and obvious denials of the essentialprinciples of their existence as the various Socialistic bodies haveproclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negativeopposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forcesthey have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor thenatural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether toochaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of theprolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, eitherin its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on thequasi-natural laws of the social body. If they favour it, it willsurvive; when they do not, it will vanish as the mists of the morningbefore the sun. 

Neglecting a few exceptional older corporations which, indeed, in theiressence are not usurious, but of unlimited liability, the shareholdingbody appeared first, in its present character, in the seventeenthcentury, and came to its full development in the mid-nineteenth. Was itsappearance then due only to the attainment of a certain necessary degreeof public credit, or was it correlated with any other force? It seems inaccordance with facts to relate it to another force, the development ofmechanism, so far as certain representative aspects go. Hitherto theonly borrower had been the farmer, then the exploring trader had found aworld too wide for purely individual effort, and then suddenly thecraftsmen of all sorts and the carriers discovered the need of the new, great, wholesale, initially expensive appliances that invention wasoffering them. It was the development of mechanism that created thegreat bulk of modern shareholding, it took its present shapedistinctively only with the appearance of the railways. The hithertonecessary but subordinate craftsman and merchant classes were to havenew weapons, new powers, they were to develop to a new importance, to apreponderance even in the social body. But before they could attainthese weapons, before this new and novel wealth could be set up, it hadto pay its footing in an apportioned world, it had to buy its right todisturb the established social order. The dividend of the shareholderwas the tribute the new enterprise had to pay the old wealth. The sharewas the manumission money of machinery. And essentially the shareholderrepresents and will continue to represent the responsible managing ownerof a former state of affairs in process of supersession. 

If the great material developments of the nineteenth century had beenfinal, if they had, indeed, constituted merely a revolution and not anabsolute release from the fixed conditions about which human affairscircled, we might even now be settling accounts with our Merovingians asthe socialists desire. But these developments were not final, and onesees no hint as yet of any coming finality. Invention runs free and ourstate is under its dominion. The novel is continually struggling toestablish itself at the relative or absolute expense of the old. Thestatesman's conception of social organization is no longer stability butgrowth. And so long as material progress continues, this tribute mustcontinue to be paid; so long as the stream of development flows, thisnecessary back eddy will endure. Even if we "municipalize" all sorts ofundertakings we shall not alter the essential facts, we shall onlysubstitute for the shareholder the corporation stockholder. The figureof an eddy is particularly appropriate. Enterprises will come and go, the relative values of kinds of wealth will alter, old appliances, oldcompanies, will serve their time and fall in value, individuals willwaste their substance, individual families and groups will die out, certain portions of the share property of the world may be gathered, byelaborate manipulation, into a more or less limited number of hands, conceivably even families and groups will be taxed out by graduatedlegacy duties and specially apportioned income taxes, but, for all suchpossible changes and modifications, the shareholding element will stillendure, so long as our present progressive and experimental state ofsociety obtains. And the very diversity, laxity, and weakness of thegeneral shareholding element, which will work to prevent its organizingitself in the interests of its property, or of evolving any distinctivetraditions or positive characters, will obviously prevent itsobstructing the continual appearance of new enterprises, of newshareholders to replace the loss of its older constituents.... 

At the opposite pole of the social scale to that about whichshareholding is most apparent, is a second necessary and quiteinevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from avery nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great numberof people without either property or any evident function in the socialorganism. This new ingredient is most apparent in the towns, it isfrequently spoken of as the Urban Poor, but its characteristic traitsare to be found also in the rural districts. For the most part itsindividuals are either criminal, immoral, parasitic in more or lessirregular ways upon the more successful classes, or labouring, atsomething less than a regular bare subsistence wage, in a finallyhopeless competition against machinery that is as yet not so cheap astheir toil. It is, to borrow a popular phrase, the "submerged" portionof the social body, a leaderless, aimless multitude, a multitude ofpeople drifting down towards the abyss. Essentially it consists ofpeople who have failed to "catch on" to the altered necessities thedevelopment of mechanism has brought about, they are people thrown outof employment by machinery, thrown out of employment by the escape ofindustries along some newly opened line of communication to some remotepart of the world, or born under circumstances that give them noopportunity of entering the world of active work. Into this welter ofmachine-superseded toil there topples the non-adaptable residue of everychanging trade; its members marry and are given in marriage, and it isrecruited by the spendthrifts, weaklings, and failures of every superiorclass. 

Since this class was not apparent in masses in the relatively static, relatively less eliminatory, society of former times, its appearance hasgiven rise to a belief that the least desirable section of the communityhas become unprecedentedly prolific, that there is now going on a "RapidMultiplication of the Unfit. " But sooner or later, as every East Enddoctor knows, the ways of the social abyss lead to death, the prematuredeath of the individual, or death through the death or infertility ofthe individual's stunted offspring, or death through that extinctionwhich moral perversion involves. It is a recruited class, not a breedingmultitude. Whatever expedients may be resorted to, to mitigate orconceal the essential nature of this social element, it remains in itsessence wherever social progress is being made, the contingent of death. Humanity has set out in the direction of a more complex and exactingorganization, and until, by a foresight to me at least inconceivable, itcan prevent the birth of just all the inadaptable, useless, or merelyunnecessary creatures in each generation, there must needs continue tobe, in greater or less amount, this individually futile struggle beneaththe feet of the race; somewhere and in some form there must stillpersist those essentials that now take shape as the slum, the prison, and the asylum. All over the world, as the railway network has spread, in Chicago and New York as vividly as in London or Paris, thecommencement of the new movement has been marked at once by theappearance of this bulky irremovable excretion, the appearance of thesegall stones of vicious, helpless, and pauper masses. There seems everyreason to suppose that this phenomenon of unemployed citizens, who are, in fact, unemployable, will remain present as a class, perishingindividually and individually renewed, so long as civilization remainsprogressive and experimental upon its present lines. Their drowningexistences may be utilized, the crude hardship of their lot may beconcealed or mitigated, [24] they may react upon the social fabric thatis attempting to eliminate them, in very astounding ways, but theirpresence and their individual doom, it seems to me, will beunavoidable--at any rate, for many generations of men. They are anintegral part of this physiological process of mechanical progress, asinevitable in the social body as are waste matters and disintegratingcells in the body of an active and healthy man. 

The appearance of these two strange functionless elements, although themost striking symptom of the new phase of progressive mechanicalcivilization now beginning, is by no means the most essential change inprogress. These appearances involve also certain disappearances. I havealready indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development ofirresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more andmore the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all theirgrades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of theState, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lowerclass, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducatedinadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development oftoil-saving machinery, dwindling and crumbling down bit by bit towardsthe abyss. But side by side with these two processes is a third processof still profounder significance, and that is the reconstruction and thevast proliferation of what constituted the middle class of the oldorder. It is now, indeed, no longer a middle class at all. Rather allthe definite classes in the old scheme of functional precedence havemelted and mingled, [25] and in the molten mass there has appeared a vastintricate confusion of different sorts of people, some sailing aboutupon floating masses of irresponsible property, some buoyed by smallerfragments, some clinging desperately enough to insignificant atoms, agreat and varied multitude swimming successfully without aid, or with anamount of aid that is negligible in relation to their own efforts, andan equally varied multitude of less capable ones clinging to theswimmers, clinging to the floating rich, or clutching empty-handed andthrust and sinking down. This is the typical aspect of the moderncommunity. It will serve as a general description of either the UnitedStates or any western European State, and the day is not far distantwhen the extension of means of communication, and of the shareholdingmethod of conducting affairs, will make it applicable to the wholeworld. Save, possibly, in a few islands and inaccessible places andregardless of colour or creed, this process of deliquescence seemsdestined to spread. In a great diversity of tongues, in the phases of anumber of conflicting moral and theological traditions, in the varyingtones of contrasting racial temperaments, the grandchildren of black andwhite, and red and brown, will be seeking more or less consciously toexpress themselves in relation to these new and unusual socialconditions. But the change itself is no longer amenable to theirinterpretations, the world-wide spreading of swift communication, theobliteration of town and country, the deliquescence of the local socialorder, have an air of being processes as uncontrollable by suchcollective intelligence as men can at present command, and asindifferent to his local peculiarities and prejudices as the movementsof winds and tides.... 

It will be obvious that the interest of this speculation, at any rate, centres upon this great intermediate mass of people who are neitherpassively wealthy, the sleeping partners of change, nor helplesslythrust out of the process. Indeed, from our point of view--an inquiryinto coming things--these non-effective masses would have but theslightest interest were it not for their enormous possibilities ofreaction upon the really living portion of the social organism. Thisreally living portion seems at first sight to be as deliquescent in itsnature, to be drifting down to as chaotic a structure as either thenon-functional owners that float above it or the unemployed who sinkbelow. What were once the definite subdivisions of the middle classmodify and lose their boundaries. The retail tradesman of the towns, forexample--once a fairly homogeneous class throughout Europe--expands hereinto vast store companies, and dwindles there to be an agent orcollector, seeks employment or topples outright into the abyss. Butunder a certain scrutiny one can detect here what we do not detect inour other two elements, and that is that, going on side by side with theprocesses of dissolution and frequently masked by these, there are otherprocesses by which men, often of the most diverse parentage andantecedent traditions, are being segregated into a multitude ofspecific new groups which may presently develop very distinctivecharacters and ideals. 

There are, for example, the unorganized myriads that one can cover bythe phrase "mechanics and engineers, " if one uses it in its widestpossible sense. At present it would be almost impossible to describesuch a thing as a typical engineer, to predicate any universallyapplicable characteristic of the engineer and mechanic. The black-faced, oily man one figures emerging from the engine-room serves well enough, until one recalls the sanitary engineer with his additions of crockeryand plumbing, the electrical engineer with his little tests and wires, the mining engineer, the railway maker, the motor builder, and theirrigation expert. Even if we take some specific branch of all this hugemass of new employment the coming of mechanism has brought with it, westill find an undigested miscellany. Consider the rude levy that isengaged in supplying and repairing the world's new need of bicycles!Wheelwrights, watchmakers, blacksmiths, music-dealers, drapers, sewing-machine repairers, smart errand boys, ironmongers, individualsfrom all the older aspects of engineering, have been caught up by thenew development, are all now, with a more or less inadequate knowledgeand training, working in the new service. But is it likely that thiswill remain a rude levy? From all these varied people the world requirescertain things, and a failure to obtain them involves, sooner or later, in this competitive creation, an individual replacement and a pushtowards the abyss. The very lowest of them must understand the machinethey contribute to make and repair, and not only is it a fairly complexmachine in itself, but it is found in several types and patterns, and sofar it has altered, and promises still to alter, steadily, byimprovements in this part and that. No limited stock-in-trade ofknowledge, such as suffices for a joiner or an ostler, will serve. Theymust keep on mastering new points, new aspects, they must be intelligentand adaptable, they must get a grasp of that permanent something thatlies behind the changing immediate practice. In other words, they willhave to be educated rather than trained after the fashion of the oldcraftsman. Just now this body of irregulars is threatened by the comingof the motors. The motors promise new difficulties, new rewards, and newcompetition. It is an ill look-out for the cycle mechanic who is notprepared to tackle the new problems that will arise. For all this nextcentury this particular body of mechanics will be picking up newrecruits and eliminating the incompetent and the rule-of-thumb sage. Canit fail, as the years pass, to develop certain general characters, tobecome so far homogeneous as to be generally conscious of the need of ascientific education, at any rate in mechanical and chemical matters, and to possess, down to its very lowest ranks and orders, a common fundof intellectual training?

But the makers and repairers of cycles, and that larger multitude thatwill presently be concerned with motors, are, after all, only a smalland specialized section of the general body of mechanics and engineers. Every year, with the advance of invention, new branches of activity, that change in their nature and methods all too rapidly for theestablishment of rote and routine workers of the old type, call togetherfresh levies of amateurish workers and learners who must surelypresently develop into, or give place to, bodies of qualified andcapable men. And the point I would particularly insist upon here is, that throughout all its ranks and ramifications, from the organizingheads of great undertakings down to the assistant in the local repairshop, this new, great, and expanding body of mechanics and engineerswill tend to become an educated and adaptable class in a sense that thecraftsmen of former times were not educated and adaptable. Just how highthe scientific and practical education may rise in the central levels ofthis body is a matter for subsequent speculation, just how muchinitiative will be found in the lowest ranks depends upon many verycomplex considerations. But that here we have at least the possibility, the primary creative conditions of a new, numerous, intelligent, educated, and capable social element is, I think, a proposition withwhich the reader will agree. 

What are the chief obstacles in the way of the emergence, from out thepresent chaos, of this social element equipped, organized, educated, conscious of itself and of distinctive aims, in the next hundred years?In the first place there is the spirit of trade unionism, theconservative contagion of the old craftsmanship. Trade Unions aroseunder the tradition of the old order, when in every business, employerand employed stood in marked antagonism, stood as a special instance ofthe universal relationship of gentle or intelligent, who supplied nolabour, and simple, who supplied nothing else. The interest of theemployer was to get as much labour as possible out of his hirelings; thecomplementary object in life of the hireling, whose sole function wasdrudgery, who had no other prospect until death, was to give as littleto his employer as possible. In order to keep the necessary labourersubmissive, it was a matter of public policy to keep him uneducated andas near the condition of a beast of burden as possible, and in order tokeep his life tolerable against that natural increase which all themoral institutions of his state promoted, the labourer--stimulated ifhis efforts slackened by the touch of absolute misery--was forced todevise elaborate rules for restricting the hours of toil, making itsperformance needlessly complex, and shirking with extreme ingenuity andconscientiousness. In the older trades, of which the building trade isforemost, these two traditions, reinforced by unimaginative buildingregulations, have practically arrested any advance whatever. [26] Therecan be no doubt that this influence has spread into what are practicallynew branches of work. Even where new conveniences have called for newtypes of workmen and have opened the way for the elevation of a group oflabourers to the higher level of versatile educated men, [27] the oldtraditions have to a very large extent prevailed. The average sanitaryplumber of to-day in England insists upon his position as a merelabourer as though it were some precious thing, he guards himself fromimprovement as a virtuous woman guards her honour, he works forspecifically limited hours and by the hour with specific limitations inthe practice of his trade, on the fairly sound assumption that but forthat restriction any fool might do plumbing as well as he; whatever helearns he learns from some other plumber during his apprenticeshipyears--after which he devotes himself to doing the minimum of work inthe maximum of time until his brief excursion into this mysteriousuniverse is over. So far from invention spurring him onward, everyimprovement in sanitary work in England, at least, is limited by theproblem whether "the men" will understand it. A person ingenious enoughto exceed this sacred limit might as well hang himself as trouble aboutthe improvement of plumbing. 

If England stood alone, I do not see why each of the new mechanical andengineering industries, so soon as it develops sufficiently to havegathered together a body of workers capable of supporting a Trade Unionsecretary, should not begin to stagnate in the same manner. Only Englanddoes not stand alone, and the building trade is so far not typical, inasmuch as it possesses a national monopoly that the most elaboratesystem of protection cannot secure any other group of trades. One musthave one's house built where one has to live, the importation of workmenin small bodies is difficult and dear, and if one cannot have the houseone wishes, one must needs have the least offensive substitute; butbicycle and motor, iron-work and furniture, engines, rails, and shipsone can import. The community, therefore, that does least to educateits mechanics and engineers out of the base and servile tradition of theold idea of industry will in the coming years of progress simply get adisproportionate share of the rejected element, the trade will goelsewhere, and the community will be left in possession of anexceptionally large contingent for the abyss. 

At present, however, I am dealing not with the specific community, butwith the generalized civilized community of A. D. 2000--we disregard thefate of states and empires for a time--and, for that emergent community, wherever it may be, it seems reasonable to anticipate, replacing andenormously larger and more important than the classes of common workmenand mechanics of to-day, a large fairly homogeneous body--big men andlittle men, indeed, but with no dividing lines--of more or less expertmechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education andintelligence, and probably a common-class consciousness--a new body, anew force, in the world's history. 

For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than theprimary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If itis an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, andjust as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilledand educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of theEngland of to-day, in--or a little way out of--orders, with hissmattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuousmathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparablesnobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of thiscoming class. Moreover, the new element will necessarily embody itscollective, necessarily distinctive, and unprecedented thoughts in aliterature of its own, its development means the development of a newsort of writer and of new elements in the press. And since, if it doesemerge, a revolution in the common schools of the community will be anecessary part of the process, then its emergence will involve arevolutionary change in the condition of classes that might otherwiseremain as they are now--the older craftsman, for example. 

The process of attraction will not end even there; the development ofmore and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operativeswill render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams, and the diffusion of this new class over the country side--assuming thereasoning in my second chapter to be sound--will bring the lever of theimproved schools under the agriculturist. The practically autonomousfarm of the old epoch will probably be replaced by a great variety oftypes of cultivation, each with its labour-saving equipment. In this, asin most things, the future spells variation. The practical abolition ofimpossible distances over the world will tend to make every districtspecialize in the production for which it is best fitted, and todevelop that production with an elaborate precision and economy. Thechief opposing force to this tendency will be found in those countrieswhere the tenure of the land is in small holdings. A population of smallagriculturists that has really got itself well established is probablyas hopelessly immovable a thing as the forces of progressive change willhave to encounter. The Arcadian healthiness and simplicity of the smallholder, and the usefulness of little hands about him, naturally resultsin his keeping the population on his plot up to the limit of baresubsistence. He avoids over-education, and his beasts live with him andhis children in a natural kindly manner. He will have no idlers, andeven grand-mamma goes weeding. His nett produce is less than theproduction of the larger methods, but his gross is greater, and usuallyit is mortgaged more or less. Along the selvage of many of the new roadswe have foretold, his hens will peck and his children beg, far into thecoming decades. This simple, virtuous, open-air life is to be foundripening in the north of France and Belgium, it culminated in Ireland inthe famine years, it has held its own in China--with a use of femaleinfanticide--for immemorable ages, and a number of excellent persons areendeavouring to establish it in England at the present time. At the Capeof Good Hope, under British rule, Kaffirs are being settled upon littleinalienable holdings that must inevitably develop in the samedirection, and over the Southern States the nigger squats andmultiplies. It is fairly certain that these stagnant ponds ofpopulation, which will grow until public intelligence rises to the pitchof draining them, will on a greater scale parallel in the twentiethcentury the soon-to-be-dispersed urban slums of the nineteenth. But I donot see how they can obstruct, more than locally, the reorganization ofagriculture and horticulture upon the ampler and more economical linesmechanism permits, or prevent the development of a type of agriculturistas adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest as the comingengineer. 

Another great section of the community, the military element, will alsofall within the attraction of this possible synthesis, and willinevitably undergo profound modification. Of the probable development ofwarfare a later chapter shall treat, and here it will suffice to pointout that at present science stands proffering the soldier vague, vastpossibilities of mechanism, and, so far, he has accepted practicallynothing but rifles which he cannot sight and guns that he does not learnto move about. It is quite possible the sailor would be in the likecase, but for the exceptional conditions that begot ironclads in theAmerican Civil War. Science offers the soldier transport that he doesnot use, maps he does not use, entrenching devices, road-making devices, balloons and flying scouts, portable foods, security from disease, athousand ways of organizing the horrible uncertainties of war. But thesoldier of to-day--I do not mean the British soldier only--still insistson regarding these revolutionary appliances as mere accessories, anduntrustworthy ones at that, to the time-honoured practice of his art. Heguards his technical innocence like a plumber. 

Every European army is organized on the lines of the once fundamentaldistinction of the horse and foot epoch, in deference to the contrast ofgentle and simple. There is the officer, with all the traditions of oldnobility, and the men still, by a hundred implications, mere sources ofmechanical force, and fundamentally base. The British Army, for example, still cherishes the tradition that its privates are absolutelyilliterate, and such small instruction as is given them in the art ofwar is imparted by bawling and enforced by abuse upon public drillgrounds. Almost all discussion of military matters still turns upon thenow quite stupid assumption that there are two primary military arms andno more, horse and foot. "Cyclists are infantry, " the War Office manualof 1900 gallantly declares in the face of this changing universe. Afterfifty years of railways, there still does not exist, in a world which issaid to be over devoted to military affairs, a skilled and organizedbody of men, specially prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, andfight such an important element in the new social machinery as arailway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will behastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or otherof the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition ofaffairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several warsbetween European powers, prepared and organized to accept the oldconventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leavethe art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner or later--it may be inthe improvised struggle that follows the collapse of some one of thesehuge, witless, fighting forces--the new sort of soldier will emerge, asober, considerate, engineering man--no more of a gentleman than the mansubordinated to him or any other self-respecting person.... 

Certain interesting side questions I may glance at here, only for thepresent, at least, to set them aside unanswered, the reaction, forexample, of this probable development of a great mass of educated andintelligent efficients upon the status and quality of the medicalprofession, and the influence of its novel needs in either modifying theexisting legal body or calling into being a parallel body of more expertand versatile guides and assistants in business operations. But from themention of this latter section one comes to another possible centre ofaggregation in the social welter. Opposed in many of their mostessential conditions to the capable men who are of primary importance inthe social body, is the great and growing variety of non-productive butactive men who are engaged in more or less necessary operations oforganization, promotion, advertisement, and trade. There are thebusiness managers, public and private, the political organizers, brokers, commission agents, the varying grades of financier down to themere greedy camp followers of finance, the gamblers pure and simple, andthe great body of their dependent clerks, typewriters, and assistants. All this multitude will have this much in common, that it will bedealing, not with the primary inexorable logic of natural laws, but withthe shifting, uncertain prejudices and emotions of the general mass ofpeople. It will be wary and cunning rather than deliberate andintelligent, smart rather than prompt, considering always the appearanceand effect before the reality and possibilities of things. It willprobably tend to form a culture about the political and financialoperator as its ideal and central type, opposed to, and conflictingwith, the forces of attraction that will tend to group the new socialmasses about the scientific engineer. [28]... 

Here, then (in the vision of the present writer), are the main socialelements of the coming time: (i. ) the element of irresponsibleproperty; (ii. ) the helpless superseded poor, that broad base of meretoilers now no longer essential; (iii. ) a great inchoate mass of more orless capable people engaged more or less consciously in applying thegrowing body of scientific knowledge to the general needs, a great massthat will inevitably tend to organize itself in a system ofinterdependent educated classes with a common consciousness and aim, butwhich may or may not succeed in doing so; and (iv. ) a possibly equallygreat number of non-productive persons living in and by the socialconfusion. 

All these elements will be mingled confusedly together, passing into oneanother by insensible gradations, scattered over the great urban regionsand intervening areas our previous anticipations have sketched out. Moreover, they are developing, as it were unconsciously, under thestimulus of mechanical developments, and with the bandages of oldtradition hampering their movements. The laws they obey, the governmentsthey live under, are for the most part laws made and governments plannedbefore the coming of steam. The areas of administration are still areasmarked out by conditions of locomotion as obsolete as the quadrupedalmethod of the pre-arboreal ancestor. In Great Britain, for example, thepolitical constitution, the balance of estates and the balance ofparties, preserves the compromise of long-vanished antagonisms. TheHouse of Lords is a collection of obsolete territorial dignitariesfitfully reinforced by the bishops and a miscellany (in no senserepresentative) of opulent moderns; the House of Commons is the seat ofa party conflict, a faction fight of initiated persons, that has longceased to bear any real relation to current social processes. Themembers of the lower chamber are selected by obscure party machinesoperating upon constituencies almost all of which have long since becometoo vast and heterogeneous to possess any collective intelligence orpurpose at all. In theory the House of Commons guards the interests ofclasses that are, in fact, rapidly disintegrating into a number of quiteantagonistic and conflicting elements. The new mass of capable men, ofwhich the engineers are typical, these capable men who must necessarilybe the active principle of the new mechanically equipped social body, finds no representation save by accident in either assembly. The man whohas concerned himself with the public health, with army organization, with educational improvement, or with the vital matters of transport andcommunication, if he enter the official councils of the kingdom at all, must enter ostensibly as the guardian of the interests of the free andindependent electors of a specific district that has long ceased to haveany sort of specific interests at all. [29]... 

And the same obsolescence that is so conspicuous in the generalinstitutions of the official kingdom of England, and that even Englishpeople can remark in the official empire of China, is to be traced in agreater or lesser degree in the nominal organization and publictradition throughout the whole world. The United States, for example, the social mass which has perhaps advanced furthest along the new lines, struggles in the iron bonds of a constitution that is based primarily ona conception of a number of comparatively small, internally homogeneous, agricultural states, a bunch of pre-Johannesburg Transvaals, communicating little, and each constituting a separate autonomousdemocracy of free farmers--slaveholding or slaveless. Every country inthe world, indeed, that is organized at all, has been organized with aview to stability within territorial limits; no country has beenorganized with any foresight of development and inevitable change, orwith the slightest reference to the practical revolution in topographythat the new means of transit involve. And since this is so, and sincehumanity is most assuredly embarked upon a series of changes of which weknow as yet only the opening phases, a large part of the history of thecoming years will certainly record more or less conscious endeavours toadapt these obsolete and obsolescent contrivances for the management ofpublic affairs to the new and continually expanding and changingrequirements of the social body, to correct or overcome the traditionsthat were once wisdom and which are now obstruction, and to burst thestraining boundaries that were sufficient for the ancient states. Thereare here no signs of a millennium. Internal reconstruction, while menare still limited, egotistical, passionate, ignorant, and ignorantlyled, means seditions and revolutions, and the rectification of frontiersmeans wars. But before we go on to these conflicts and wars certaingeneral social reactions must be considered. 

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Even the characteristic conditions of writing books, that leastmechanical of pursuits, have been profoundly affected by the typewriter. 

[21] To these two primary classes the more complicated societies haveadded others. There is the priest, almost always in the social order ofthe pre-railway period, an integral part, a functional organ of thesocial body, and there are the lawyer and the physician. And in thetowns--constituting, indeed, the towns--there appear, as an outgrowth ofthe toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's directcontrol, the craftsman, the merchant, and the trading sailor, essentially accessory classes, producers of, and dealers in, theaccessories of life, and mitigating and clouding only very slightly thatbroad duality. 

[22] Slight, that is, in comparison with nineteenth-century changes. 

[23] It included, one remembers, Schopenhauer, but, as he remarked uponoccasion, not Hegel. 

[24] A very important factor in this mitigation, a factor over which thehumanely minded cannot too greatly rejoice, will be the philanthropicamusements of the irresponsible wealthy. There is a growing class ofenergetic people--organizers, secretaries, preachers--who cater to thephilanthropic instinct, and who are, for all practical purposes, employing a large and increasing section of suitable helpless people, insupplying to their customers, by means of religious acquiescence andlight moral reforms, that sense of well-doing which is one of the leastobjectionable of the functionless pleasures of life. The attempts toreinstate these failures by means of subsidized industries will, in theend, of course, merely serve to throw out of employment other justsubsisting strugglers; it will probably make little or no difference inthe nett result of the process. 

[25] I reserve any consideration of the special case of the "priest. "

[26] I find it incredible that there will not be a sweeping revolutionin the methods of building during the next century. The erection of ahouse-wall, come to think of it, is an astonishingly tedious and complexbusiness; the final result exceedingly unsatisfactory. It has been mylot recently to follow in detail the process of building a privatedwelling-house, and the solemn succession of deliberate, respectable, perfectly satisfied men, who have contributed each so many days of hislife to this accumulation of weak compromises, has enormouslyintensified my constitutional amazement at my fellow-creatures. Thechief ingredient in this particular house-wall is the common brick, burnt earth, and but one step from the handfuls of clay of the ancestralmud hut, small in size and permeable to damp. Slowly, day by day, thewalls grew tediously up, to a melody of tinkling trowels. These bricksare joined by mortar, which is mixed in small quantities, and must varyvery greatly in its quality and properties throughout the house. Inorder to prevent the obvious evils of a wall of porous and irregularbaked clay and lime mud, a damp course of tarred felt, which cannotpossibly last more than a few years, was inserted about a foot from theground. Then the wall, being quite insufficient to stand the heavy driftof weather to which it is exposed, was dabbled over with two coatings ofplaster on the outside, the outermost being given a primitivepicturesqueness by means of a sham surface of rough-cast pebbles andwhite-wash, while within, to conceal the rough discomfort of thesurface, successive coatings of plaster, and finally, paper, were added, with a wood-skirting at the foot thrice painted. Everything in this washand work, the laying of the bricks, the dabbing of the plaster, thesmoothing of the paper; it is a house built of hands--and some I sawwere bleeding hands--just as in the days of the pyramids, when the onlyengines were living men. The whole confection is now undergoingincalculable chemical reactions between its several parts. Lime, mortar, and microscopical organisms are producing undesigned chromatic effectsin the paper and plaster; the plaster, having methods of expansion andcontraction of its own, crinkles and cracks; the skirting, havingabsorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-castcoquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humblercreation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resentbitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, andbetter and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and betterthan bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at lastof much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro alonga temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint froma tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. Moreover, Ido not see at all why the walls of small dwelling-houses should be sosolid as they are. There still hangs about us the monumental traditionsof the pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, portable, andhabitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon alight framework. This sort of thing is, no doubt, abominably ugly atpresent, but that is because architects and designers, being for themost part inordinately cultured and quite uneducated, are unable to copewith its fundamentally novel problems. A few energetic men might at anytime set out to alter all this. And with the inevitable revolutions thatmust come about in domestic fittings, and which I hope to discuss morefully in the next paper, it is open to question whether many groundlandlords may not find they have work for the house-breakers rather thanwealth unlimited falling into their hands when the building leases theirsolicitors so ingeniously draw up do at last expire. 

[27] The new aspects of building, for example, that have been broughtabout by the entrance of water and gas into the house, and theapplication of water to sanitation. 

[28] The future of the servant class and the future of the artist aretwo interesting questions that will be most conveniently mentioned at alater stage, when we come to discuss the domestic life in greater detailthan is possible before we have formed any clear notion of the sort ofpeople who will lead that life. 

[29] Even the physical conditions under which the House of Commons meetsand plays at government, are ridiculously obsolete. Every disputablepoint is settled by a division, a bell rings, there is shouting andrunning, the members come blundering into the chamber and sortthemselves with much loutish shuffling and shoving into the divisionlobbies. They are counted, as illiterate farmers count sheep; amidstmuch fuss and confusion they return to their places, and the tellersvociferate the result. The waste of time over these antics is enormous, and they are often repeated many times in an evening. For the lack oftime, the House of Commons is unable to perform the most urgent andnecessary legislative duties--it has this year hung up a cryinglynecessary Education Bill, a delay that will in the end cost GreatBritain millions--but not a soul in it has had the necessary commonsense to point out that an electrician and an expert locksmith could ina few weeks, and for a few hundred pounds, devise and construct amember's desk and key, committee-room tapes and voting-desks, and ageneral recording apparatus, that would enable every member within theprecincts to vote, and that would count, record, and report the voteswithin the space of a couple of minutes. 

IV

CERTAIN SOCIAL REACTIONS

We are now in a position to point out and consider certain general waysin which the various factors and elements in the deliquescent society ofthe present time will react one upon another, and to speculate whatdefinite statements, if any, it may seem reasonable to make about theindividual people of the year 2000--or thereabouts--from the reaction ofthese classes we have attempted to define. 

To begin with, it may prove convenient to speculate upon the trend ofdevelopment of that class about which we have the most grounds forcertainty in the coming time. The shareholding class, the rout of theAbyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to thevarying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the mosttypical portion of the central body, the section containing thescientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we canpostulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways ofthought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they willradiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even, I think, deduce some conception of the home in which a fairly typicalexample of this body will be living within a reasonable term of years. 

The mere fact that a man is an engineer or a doctor, for example, shouldimply now, and certainly will imply in the future, that he has receivedan education of a certain definite type; he will have a generalacquaintance with the scientific interpretation of the universe, and hewill have acquired certain positive and practical habits of mind. If themethods of thought of any individual in this central body are notpractical and positive, he will tend to drift out of it to some morecongenial employment. He will almost necessarily have a strongimperative to duty quite apart from whatever theological opinions he mayentertain, because if he has not such an inherent imperative, life willhave very many more alluring prospects than this. His religiousconclusions, whatever they may be, will be based upon some orderlytheological system that must have honestly admitted and reconciled hisscientific beliefs; the emotional and mystical elements in his religionwill be subordinate or absent. Essentially he will be a moral man, certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an orderedway. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energiesto thought and work--that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. Ifsensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore, --apoint we must leave open here--it will appear without any trappings ofsentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach'ssake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the fleshnecessary to secure efficiency. Assuming in our typical case that pureindulgence does not appear or flares and passes, then either he will besingle or more or less married. The import of that "more or less" willbe discussed later, for the present we may very conveniently conceivehim married under the traditional laws of Christendom. Having a mindconsiderably engaged, he will not have the leisure for a wife of thedistracting, perplexing personality kind, and in our typical case, whichwill be a typically sound and successful one, we may picture him weddedto a healthy, intelligent, and loyal person, who will be her husband'scompanion in their common leisure, and as mother of their three or fourchildren and manager of his household, as much of a technically capableindividual as himself. He will be a father of several children, I think, because his scientific mental basis will incline him to see the whole oflife as a struggle to survive; he will recognize that a childless, sterile life, however pleasant, is essentially failure and perversion, and he will conceive his honour involved in the possession of offspring. 

Such a couple will probably dress with a view to decent convenience, they will not set the fashions, as I shall presently point out, butthey will incline to steady and sober them, they will avoid excitingcolour contrasts and bizarre contours. They will not be habituallypromenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they willprobably find their secondary interests--the cardinal one will of coursebe the work in hand--in a not too imaginative prose literature, intravel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They willprobably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their _ménage_, which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, inall probability, be servantless. 

They will probably not keep a servant for two very excellent reasons, because in the first place they will not want one, and in the secondthey will not get one if they do. A servant is necessary in the small, modern house, partly to supplement the deficiencies of the wife, butmainly to supplement the deficiencies of the house. She comes to cookand perform various skilled duties that the wife lacks either knowledgeor training, or both, to perform regularly and expeditiously. Usually itmust be confessed that the servant in the small household fails toperform these skilled duties completely. But the great proportion of theservant's duties consists merely in drudgery that the stupidities of ourpresent-day method of house construction entail, and which the moresanely constructed house of the future will avoid. Consider, forinstance, the wanton disregard of avoidable toil displayed in buildinghouses with a service basement without lifts! Then most dusting andsweeping would be quite avoidable if houses were wiselier done. It isthe lack of proper warming appliances which necessitates a vast amountof coal carrying and dirt distribution, and it is this dirt mainly thathas so painfully to be removed again. The house of the future willprobably be warmed in its walls from some power-generating station, as, indeed, already very many houses are lit at the present day. The lack ofsane methods of ventilation also enhances the general dirtiness anddustiness of the present-day home, and gas-lighting and the use oftarnishable metals, wherever possible, involve further labour. But airwill enter the house of the future through proper tubes in the walls, which will warm it and capture its dust, and it will be spun out againby a simple mechanism. And by simple devices such sweeping as stillremains necessary can be enormously lightened. The fact that in existinghomes the skirting meets the floor at right angles makes sweeping abouttwice as troublesome as it will be when people have the sense andability to round off the angle between wall and floor. 

So one great lump of the servant's toil will practically disappear. Twoothers are already disappearing. In many houses there are still theoffensive duties of filling lamps and blacking boots to be done. Ourcoming house, however, will have no lamps to need filling, and, as forthe boots, really intelligent people will feel the essential ugliness ofwearing the evidence of constant manual toil upon their persons. Theywill wear sorts of shoes and boots that can be cleaned by wiping in aminute or so. Take now the bedroom work. The lack of ingenuity insanitary fittings at present forbids the obvious convenience of hot andcold water supply to the bedroom, and there is a mighty fetching andcarrying of water and slops to be got through daily. All that willcease. Every bedroom will have its own bath-dressing room which anywell-bred person will be intelligent and considerate enough to use andleave without the slightest disarrangement. This, so far as "upstairs"goes, really only leaves bedmaking to be done, and a bed does not takefive minutes to make. Downstairs a vast amount of needless labour atpresent arises out of table wear. "Washing up" consists of a tediouscleansing and wiping of each table utensil in turn, whereas it should bepossible to immerse all dirty table wear in a suitable solvent for a fewminutes and then run that off for the articles to dry. The applicationof solvents to window cleaning, also, would be a possible thing but forthe primitive construction of our windows, which prevents anything but apainful rub, rub, rub, with the leather. A friend of mine in domesticservice tells me that this rubbing is to get the window dry, and thisseems to be the general impression, but I think it incorrect. The wateris not an adequate solvent, and enough cannot be used under existingconditions. Consequently, if the window is cleaned and left wet, itdries in drops, and these drops contain dirt in solution which remain asspots. But water containing a suitable solvent could quite simply bemade to run down a window for a few minutes from pinholes in a pipeabove into a groove below, and this could be followed by pure rain waterfor an equal time, and in this way the whole window cleaning in thehouse could, I imagine, be reduced to the business of turning on a tap. 

There remains the cooking. To-day cooking, with its incidentals, is avery serious business; the coaling, the ashes, the horrible moments ofheat, the hot black things to handle, the silly vague recipes, the wantof neat apparatus, and the want of intelligence to demand or use neatapparatus. One always imagines a cook working with a crimsoned face andbare blackened arms. But with a neat little range, heated by electricityand provided with thermometers, with absolutely controllabletemperatures and proper heat screens, cooking might very easily be madea pleasant amusement for intelligent invalid ladies. Which reminds one, by-the-by, as an added detail to our previous sketch of the scenery ofthe days to come, that there will be no chimneys at all to the house ofthe future of this type, except the flue for the kitchen smells. [30]This will not only abolish the chimney stack, but make the roof a cleanand pleasant addition to the garden spaces of the home. 

I do not know how long all these things will take to arrive. Theerection of a series of experimental labour-saving houses by somephilanthropic person, for exhibition and discussion, would certainlybring about a very extraordinary advance in domestic comfort even in theimmediate future, but the fashions in philanthropy do not trend in suchpractical directions; if they did, the philanthropic person wouldprobably be too amenable to flattery to escape the pushful patentee andtoo sensitive to avail himself of criticism (which rarely succeeds inbeing both penetrating and polite), and it will probably be many yearsbefore the cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to theeconomies that are theoretically possible to-day. But certainly theengineering and medical sorts of person will be best able to appreciatethe possibilities of cutting down the irksome labours of thecontemporary home, and most likely to first demand and secure them. 

The wife of this ideal home may probably have a certain distaste forvicarious labour, that so far as the immediate minimum of duties goeswill probably carry her through them. There will be few servantsobtainable for the small homes of the future, and that may strengthenher sentiments. Hardly any woman seems to object to a system of thingswhich provides that another woman should be made rough-handed and keptrough-minded for her sake, but with the enormous diffusion of levellinginformation that is going on, a perfectly valid objection will probablycome from the other side in this transaction. The servants of the pastand the only good servants of to-day are the children of servants or thechildren of the old labour base of the social pyramid, until recently anecessary and self-respecting element in the State. Machinery hassmashed that base and scattered its fragments; the tradition ofself-respecting inferiority is being utterly destroyed in the world. Thecontingents of the Abyss, even, will not supply daughters for thispurpose. In the community of the United States no native-born race ofwhite servants has appeared, and the emancipated young negressdegenerates towards the impossible--which is one of the many stimulantsto small ingenuities that may help very powerfully to give that nationthe industrial leadership of the world. The servant of the future, ifindeed she should still linger in the small household, will be a personalive to a social injustice and the unsuccessful rival of the wife. Suchservants as wealth will retain will be about as really loyal and servileas hotel waiters, and on the same terms. For the middling sort ofpeople in the future maintaining a separate _ménage_ there is nothingfor it but the practically automatic house or flat, supplemented, perhaps, by the restaurant or the hotel. 

Almost certainly, for reasons detailed in the second chapter of theseAnticipations, this household, if it is an ideal type, will be situatedaway from the central "Town" nucleus and in pleasant surroundings. And Iimagine that the sort of woman who would be mother and mistress of sucha home would not be perfectly content unless there were a garden aboutthe house. On account of the servant difficulty, again, this gardenwould probably be less laboriously neat than many of our gardensto-day--no "bedding-out, " for example, and a certain parsimony of mownlawn.... 

To such a type of home it seems the active, scientifically trainedpeople will tend. But usually, I think, the prophet is inclined to overestimate the number of people who will reach this condition of affairsin a generation or so, and to under estimate the conflicting tendenciesthat will make its attainment difficult to all, and impossible to many, and that will for many years tint and blotch the achievement of thosewho succeed with patches of unsympathetic colour. To understand just howmodifications may come in, it is necessary to consider the probable lineof development of another of the four main elements in the social bodyof the coming time. As a consequence and visible expression of thegreat new growth of share and stock property there will be scatteredthrough the whole social body, concentrated here perhaps, and diffusedthere, but everywhere perceived, the members of that new class of theirresponsible wealthy, a class, as I have already pointed out in thepreceding chapter, miscellaneous and free to a degree quiteunprecedented in the world's history. Quite inevitably great sections ofthis miscellany will develop characteristics almost diametricallyopposed to those of the typical working expert class, and theirgravitational attraction may influence the lives of this more efficient, finally more powerful, but at present much less wealthy, class to a veryconsiderable degree of intimacy. 

The rich shareholder and the skilled expert must necessarily be sharplycontrasted types, and of the two it must be borne in mind that it is therich shareholder who spends the money. While occupation and skillincline one towards severity and economy, leisure and unlimited meansinvolve relaxation and demand the adventitious interest of decoration. The shareholder will be the decorative influence in the State. So far asthere will be a typical shareholder's house, we may hazard that it willhave rich colours, elaborate hangings, stained glass adornments, andadded interests in great abundance. This "leisure class" will certainlyemploy the greater proportion of the artists, decorators, fabric makers, and the like, of the coming time. It will dominate the world ofart--and we may say, with some confidence, that it will influence it incertain directions. For example, standing apart from the movement of theworld, as they will do to a very large extent, the archaic, opulentlydone, will appeal irresistibly to very many of these irresponsible richas the very quintessence of art. They will come to art with uncritical, cultured minds, full of past achievements, ignorant of presentnecessities. Art will be something added to life--something stuck on andrichly reminiscent--not a manner pervading all real things. We may bepretty sure that very few will grasp the fact that an iron bridge or arailway engine may be artistically done--these will not be "art"objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can prettyconfidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for thatturgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles ofwhich William Morris and his associates have been the fortunatepioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. Anon-functional class of people cannot have a functional costume, thewhole scheme of costume, as it will be worn by the wealthy classes inthe coming years, will necessarily be of that character which is calledfancy dress. Few people will trouble to discover the most convenientforms and materials, and endeavour to simplify them and reduce them tobeautiful forms, while endless enterprising tradesmen will be alert fora perpetual succession of striking novelties. The women will ransack theages for becoming and alluring anachronisms, the men will appear in theelaborate uniforms of "games, " in modifications of "court" dress, inpicturesque revivals of national costumes, in epidemic fashions of themost astonishing sort.... 

Now, these people, so far as they are spenders of money, and so far ashe is a spender of money, will stand to this ideal engineering sort ofperson, who is the vitally important citizen of a progressive scientificState, in a competitive relation. In most cases, whenever there issomething that both want, one against the other, the shareholder willget it; in most cases, where it is a matter of calling the tune, theshareholder will call the tune. For example, the young architect, conscious of exceptional ability, will have more or less clearly beforehim the alternatives of devoting himself to the novel, intricate, anddifficult business of designing cheap, simple, and mechanicallyconvenient homes for people who will certainly not be highlyremunerative, and will probably be rather acutely critical, or ofperfecting himself in some period of romantic architecture, or strikingout some startling and attractive novelty of manner or material whichwill be certain, sooner or later, to meet its congenial shareholder. Even if he hover for a time between these alternatives, he will need tobe a person not only of exceptional gifts, but what is by no means acommon accompaniment of exceptional gifts, exceptional strength ofcharacter, to take the former line. Consequently, for many years yet, most of the experimental buildings and novel designs, that initiatediscussion and develop the general taste, will be done primarily toplease the more originative shareholders and not to satisfy the demandsof our engineer or doctor; and the strictly commercial builders, whowill cater for all but the wealthiest engineers, scientificinvestigators, and business men, being unable to afford specificdesigns, will--amidst the disregarded curses of these more intelligentcustomers--still simply reproduce in a cheaper and mutilated form suchexamples as happen to be set. Practically, that is to say, theshareholder will buy up almost all the available architectural talent. 

This modifies our conception of the outer appearance of that littlehouse we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionallyprosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack somethingof the neat directness implicit in our description, something of thatinevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends--forvery many years, at any rate. It will almost certainly be tinted, it mayeven be saturated, with the secondhand archaic. The owner may object, but a busy man cannot stop his life work to teach architects what theyought to know. It may be heated electrically, but it will have shamchimneys, in whose darkness, unless they are built solid, dust andfilth will gather, and luckless birds and insects pass horrible lasthours of ineffectual struggle. It may have automatic window-cleaningarrangements, but they will be hidden by "picturesque" mullions. Thesham chimneys will, perhaps, be made to smoke genially in winter by someingenious contrivance, there may be sham open fireplaces within, withingle nooks about the sham glowing logs. The needlessly steep roofs willhave a sham sag and sham timbered gables, and probably forced lichenswill give it a sham appearance of age. Just that feeble-mindedcontemporary shirking of the truth of things that has given the worldsuch stockbroker in armour affairs as the Tower Bridge and historicalromance, will, I fear, worry the lucid mind in a great multitude of thehomes that the opening half, at least, of this century will produce. 

In quite a similar way the shareholding body will buy up all the cleverand more enterprising makers and designers of clothing and adornment, hewill set the fashion of almost all ornament, in bookbinding and printingand painting, for example, furnishing, and indeed of almost all thingsthat are not primarily produced "for the million, " as the phrase goes. And where that sort of thing comes in, then, so far as the trained andintelligent type of man goes, for many years yet it will be simply acase of the nether instead of the upper millstone. Just how far theinfluence and contagion of the shareholding mass will reach into thisimaginary household of non-shareholding efficients, and just how far theinfluence of science and mechanism will penetrate the minds and methodsof the rich, becomes really one of the most important questions withwhich these speculations will deal. For this argument that he willperhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decoratorand so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is justpossible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent--in a certainfigurative sense, at least--buy up much of the womankind that wouldotherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probablyby no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineerswill tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of aregenerating world. The huge secretion of irresponsible wealth by thesocial organism is certain to affect the tone of thought of the entirefeminine sex profoundly--the exact nature of this influence we may nowconsider. 

The gist of this inquiry lies in the fact that, while a man's startingposition in this world of to-day is entirely determined by theconditions of his birth and early training, and his final position theslow elaborate outcome of his own sustained efforts to live, a woman, from the age of sixteen onward--as the world goes now--is essentiallyadventurous, the creature of circumstances largely beyond her controland foresight. A virile man, though he, too, is subject to accidents, may, upon most points, still hope to plan and determine his life; thelife of a woman is all accident. Normally she lives in relation to somespecific man, and until that man is indicated her preparation for lifemust be of the most tentative sort. She lives, going nowhere, like acabman on the crawl, and at any time she may find it open to her toassist some pleasure-loving millionaire to spend his millions, or toplay her part in one of the many real, original, and only derivatives ofthe former aristocratic "Society" that have developed themselves amongindependent people. Even if she is a serious and labour-loving type, some shareholder may tempt her with the prospect of developing herexceptional personality in ease and freedom and in "doing good" with hismoney. With the continued growth of the shareholding class, thebrighter-looking matrimonial chances, not to speak of the glitteringopportunities that are not matrimonial, will increase. Reading is nowthe privilege of all classes, there are few secrets of etiquette that aclever lower-class girl will fail to learn, there are few such girls, even now, who are not aware of their wide opportunities, or at leasttheir wide possibilities, of luxury and freedom, there are still fewerwho, knowing as much, do not let it affect their standards andconception of life. The whole mass of modern fiction written by womenfor women, indeed, down to the cheapest novelettes, is saturated withthe romance of _mésalliance_. And even when the specific man hasappeared, the adventurous is still not shut out of a woman's career. Aman's affections may wander capriciously and leave him but a littlepoorer or a little better placed; for the women they wander from, however, the issue is an infinitely graver one, and the seriouswandering of a woman's fancy may mean the beginning of a new world forher. At any moment the chances of death may make the wife a widow, maysweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life, may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, andrestore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence.... 

Now, it is difficult to say why we should expect the growing girl, inwhom an unlimited ambition and egotism is as natural and proper a thingas beauty and high spirits, to deny herself some dalliance with the moreopulent dreams that form the golden lining to these precariousprospects? How can we expect her to prepare herself solely, putting allwandering thoughts aside, for the servantless cookery, domesticKindergarten work, the care of hardy perennials, and low-pitchedconversation of the engineer's home? Supposing, after all, there is nopredestinate engineer! The stories the growing girl now prefers, and Iimagine will in the future still prefer, deal mainly with the rich andfree; the theatre she will prefer to visit will present the lives andloves of opulent people with great precision and detailed correctness;her favourite periodicals will reflect that life; her schoolmistress, whatever her principles, must have an eye to her "chances. " And evenafter Fate or a gust of passion has whirled her into the arms of ourbusy and capable fundamental man, all these things will still be in herimagination and memory. Unless he is a person of extraordinary mentalprepotency, she will almost insensibly determine the character of thehome in a direction quite other than that of our first sketch. She willset herself to realize, as far as her husband's means and credit permit, the ideas of the particular section of the wealthy that have capturedher. If she is a fool, her ideas of life will presently come intocomplete conflict with her husband's in a manner that, as the fumes ofthe love potion leave his brain, may bring the real nature of the casehome to him. If he is of that resolute strain to whom the world mustfinally come, he may rebel and wade through tears and crises to hisappointed work again. The cleverer she is, and the finer and more loyalher character up to a certain point, the less likely this is to happen, the more subtle and effective will be her hold upon her husband, and themore probable his perversion from the austere pursuit of someinteresting employment, towards the adventures of modern money-gettingin pursuit of her ideals of a befitting life. And meanwhile, since "onemust live, " the nursery that was implicit in the background of the firstpicture will probably prove unnecessary. She will be, perforce, aperson not only of pleasant pursuits, but of leisure. If she endearsherself to her husband, he will feel not only the attraction but theduty of her vacant hours; he will not only deflect his working hoursfrom the effective to the profitable, but that occasional burning of themidnight oil, that no brain-worker may forego if he is to retain hisefficiency, will, in the interests of some attractive theatricalperformance or some agreeable social occasion, all too frequently haveto be put off or abandoned. 

This line of speculation, therefore, gives us a second picture of ahousehold to put beside our first, a household, or rather a couple, rather more likely to be typical of the mass of middling sort of peoplein those urban regions of the future than our first projection. It willprobably not live in a separate home at all, but in a flat in "Town, " orat one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen. The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorativefashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that willobtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneousliterature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sortpredominating, and with _bric-à-brac_; in a childless household theremust certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps acanary would find a place. I suspect there would be an edition or so of"Omar" about in this more typical household of "Moderns, " but I doubtabout the Bible. The man's working books would probably be shabby andrelegated to a small study, and even these overlaid by abundant copiesof the _Financial_--something or other. It would still be a servantlesshousehold, and probably not only without a nursery but without akitchen, and in its grade and degree it would probably have socialrelations directly or intermediately through rich friends with somesection, some one of the numerous cults of the quite independentwealthy. 

Quite similar households to this would be even more common among thoseneither independent nor engaged in work of a primarily functionalnature, but endeavouring quite ostensibly to acquire wealth by politicalor business ingenuity and activity, and also among the great multitudeof artists, writers, and that sort of people, whose works are theirchildren. In comparison with the state of affairs fifty years ago, thechild-infested household is already conspicuously rare in these classes. 

These are two highly probably _ménages_ among the central mass of thepeople of the coming time. But there will be many others. The _ménage àdeux_, one may remark, though it may be without the presence ofchildren, is not necessarily childless. Parentage is certainly part ofthe pride of many men--though, curiously enough, it does not appear tobe felt among modern European married women as any part of theirhonour. Many men will probably achieve parentage, therefore, who willnot succeed in inducing, or who may possibly even be very loth topermit, their wives to undertake more than the first beginnings ofmotherhood. From the moment of its birth, unless it is kept as a pet, the child of such marriages will be nourished, taught, and trainedalmost as though it were an orphan, it will have a succession of bottlesand foster-mothers for body and mind from the very beginning. Side byside with this increasing number of childless homes, therefore, theremay develop a system of Kindergarten boarding schools. Indeed, to acertain extent such schools already exist, and it is one of theunperceived contrasts of this and any former time how common such aseparation of parents and children becomes. Except in the case of theillegitimate and orphans, and the children of impossible (manypublic-house children, _e. G. _), or wretched homes, boarding schoolsuntil quite recently were used only for quite big boys and girls. Butnow, at every seaside town, for example, one sees a multitude ofpreparatory schools, which are really not simply educationalinstitutions, but supplementary homes. In many cases these are conductedand very largely staffed by unmarried girls and women who are indeed, ineffect, assistant mothers. This class of capable schoolmistresses is oneof the most interesting social developments of this period. For the mostpart they are women who from emotional fastidiousness, intellectualegotism, or an honest lack of passion, have refused the common lot ofmarriage, women often of exceptional character and restraint, and it iswell that, at any rate, their intelligence and character should not passfruitlessly out of being. Assuredly for this type the future has much instore. 

There are, however, still other possibilities to be considered in thismatter. In these Anticipations it is impossible to ignore the forcesmaking for a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanentmonogamous marriage in the coming years, and of a much greater varietyof establishments than is suggested by these possibilities within thepale. I guess, without attempting to refer to statistics, that ourpresent society must show a quite unprecedented number and increasingnumber of male and female celibates--not religious celibates, butpeople, for the most part, whose standard of personal comfort has such arelation to their earning power that they shirk or cannot enter thematrimonial grouping. The institution of permanent monogamousmarriage--except in the ideal Roman Catholic community, where it isbased on the sanction of an authority which in real Roman Catholiccountries a large proportion of the men decline to obey--is sustained atpresent entirely by the inertia of custom, and by a number ofsentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may verypossibly undergo modification in the face of the altered relationship ofhusband and wife that the present development of childless _ménages_ isbringing about. The practical and sustaining reason for monogamy is thestability it gives to the family; the value of a stable family lies inthe orderly upbringing in an atmosphere of affection that it secures inmost cases for its more or less numerous children. The monogamous familyhas indisputably been the civilizing unit of the pre-mechanicalcivilized state. It must be remembered that both for husband and wife inmost cases monogamic life marriage involves an element of sacrifice, itis an institution of late appearance in the history of mankind, and itdoes not completely fit the psychology or physiology of any but veryexceptional characters in either sex. For the man it commonly involvesconsiderable restraint; he must ride his imagination on the curb, orexceed the code in an extremely dishonouring, furtive, andunsatisfactory manner while publicly professing an impossible virtue;for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. Thereare probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases ofbitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases, practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward thatin the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and amongthe middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comesthe great development of associations and tendernesses that arises outof intimate co-operation in an established home, and particularly out ofthe linking love and interest of children's lives.... 

But how does this fit into the childless, disunited, and probablyshifting _ménage_ of our second picture?

It must be borne in mind that it has been the middling and lower mass ofpeople, the tenants and agriculturists, the shopkeepers, and so forth, men needing before all things the absolutely loyal help of wives, thathas sustained permanent monogamic marriage whenever it has beensustained. Public monogamy has existed on its merits--that is, on themerits of the wife. Merely ostensible reasons have never sufficed. Nosort of religious conviction, without a real practical utility, has everavailed to keep classes of men, unhampered by circumstances, to itsrestrictions. In all times, and holding all sorts of beliefs, thespecimen humanity of courts and nobilities is to be found developing themost complex qualifications of the code. In some quiet corner of Elysiumthe bishops of the early Georges, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of thecontemporary French and Spanish courts, the patriarchs of vanishedByzantium, will find a common topic with the spiritual advisers of thekingdoms of the East in this difficult theme, --the theme of theconcessions permissible and expedient to earnest believers encumberedwith leisure and a superfluity of power.... It is not necessary todiscuss religious development, therefore, before deciding this issue. Weare dealing now with things deeper and forces infinitely more powerfulthan the mere convictions of men. 

Will a generation to whom marriage will be no longer necessarilyassociated with the birth and rearing of children, or with the immediateco-operation and sympathy of husband and wife in common proceedings, retain its present feeling for the extreme sanctity of the permanentbond? Will the agreeable, unemployed, childless woman, with a highconception of her personal rights, who is spending her husband'searnings or income in some pleasant discrepant manner, a type of womanthere are excellent reasons for anticipating will become morefrequent--will she continue to share the honours and privileges of thewife, mother, and helper of the old dispensation? and in particular, will the great gulf that is now fixed by custom between her and theagreeable unmarried lady who is similarly employed remain so inexorablywide? Charity is in the air, and why should not charming people meet oneanother? And where is either of these ladies to find the support thatwill enable her to insist upon the monopoly that conventional sentiment, so far as it finds expression, concedes her? The danger to them both ofthe theory of equal liberty is evident enough. On the other hand, in thecase of the unmarried mother who may be helped to hold her own, or whomay be holding her own in the world, where will the moral censor of theyear 1950 find his congenial following to gather stones? Much as we mayregret it, it does very greatly affect the realities of this matter, that with the increased migration of people from home to home amidst thelarge urban regions that, we have concluded, will certainly obtain inthe future, even if moral reprobation and minor social inconveniences dostill attach to certain sorts of status, it will probably beincreasingly difficult to determine the status of people who wish toconceal it for any but criminal ends. 

In another direction there must be a movement towards the relaxation ofthe marriage law and of divorce that will complicate status veryconfusingly. In the past it has been possible to sustain severalcontrasting moral systems in each of the practically autonomous statesof the world, but with a development and cheapening of travel andmigration that is as yet only in its opening phase, an increasingconflict between dissimilar moral restrictions must appear. Even atpresent, with only the most prosperous classes of the American andWestern European countries migrating at all freely, there is a growingamount of inconvenience arising out of these--from the point of view ofsocial physiology--quite arbitrary differences. A man or woman may, forexample, have been the injured party in some conjugal complication, mayhave established a domicile and divorced the erring spouse in certainof the United States, may have married again there with absolute localpropriety, and may be a bigamist and a criminal in England. A child maybe a legal child in Denmark or Australia, and a bastard in this austererclimate. These things are, however, only the first intimations of muchmore profound reactions. Almost all the great European Powers, and theUnited States also, are extending their boundaries to include greatmasses of non-Christian polygamous peoples, and they are permeatingthese peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants ofour present state. With the spread of these conveniences there is nocorresponding spread of Christianity. These people will not alwaysremain in the ring fence of their present regions; their supersededprinces, and rulers, and public masters, and managers, will presentlycome to swell the shareholding mass of the appropriating Empire. Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into these districts, and underthe influence of their customs, intermarriages and interracial reactionwill increase; in a world which is steadily abolishing locality, thecompromise of local concessions, of localized recognition of the "customof the country, " cannot permanently avail. Statesmen will have to facethe alternative of either widening the permissible variations of themarriage contract, or of acute racial and religious stresses, of a vastvariety of possible legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body ofself-respecting people, outside the law and public respect, a body thatwill confer a touch of credit upon, because it will share the stigma of, the deliberately dissolute and criminal. And whether the moral lawshrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness--as in religious matters theChurch of England, for example, has shrivelled to the proportions of amere sectarian practice--or whether it broadens itself to sustainjustice in a variety of sexual contracts, the nett result, so far as ourpresent purpose goes, will be the same. All these forces, making formoral relaxation in the coming time, will probably be greatly enhancedby the line of development certain sections of the irresponsible wealthywill almost certainly follow. 

Let me repeat that the shareholding rich man of the new time is in aposition of freedom almost unparalleled in the history of men. He hassold his permission to control and experiment with the material wealthof the community for freedom--for freedom from care, labour, responsibility, custom, local usage and local attachment. He may comeback again into public affairs if he likes--that is his private concern. Within the limits of the law and his capacity and courage, he may do asthe imagination of his heart directs. Now, such an experimental andimperfect creature as man, a creature urged by such imperious passions, so weak in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receivessuch absolute freedom as this only at infinite peril. To a great numberof these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom willmean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We haveon record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedomand uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men notentirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrarycaprice of adoption and political revolution. We have in the history ofthe Russian empresses a glimpse of similar feminine possibilities. Weare moving towards a time when, through this confusion of moralstandards I have foretold, the pressure of public opinion in thesematters must be greatly relaxed, when religion will no longer speak witha unanimous voice, and when freedom of escape from disapprovingneighbours will be greatly facilitated. In the past, when depravity hada centre about a court, the contagion of its example was limited to thecourt region, but every idle rich man of this great, various, and widelydiffused class, will play to a certain extent the moral _rôle_ of acourt. In these days of universal reading and vivid journalism, everynovel infraction of the code will be known of, thought about, and moreor less thoroughly discussed by an enormous and increasing proportion ofthe common people. In the past it has been possible for the churches tomaintain an attitude of respectful regret towards the lapses of thegreat, and even to co-operate in these lapses with a sympatheticprivacy, while maintaining a wholesome rigour towards vulgar vice. Butin the coming time there will be no Great, but many rich, the middlingsort of people will probably be better educated as a whole than therich, and the days of their differential treatment are at an end. 

It is foolish, in view of all these things, not to anticipate andprepare for a state of things when not only will moral standards beshifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound _ménages_ ofvery variable status, but also when vice and depravity, in every formthat is not absolutely penal, will be practised in every grade ofmagnificence and condoned. This means that not only will status cease tobe simple and become complex and varied, but that outside the system of_ménages_ now recognized, and under the disguise of which all other_ménages_ shelter, there will be a vast drifting and unstable populationgrouped in almost every conceivable form of relation. The world ofGeorgian England was a world of Homes; the world of the coming time willstill have its Homes, its real Mothers, the custodians of the humansuccession, and its cared-for children, the inheritors of the future, but in addition to this Home world, frothing tumultuously over andamidst these stable rocks, there will be an enormous complex ofestablishments, and hotels, and sterile households, and flats, and allthe elaborate furnishing and appliances of a luxurious extinction. 

And since in the present social chaos there does not yet exist anyconsiderable body of citizens--comparable to the agricultural andcommercial middle class of England during the period of limitedmonarchy--that will be practically unanimous in upholding any body ofrules of moral restraint, since there will probably not appear for somegenerations any body propounding with wide-reaching authority a newdefinitely different code to replace the one that is now likely to beincreasingly disregarded, it follows that the present code with a fewinterlined qualifications and grudging legal concessions will remainnominally operative in sentiment and practice while being practicallydisregarded, glossed, or replaced in numberless directions. It must bepointed out that in effect, what is here forecast for questions of_ménage_ and moral restraints has already happened to a very largeextent in religious matters. There was a time when it was held--and Ithink rightly--that a man's religious beliefs, and particularly hismethod of expressing them, was a part not of his individual but of hissocial life. But the great upheavals of the Reformation resulted finallyin a compromise, a sort of truce, that has put religious belief verylargely out of intercourse and discussion. It is conceded that withinthe bounds of the general peace and security a man may believe andexpress his belief in matters of religion as he pleases, not because itis better so, but because for the present epoch there is no way norhope of attaining unanimous truth. There is a decided tendency thatwill, I believe, prevail towards the same compromise in the question ofprivate morals. There is a convention to avoid all discussion of creedsin general social intercourse; and a similar convention to avoid thepoint of status in relation to marriage, one may very reasonablyanticipate, will be similarly recognized. 

But this impending dissolution of a common standard of morals does notmean universal depravity until some great reconstruction obtains anymore than the obsolescence of the Conventicle Act means universalirreligion. It means that for one Morality there will be manymoralities. Each human being will, in the face of circumstances, workout his or her particular early training as his or her characterdetermines. And although there will be a general convention upon whichthe most diverse people will meet, it will only be with persons who havecome to identical or similar conclusions in the matter of moral conductand who are living in similar _ménages_, just as now it is only withpeople whose conversation implies a certain community or kinship ofreligious belief, that really frequent and intimate intercourse will goon. In other words, there will be a process of moral segregation[31] setup. Indeed, such a process is probably already in operation, amidst thedeliquescent social mass. People will be drawn together into littlegroups of similar _ménages_ having much in common. And this--in view ofthe considerations advanced in the first two chapters, considerationsall converging on the practical abolition of distances and the generalfreedom of people to live anywhere they like over large areas--will meanvery frequently an actual local segregation. There will be districtsthat will be clearly recognized and marked as "nice, " fast regions, areas of ramshackle Bohemianism, regions of earnest and active work, old-fashioned corners and Hill Tops. Whole regions will be set aside forthe purposes of opulent enjoyment--a thing already happening, indeed, atpoints along the Riviera to-day. Already the superficial possibilitiesof such a segregation have been glanced at. It has been pointed out thatthe enormous urban region of the future may present an extraordinaryvariety of districts, suburbs, and subordinate centres within itslimiting boundaries, and here we have a very definite enforcement ofthat probability. 

In the previous chapter I spoke of boating centres and horsey suburbs, and picturesque hilly districts and living places by the sea, ofpromenade centres and theatrical districts; I hinted at various fashionsin architecture, and suchlike things, but these exterior appearanceswill be but the outward and visible sign of inward and more spiritualdistinctions. The people who live in the good hunting country and aboutthat glittering Grand Stand, will no longer be even pretending to liveunder the same code as those picturesque musical people who haveconcentrated on the canoe-dotted river. Where the promenaders gather, and the bands are playing, and the pretty little theatres compete, thepleasure seeker will be seeking such pleasure as he pleases, no longerdebased by furtiveness and innuendo, going his primrose path to acongenial, picturesque, happy and highly desirable extinction. Just overthe hills, perhaps, a handful of opulent shareholders will be pleasantlypreserving the old traditions of a landed aristocracy, with servants, tenants, vicar, and other dependents all complete, and what from thepoint of view of social physiology will really be an arrested contingentof the Abyss, but all nicely washed and done good to, will pursue homeindustries in model cottages in a quite old English and exemplarymanner. Here the windmills will spin and the waterfalls be trapped togather force, and the quiet-eyed master of the machinery will have hisoffice and perhaps his private home. Here about the great college andits big laboratories there will be men and women reasoning and studying;and here, where the homes thicken among the ripe gardens, one will hearthe laughter of playing children, the singing of children in theirschools, and see their little figures going to and fro amidst the treesand flowers.... 

And these segregations, based primarily on a difference in moral ideasand pursuits and ideals, will probably round off and complete themselvesat last as distinct and separate cultures. As the moral ideas realizethemselves in _ménage_ and habits, so the ideals will seek to findexpression in a literature, and the passive drifting together will passover into a phase of more or less conscious and intentionalorganization. The segregating groups will develop fashions of costume, types of manners and bearing, and even, perhaps, be characterized by acertain type of facial expression. And this gives us a glimpse, anaspect of the immediate future of literature. The kingdoms of the pastwere little things, and above the mass of peasants who lived and obeyedand died, there was just one little culture to which all must needsconform. Literature was universal within the limits of its language. Where differences of view arose there were violent controversies, polemics, and persecutions, until one or other rendering had won itsascendency. But this new world into which we are passing will, forseveral generations at least, albeit it will be freelyinter-communicating and like a whispering gallery for things outspoken, possess no universal ideals, no universal conventions: there will be theliterature of the thought and effort of this sort of people, and theliterature, thought, and effort of that. [32] Life is already mostwonderfully arbitrary and experimental, and for the coming century thismust be its essential social history, a great drifting and unrest ofpeople, a shifting and regrouping and breaking up again of groups, greatmultitudes seeking to find themselves. 

The safe life in the old order, where one did this because it was right, and that because it was the custom, when one shunned this and hatedthat, as lead runs into a mould, all that is passing away. Andpresently, as the new century opens out, there will become more and moredistinctly emergent many new cultures and settled ways. The grey expanseof life to-day is grey, not in its essence, but because of the minuteconfused mingling and mutual cancelling of many-coloured lives. Presently these tints and shades will gather together here as a mass ofone colour, and there as a mass of another. And as these coloursintensify and the tradition of the former order fades, as these culturesbecome more and more shaped and conscious, as the new literatures growin substance and power, as differences develop from speculative matterof opinion to definite intentions, as contrasts and affinities growsharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modificationsin the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour mustneeds have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While theforces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of societymake for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, theforces that bring together the really functional people will tend moreand more to impose upon them certain common characteristics and beliefs, and the discovery of a group of similar and compatible class interestsupon which they can unite. The practical people, the engineering andmedical and scientific people, will become more and more homogeneous intheir fundamental culture, more and more distinctly aware of a common"general reason" in things, and of a common difference from the lessfunctional masses and from any sort of people in the past. They willhave in their positive science a common ground for understanding thereal pride of life, the real reason for the incidental nastiness ofvice, and so they will be a sanely reproductive class, and, above all, an educating class. Just how much they will have kept or changed of thedeliquescent morality of to-day, when in a hundred years or so they dodistinctively and powerfully emerge, I cannot speculate now. They willcertainly be a moral people. They will have developed the literature oftheir needs, they will have discussed and tested and thrashed out manythings, they will be clear where we are confused, resolved where we areundecided and weak. In the districts of industrial possibility, in thehealthier quarters of the town regions, away from the swamps and awayfrom the glare of the midnight lights, these people will be gatheredtogether. They will be linked in professions through the agency of greatand sober papers--in England the _Lancet_, the _British MedicalJournal_, and the already great periodicals of the engineering trades, foreshadow something, but only a very little, of what these papers maybe. The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attractingcentres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all thatman has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated, adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we haveconsidered so far, the element finally emergent amidst the vastconfusions of the coming time. 

FOOTNOTES:

[30] That interesting book by Mr. George Sutherland, _Twentieth CenturyInventions_, is very suggestive on these as on many other matters. 

[31] I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used bymineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter uponcentres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must haveoccurred in the growth of flints. 

[32] Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary "Boom, " forexample, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenthcentury. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron orpuzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful useof the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced himeven into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But thefactory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" touches whole sections ofthe reading public no more than fog-horns going down Channel. One wouldas soon think of Skinner's Soap for one's library as So-and-so's HundredThousand Copy Success. Instead of "everyone" talking of the Great NewBook, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly admitting they don'tread that sort of thing. One gets used to literary booms just as onegets used to motor cars, they are no longer marvellous, universallysignificant things, but merely something that goes by with muchunnecessary noise and leaves a faint offence in the air. Distinctly wesegregate. And while no one dominates, while for all this bawling thereare really no great authors of imperial dimensions, indeed no greatsuccesses to compare with the Waverley boom, or the boom of Macaulay'sHistory, many men, too fine, too subtle, too aberrant, too unusuallyfresh for any but exceptional readers, men who would probably havefailed to get a hearing at all in the past, can now subsist quitehappily with the little sect they have found, or that has found them. They live safely in their islands; a little while ago they could nothave lived at all, or could have lived only on the shameful bread ofpatronage, and yet it is these very men who are often most covetouslybitter against the vulgar preferences of the present day. 

V

THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY

In the preceding four chapters there has been developed, in a clumsylaborious way, a smudgy, imperfect picture of the generalized civilizedstate of the coming century. In terms, vague enough at times, but neverabsolutely indefinite, the general distribution of the population inthis state has been discussed, and its natural development into fourgreat--but in practice intimately interfused--classes. It has beenshown--I know not how convincingly--that as the result of forces thatare practically irresistible, a world-wide process of social and moraldeliquescence is in progress, and that a really functional social bodyof engineering, managing men, scientifically trained, and having commonideals and interests, is likely to segregate and disentangle itself fromour present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has beenpointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasingvariety of morals, _ménages_, occupations and types, at present somingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing thepromise of local concentration that may presently change that greynessinto kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrastedcolours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the courseof these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concreteglimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of thecoming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in thisgeneral thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, thesoundness of these earlier speculations, we have arrived at a stage whenwe may consider how the existing arrangements for the ostensiblegovernment of the State are likely to develop through their own inherentforces, and how they are likely to be affected by the processes we haveforecast. 

So far, this has been a speculation upon the probable development of acivilized society _in vacuo_. Attention has been almost exclusivelygiven to the forces of development, and not to the forces of conflictand restraint. We have ignored the boundaries of language that are flungathwart the great lines of modern communication, we have disregarded thefriction of tariffs, the peculiar groups of prejudices and irrationalinstincts that inspire one miscellany of shareholders, workers, financiers, and superfluous poor such as the English, to hate, exasperate, lie about, and injure another such miscellany as the Frenchor the Germans. Moreover, we have taken very little account of the factthat, quite apart from nationality, each individual case of the newsocial order is developing within the form of a legal government basedon conceptions of a society that has been superseded by the advent ofmechanism. It is this last matter that we are about to take intoconsideration. 

Now, this age is being constantly described as a "Democratic" age;"Democracy" is alleged to have affected art, literature, trade andreligion alike in the most remarkable ways. It is not only tacitlypresent in the great bulk of contemporary thought that this "Democracy"is now dominant, but that it is becoming more and more overwhelminglypredominant as the years pass. Allusions to Democracy are so abundant, deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it isworth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most casesreally is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and fadedassociations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire justexactly what the original implications and present realities of"Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very differentconception of the nature and future of this sort of politicalarrangement from that generally assumed. We have already seen in thediscussion of the growth of great cities, that an analytical process mayabsolutely invert the expectation based on the gross results up-to-date, and I believe it will be equally possible to show cause for believingthat the development of Democracy also is, after all, not the openingphase of a world-wide movement going on unbendingly in its presentdirection, but the first impulse of forces that will finally sweep roundinto a quite different path. Flying off at a tangent is probably one ofthe gravest dangers and certainly the one most constantly present, inthis enterprise of prophecy. 

One may, I suppose, take the Rights of Man as they are embodied in theFrench Declaration as the ostentations of Democracy; our presentDemocratic state may be regarded as a practical realization of theseclaims. As far as the individual goes, the realization takes the form ofan untrammelled liberty in matters that have heretofore been considereda part of social procedure, in the lifting of positive religious andmoral compulsions, in the recognition of absolute property, and in theabolition of special privileges and special restrictions. Politicallymodern Democracy takes the form of denying that any specific person orpersons shall act as a matter of intrinsic right or capacity on behalfof the community as a whole. Its root idea is representation. Governmentis based primarily on election, and every ruler is, in theory at least, a delegate and servant of the popular will. It is implicit in theDemocratic theory that there _is_ such a thing as a popular will, andthis is supposed to be the net sum of the wills of all the citizens inthe State, so far as public affairs are concerned. In its less perfectand more usual state the Democratic theory is advanced either as anethical theory which postulates an absence of formal acquiescence on thepart of the governed as injustice, or else as a convenient politicalcompromise, the least objectionable of all possible methods of publiccontrol, because it will permit only the minimum of generalunhappiness.... I know of no case for the elective Democratic governmentof modern States that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes. It ismanifest that upon countless important public issues there is nocollective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blankindifference; that an electional system simply places power in the handsof the most skilful electioneers; that neither men nor their rights areidentically equal, but vary with every individual, and, above all, thatthe minimum or maximum of general happiness is related only soindirectly to the public control that people will suffer great miseriesfrom their governments unresistingly, and, on the other hand, changetheir rulers on account of the most trivial irritations. The caseagainst all the prolusions of ostensible Democracy is indeed so strongthat it is impossible to consider the present wide establishment ofDemocratic institutions as being the outcome of any process ofintellectual conviction; it arouses suspicion even whether ostensibleDemocracy may not be a mere rhetorical garment for essentiallydifferent facts, and upon that suspicion we will now inquire. 

Democracy of the modern type, manhood suffrage and so forth, became aconspicuous phenomenon in the world only in the closing decades of theeighteenth century. Its genesis is so intimately connected with thefirst expansion of the productive element in the State, throughmechanism and a co-operative organization, as to point at once to acausative connection. The more closely one looks into the social andpolitical life of the eighteenth century the more plausible becomes thisview. New and potentially influential social factors had begun toappear--the organizing manufacturer, the intelligent worker, the skilledtenant, and the urban abyss, and the traditions of the old land-owningnon-progressive aristocratic monarchy that prevailed in Christendom, rendered it incapable--without some destructive shock or convulsion--ofany re-organization to incorporate or control these new factors. In thecase of the British Empire an additional stress was created by theincapacity of the formal government to assimilate the developingcivilization of the American colonies. Everywhere there were newelements, not as yet clearly analyzed or defined, arising as mechanismarose; everywhere the old traditional government and social system, defined and analyzed all too well, appeared increasingly obstructive, irrational, and feeble in its attempts to include and direct these newpowers. But now comes a point to which I am inclined to attach verygreat importance. The new powers were as yet shapeless. It was not theconflict of a new organization with the old. It was the preliminarydwarfing and deliquescence of the mature old beside the embryonic massof the new. It was impossible then--it is, I believe, only beginning tobe possible now--to estimate the proportions, possibilities, andinter-relations of the new social orders out of which a socialorganization has still to be built in the coming years. No formula ofdefinite re-construction had been evolved, or has even been evolved yet, after a hundred years. And these swelling inchoate new powers, whosevery birth condition was the crippling, modification, or destruction ofthe old order, were almost forced to formulate their proceedings for atime, therefore, in general affirmative propositions that were really ineffect not affirmative propositions at all, but propositions ofrepudiation and denial. "These kings and nobles and people privileged inrelation to obsolescent functions cannot manage our affairs"--that wasevident enough, that was the really essential question at that time, andsince no other effectual substitute appeared ready made, the workingdoctrine of the infallible judgment of humanity in the gross, asdistinguished from the quite indisputable incapacity of sampleindividuals, became, in spite of its inherent absurdity, a convenientand acceptable working hypothesis. 

Modern Democracy thus came into being, not, as eloquent persons havepretended, by the sovereign people consciously and definitely assumingpower--I imagine the sovereign people in France during the firstRevolution, for example, quite amazed and muddle-headed with it all--butby the decline of old ruling classes in the face of the _quasi_-naturalgrowth of mechanism and industrialism, and by the unpreparedness andwant of organization in the new intelligent elements in the State. Ihave compared the human beings in society to a great and increasingvariety of colours tumultuously smashed up together, and giving atpresent a general and quite illusory effect of grey, and I haveattempted to show that there is a process in progress that will amountat last to the segregation of these mingled tints into recognizabledistinct masses again. It is not a monotony, but an utterly disorderlyand confusing variety that makes this grey, but Democracy, for practicalpurposes, does really assume such a monotony. Like 'infinity', theDemocratic formula is a concrete-looking and negotiable symbol for anegation. It is the aspect in political disputes and contrivances ofthat social and moral deliquescence the nature and possibilities ofwhich have been discussed in the preceding chapters of this volume. 

Modern Democracy first asserted itself in the ancient kingdoms ofFrance and Great Britain (counting the former British colonies inAmerica as a part of the latter), and it is in the French andEnglish-speaking communities that Democracy has developed itself mostcompletely. Upon the supposition we have made, Democracy broke out firstin these States because they were leading the way in material progress, because they were the first States to develop industrialism, wholesalemechanisms, and great masses of insubordinate activity outside therecognized political scheme, and the nature and time and violence of theoutbreak was determined by the nature of the superseded government, andthe amount of stress between it and the new elements. But the detachmentof a great section of the new middle-class from the aristocratic orderof England to form the United States of America, and the suddenrejuvenescence of France by the swift and thorough sloughing of itsoutworn aristocratic monarchy, the consequent wars and the Napoleonicadventure, checked and modified the parallel development that mightotherwise have happened in country after country over all Europe west ofthe Carpathians. The monarchies that would probably have collapsedthrough internal forces and given place to modern democratic states weresmashed from the outside, and a process of political re-construction, that has probably missed out the complete formal Democratic phasealtogether--and which has been enormously complicated throughreligious, national, and dynastic traditions--set in. ThroughoutAmerica, in England, and, after extraordinary experiments, in France, political democracy has in effect legally established itself--mostcompletely in the United States--and the reflection and influence of itsmethods upon the methods of all the other countries in intellectualcontact with it, have been so considerable as practically to make theirmonarchies as new in their kind, almost, as democratic republics. InGermany, Austria, and Italy, for example, there is a press nearly asaudible as in the more frankly democratic countries, and measurably akinin influence; there are constitutionally established legislativeassemblies, and there is the same unofficial development of powerfulfinancial and industrial powers with which the ostensible Governmentmust make terms. In a vast amount of the public discussion of theseStates, the postulates of Democracy are clearly implicit. Quite as muchin reality as the democratic republics of America, are they based not onclasses but upon a confusion; they are, in their various degrees andwith their various individual differences, just as truly governments ofthe grey. 

It has been argued that the grey is illusory and must sooner or laterpass, and that the colour that will emerge to predominance will take itsshape as a scientifically trained middle-class of an unprecedentedsort, not arising out of the older middle-classes, but replacing them. This class will become, I believe, at last consciously _the_ State, controlling and restricting very greatly the three non-functional masseswith which it is as yet almost indistinguishably mingled. The generalnature of its formation within the existing confusion and its emergencemay, I think, with a certain degree of confidence, be already forecast, albeit at present its beginnings are singularly unpromising and faint. At present the class of specially trained and capable people--doctors, engineers, scientific men of all sorts--is quite disproportionallyabsent from political life, it does not exist as a factor in that life, it is growing up outside that life, and has still to develop, much moreto display, a collective intention to come specifically in. But theforces are in active operation to drag it into the centre of the stagefor all that. 

The modern democracy or democratic quasi-monarchy conducts its affairsas though there was no such thing as special knowledge or practicaleducation. The utmost recognition it affords to the man who has takenthe pains to know, and specifically to do, is occasionally to consulthim upon specific points and override his counsels in its ampler wisdom, or to entrust to him some otherwise impossible duty under circumstancesof extreme limitation. The man of special equipment is treated always asif he were some sort of curious performing animal. The gunneryspecialist, for example, may move and let off guns, but he may not saywhere they are to be let off--some one a little ignorant of range andtrajectory does that; the engineer may move the ship and fire thebattery, but only with some man, who does not perfectly understand, shouting instructions down a tube at him. If the cycle is to be adaptedto military requirements, the thing is entrusted to Lieutenant-ColonelBalfour. If horses are to be bought for the British Army in India, nospecialist goes, but Lord Edward Cecil. These people of the governingclass do not understand there is such a thing as special knowledge or aninexorable fact in the world; they have been educated at schoolsconducted by amateur schoolmasters, whose real aim in life--if suchpeople can be described as having a real aim in life--is the episcopalbench, and they have learnt little or nothing but the extraordinarypower of appearances in these democratic times. To look right and to beof good report is to succeed. What else is there? The primarilyfunctional men are ignored in the ostensible political scheme, itoperates as though they did not exist, as though nothing, in fact, existed but the irresponsible wealthy, and the manipulators ofirresponsible wealth, on the one hand, and a great, grey, politicallyindifferent community on the other. Having regard only to the presentcondition of political life, it would seem as though this state ofaffairs must continue indefinitely, and develop only in accordance withthe laws of inter-action between our charlatan governing class on theone hand, and the grey mass of governed on the other. There is no wayapparent in the existing political and social order, whereby the classof really educated persons that the continually more complicatedmechanical fabric of social life is developing may be expected to comein. And in a very great amount of current political speculation, thedevelopment and final emergence of this class is ignored, and attentionis concentrated entirely upon the inherent process of development of thepolitical machine. And even in that it is very easy to exaggerate thepreponderance of one or other of what are really very evenly balancedforces in the machine of democratic government. 

There are two chief sets of parts in the machine that have a certainantagonistic relation, that play against each other, and one'sconception of coming developments is necessarily determined by therelative value one gives to these opposing elements. One may comparethese two groups to the Power and the Work, respectively, at the twoends of a lever. [33] On the one hand there is that which pays for themachine, which distributes salaries and rewards, subsidizes newspapersand so forth--the central influence. [34] On the other hand, there isthe collectively grey voting mass, with certain prejudices andtraditions, and certain laws and limitations of thought upon which thenewspapers work, and which, within the confines of its inherent laws, they direct. If one dwell chiefly on the possibilities of the formerelement, one may conjure up a practical end to democracy in the visionof a State "run" entirely by a group of highly forcible and intellectualpersons--usually the dream takes the shape of financiers and theirassociates, their perfected mechanism of party control working theelections boldly and capably, and their public policy being directedtowards financial ends. One of the common prophecies of the future ofthe United States is such a domination by a group of trust organizersand political bosses. But a man, or a group of men, so strong andintelligent as would be needed to hold an entire party machine withinthe confines of his--or their collective--mind and will, could, at themost, be but a very transitory and incidental phenomenon in the historyof the world. Either such an exploitation of the central control willhave to be covert and subtle beyond any precedent in humandisingenuousness, or else its domination will have to be very amplymodified indeed, by the requirements of the second factor, and itsproceedings made very largely the resultant of that second factor'sforces. Moreover, very subtle men do not aim at things of this sort, oraiming, fail, because subtlety of intelligence involves subtlety ofcharacter, a certain fastidiousness and a certain weakness. Now that thegarrulous period, when a flow of language and a certain effectiveness ofmanner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passingaway, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of abarristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery, practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are peoplewith "faith, " as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people whodo not analyze, people who will take the machine as it is, unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and--saving theirvanity--work it as it wants to go. The man who will be boss will be theman who wants to be boss, who finds, in being boss, a complete and finalsatisfaction, and not the man who complicates things by wanting to beboss in order to be, or do, something else. The machines are governedto-day, and there is every reason to believe that they will continue tobe governed, by masterful-looking resultants, masters of nothing butcompromise, and that little fancy of an inner conspiracy of controlwithin the machine and behind ostensible politics is really on all fourswith the wonderful Rodin (of the Juif Errant) and as probable asanything else in the romances of Eugene Sue. 

If, on the other hand, we direct attention to the antagonistic elementin the machine, to Public Opinion, to the alleged collective mind of thegrey mass, and consider how it is brought to believe in itself and itspossession of certain opinions by the concrete evidence of dailynewspapers and eloquent persons saying as much, we may also very readilyconjure up a contrasted vision of extraordinary demagogues or newspapersyndicates working the political machine from that direction. So far asthe demagogue goes, the increase of population, the multiplication ofamusements and interests, the differentiation of social habits, thediffusion of great towns, all militate against that sufficient gatheringof masses of voters in meeting-houses which gave him his power in therecent past. It is improbable that ever again will any flushedundignified man with a vast voice, a muscular face in incessantoperation, collar crumpled, hair disordered, and arms in wild activity, talking, talking, talking, talking copiously out of the windows ofrailway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotelbalconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits--tireless andundammable--rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic statein the world. Continually the individual vocal demagogue dwindles, andthe element of bands and buttons, the organization of the press andprocession, the share of the machine, grows. 

Mr. Harmsworth, of the London _Daily Mail_, in a very interestingarticle has glanced at certain possibilities of power that may vest inthe owners of a great system of world-wide "simultaneous" newspapers, but he does not analyze the nature of the influence exercised bynewspapers during the successive phases of the nineteenth century, northe probable modifications of that influence in the years to come, and Ithink, on the whole, he inclines very naturally to over estimate theamount of intentional direction that may be given by the owner of apaper to the minds and acts of his readers, and to exceed the verydefinite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlierVictorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still veryhomogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; itstranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and æstheticpoints left political questions as the chief field of exercise for suchthinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers ofthat time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss notonly specific situations but general principles. That indeed was theirprincipal function, and it fell rather to the eloquent men to misapplythese principles according to the necessity of the occasion. The papersdid then very much more than they do now to mould opinion, though theydid not direct affairs to anything like the extent of their modernsuccessors. They made roads upon which events presently travelled inunexpected fashions. But the often cheaper and always more vividnewspapers that have come with the New Democracy do nothing to mouldopinion. Indeed, there is no longer upon most public questions--and as Ihave tried to make clear in my previous paper, there is not likely to beany longer--a collective opinion to be moulded. Protectionists, forexample, are a mere band, Free Traders are a mere band; on all thesedetails we are in chaos. And these modern newspapers simply endeavour tosustain a large circulation and so merit advertisements by being asmiscellaneously and vividly interesting as possible, by firing where thecrowd seems thickest, by seeking perpetually and without any attempt atconsistency, the greatest excitement of the greatest number. It is uponthe cultivation and rapid succession of inflammatory topics that themodern newspaper expends its capital and trusts to recover its reward. Its general news sinks steadily to a subordinate position; criticism, discussion, and high responsibility pass out of journalism, and thepower of the press comes more and more to be a dramatic and emotionalpower, the power to cry "Fire!" in the theatre, the power to giveenormous value for a limited time to some personality, some event, someaspect, true or false, without any power of giving a specific directionto the forces this distortion may set going. Directly the press ofto-day passes from that sort of thing to some specific proposal, someimplication of principles and beliefs, directly it chooses and selects, then it passes from the miscellaneous to the sectarian, and out of touchwith the grey indefiniteness of the general mind. It gives offence here, it perplexes and bores there; no more than the boss politician can thepaper of great circulation afford to work consistently for any ulterioraim. 

This is the limit of the power of the modern newspaper of largecirculation, the newspaper that appeals to the grey element, to theaverage democratic man, the newspaper of the deliquescence, and if ourprevious conclusion that human society has ceased to be homogeneous andwill presently display new masses segregating from a great confusion, holds good, that will be the limit of its power in the future. It mayundergo many remarkable developments and modifications, [35] but none ofthese tend to give it any greater political importance than it has now. And so, after all, our considerations of the probable developments ofthe party machine give us only negative results, so long as the greysocial confusion continues. Subject to that continuance the partymachine will probably continue as it is at present, and DemocraticStates and governments follow the lines upon which they run at thepresent time. 

Now, how will the emergent class of capable men presently begin tomodify the existing form of government in the ostensibly democraticcountries and democratic monarchies? There will be very many variationsand modifications of the methods of this arrival, an infinitecomplication of detailed incidents, but a general proposition will befound to hold good. The suppression of the party machine in the purelydemocratic countries and of the official choice of the rich andprivileged rulers in the more monarchical ones, by capable operative andadministrative men inspired by the belief in a common theory of socialorder, will come about--peacefully and gradually as a process of change, or violently as a revolution--but inevitably as the outcome either ofthe imminence or else of the disasters of war. 

That all these governments of confusion will drift towards war, with aspacious impulse and a final vehemence quite out of comparison greaterthan the warlike impulses of former times, is a remarkable but by nomeans inexplicable thing. A tone of public expression, jealous andpatriotic to the danger-point, is an unavoidable condition under whichdemocratic governments exist. To be patriotically quarrelsome isimperative upon the party machines that will come to dominate thedemocratic countries. They will not possess detailed and definitepolicies and creeds because there are no longer any detailed anddefinite public opinions, but they will for all that require someostensible purpose to explain their cohesion, some hold upon the commonman that will ensure his appearance in numbers at the polling placesufficient to save the government from the raids of small but determinedsects. That hold can be only of one sort. Without moral or religiousuniformity, with material interests as involved and confused as a heapof spelicans, there remains only one generality for the politician'spurpose, the ampler aspect of a man's egotism, his pride in what heimagines to be his particular kind--his patriotism. In every countryamenable to democratic influences there emerges, or will emerge, a partymachine, vividly and simply patriotic--and indefinite upon the score ofany other possible consideration between man and man. This will holdtrue, not only of the ostensibly democratic states, but also of suchreconstituted modern monarchies as Italy and Germany, for they, too, forall their legal difference, rest also on the grey. The party conflictsof the future will turn very largely on the discovery of the truepatriot, on the suspicion that the crown or the machine in possession isin some more or less occult way traitorous, and almost all other mattersof contention will be shelved and allowed to stagnate, for fear ofbreaking the unity of the national mechanism. 

Now, patriotism is not a thing that flourishes in the void, --one needs aforeigner. A national and patriotic party is an anti-foreign party; thealtar of the modern god, Democracy, will cry aloud for the stranger men. Simply to keep in power, and out of no love of mischief, the governmentor the party machine will have to insist upon dangers and nationaldifferences, to keep the voter to the poll by alarms, seeking ever totaint the possible nucleus of any competing organization with thescandal of external influence. The party press will play the watch-dogand allay all internal dissensions with its warning bay at some adjacentpeople, and the adjacent peoples, for reasons to be presently expanded, will be continually more sensitive to such baying. Already one seescountry yelping at country all over the modern world, not only in thematter of warlike issues, but with a note of quite furious commercialrivalry--quite furious and, indeed, quite insane, since its ideal oftrading enormously with absolutely ruined and tradeless foreigners, exporting everything and importing nothing, is obviously outside reasonaltogether. The inexorable doom of these governments based on the grey, is to foster enmity between people and people. Even their alliances arebut sacrifices to intenser antagonisms. And the phases of the democraticsequence are simple and sure. Forced on by a relentless competition, thetone of the outcries will become fiercer and fiercer; the occasions ofexcitement, the perilous moments, the ingenuities of annoyance, more andmore dramatic, --from the mere emptiness and disorder of the generalmind! Jealousies and anti-foreign enactments, tariff manipulations andcommercial embitterment, destructive, foolish, exasperating obstructionsthat benefit no human being, will minister to this craving withoutcompletely allaying it. Nearer, and ever nearer, the politicians of thecoming times will force one another towards the verge, not because theywant to go over it, not because any one wants to go over it, but becausethey are, by their very nature, compelled to go that way, because to goin any other direction is to break up and lose power. And, consequently, the final development of the democratic system, so far as intrinsicforces go, will be, not the rule of the boss, nor the rule of the trust, nor the rule of the newspaper; no rule, indeed, but internationalrivalry, international competition, international exasperation andhostility, and at last--irresistible and overwhelming--the definiteestablishment of the rule of that most stern and educational of allmasters--_War_. 

At this point there opens a tempting path, and along it historicalprecedents, like a forest of notice-boards, urge us to go. At the end ofthe vista poses the figure of Napoleon with "Cæsarism" written beneathit. Disregarding certain alien considerations for a time, assuming thefree working out of democracy to its conclusion, we perceive that, inthe case of our generalized state, the party machine, together with thenation entrusted to it, must necessarily be forced into passionatenational war. But, having blundered into war, the party machine willhave an air of having accomplished its destiny. A party machine or apopular government is surely as likely a thing to cause a big disorderof war and as unlikely a thing to conduct it, as the wit of man, workingsolely to that end, could ever have devised. I have already pointed outwhy we can never expect an elected government of the modern sort to beguided by any far-reaching designs, it is constructed to get office andkeep office, not to do anything in office, the conditions of itssurvival are to keep appearances up and taxes down, [36] and the careand management of army and navy is quite outside its possibilities. Themilitary and naval professions in our typical modern State will subsistvery largely upon tradition, the ostensible government will interferewith rather than direct them, and there will be no force in the entirescheme to check the corrupting influence of a long peace, to insist uponadequate exercises for the fighting organization or ensure an adequateadaptation to the new and perpetually changing possibilities of untriedapparatus. Incapable but confident and energetic persons, havingpolitical influence, will have been permitted to tamper with the variousarms of the service, the equipment will be largely devised to create animpression of efficiency in times of peace in the minds of the generalvoting public, and the really efficient soldiers will either havefretted themselves out of the army or have been driven out as politicalnon-effectives, troublesome, innovating persons anxious to spend moneyupon "fads. " So armed, the New Democracy will blunder into war, and theopening stage of the next great war will be the catastrophic breakdownof the formal armies, shame and disasters, and a disorder of conflictbetween more or less equally matched masses of stupefied, scared, andinfuriated people. Just how far the thing may rise from the value of analarming and edifying incident to a universal catastrophe, depends uponthe special nature of the conflict, but it does not alter the fact thatany considerable war is bound to be a bitter, appalling, highlyeducational and constitution-shaking experience for the moderndemocratic state. 

Now, foreseeing this possibility, it is easy to step into the trap ofthe Napoleonic precedent. One hastens to foretell that either with thepressure of coming war, or in the hour of defeat, there will arise theMan. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personallyhandsome and continually victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments anddemagogues, carry the nation to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, andhold it together by circulating his profile and organizing furthersuccesses. He will--I gather this from chance lights upon contemporaryanticipations--codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy, or, at anyrate, galvanize Christianity, organize learning in meek intriguingacademies of little men, and prescribe a wonderful educational system. The grateful nations will once more deify a lucky and aggressiveegotism.... And there the vision loses breath. 

Nothing of the sort is going to happen, or, at any rate, if it happens, it will happen as an interlude, as no necessary part in the generalprogress of the human drama. The world is no more to be recast by chanceindividuals than a city is to be lit by sky rockets. The purpose ofthings emerges upon spacious issues, and the day of individual leadersis past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast thecoming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodiesof Cæsar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chesschampion, Napoleon I. Contrived, are false. They are false because theyignore two correlated things; first, the steady development of a new andquite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of theexpansion of science and mechanism, and secondly, the absoluterevolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringingabout. This latter consideration the next chapter will expand, but here, in the interests of this discussion, we may in general terms anticipateits gist. War in the past has been a thing entirely different in itsnature from what war, with the apparatus of the future, will be--it hasbeen showy, dramatic, emotional, and restricted; war in the future willbe none of these things. War in the past was a thing of days andheroisms; battles and campaigns rested in the hand of the greatcommander, he stood out against the sky, picturesquely on horseback, visibly controlling it all. War in the future will be a question ofpreparation, of long years of foresight and disciplined imagination, there will be no decisive victory, but a vast diffusion of conflict--itwill depend less and less on controlling personalities and drivingemotions, and more and more upon the intelligence and personal qualityof a great number of skilled men. All this the next chapter will expand. And either before or after, but, at any rate, in the shadow of war, itwill become apparent, perhaps even suddenly, that the whole apparatus ofpower in the country is in the hands of a new class of intelligent andscientifically-educated men. They will probably, under the developmentof warlike stresses, be discovered--they will discoverthemselves--almost surprisingly with roads and railways, carts andcities, drains, food supply, electrical supply, and water supply, andwith guns and such implements of destruction and intimidation as menscarcely dream of yet, gathered in their hands. And they will bediscovered, too, with a growing common consciousness of themselves asdistinguished from the grey confusion, a common purpose and implicationthat the fearless analysis of science is already bringing to light. They will find themselves with bloodshed and horrible disasters ahead, and the material apparatus of control entirely within their power. "Suppose, after all, " they will say, "we ignore these very eloquent andshowy governing persons above, and this very confused and ineffectualmultitude below. Suppose now we put on the brakes and try something alittle more stable and orderly. These people in possession have, ofcourse, all sorts of established rights and prescriptions; they havesquared the law to their purpose, and the constitution does not know us;they can get at the judges, they can get at the newspapers, they can doall sorts of things except avoid a smash--but, for our part, we havethese really most ingenious and subtle guns. Suppose instead of ourturning them and our valuable selves in a fool's quarrel against theingenious and subtle guns of other men akin to ourselves, we use them inthe cause of the higher sanity, and clear that jabbering war tumult outof the streets. "... There may be no dramatic moment for the expressionof this idea, no moment when the new Cromwellism and the new Ironsideswill come visibly face to face with talk and baubles, flags andpatriotic dinner bells; but, with or without dramatic moments, the ideawill be expressed and acted upon. It will be made quite evident then, what is now indeed only a pious opinion, namely, that wealth is, afterall, no ultimate Power at all, but only an influence among aimless, police-guarded men. So long as there is peace the class of capable menmay be mitigated and gagged and controlled, and the ostensible presentorder may flourish still in the hands of that other class of men whichdeals with the appearances of things. But as some supersaturatedsolution will crystallize out with the mere shaking of its beaker, somust the new order of men come into visibly organized existence throughthe concussions of war. The charlatans can escape everything except war, but to the cant and violence of nationality, to the sustaining force ofinternational hostility, they are ruthlessly compelled to cling, andwhat is now their chief support must become at last their destruction. And so it is I infer that, whether violently as a revolution or quietlyand slowly, this grey confusion that is Democracy must pass awayinevitably by its own inherent conditions, as the twilight passes, asthe embryonic confusion of the cocoon creature passes, into the higherstage, into the higher organism, the world-state of the coming years. 

FOOTNOTES:

[33] The fulcrum, which is generally treated as being absolutelyimmovable, being the general belief in the theory of democracy. 

[34] In the United States, a vast rapidly developing country, withrelatively much kinetic wealth, this central influence is the financialsupport of the Boss, consisting for the most part of active-minded, capable business organizers; in England, the land where irresponsiblerealized wealth is at a maximum, a public-spirited section of theirresponsible, inspired by the tradition of an aristocratic functionalpast, qualifies the financial influence with an amateurish, indolent, and publicly unprofitable integrity. In Germany an aggressivelyfunctional Court occupies the place and plays the part of a permanentlydominant party machine. 

[35] The nature of these modifications is an interesting side issue. There is every possibility of papers becoming at last papers ofworld-wide circulation, so far as the language in which they are printedpermits, with editions that will follow the sun and change intoto-morrow's issue as they go, picking up literary criticism here, financial intelligence there, here to-morrow's story, and thereto-morrow's scandal, and, like some vast intellectual garden-roller, rolling out local provincialism at every revolution. This, for papers inEnglish, at any rate, is merely a question of how long it will be beforethe price of the best writing (for journalistic purposes) rises actuallyor relatively above the falling cost of long distance electrical typesetting. Each of the local editions of these world travelling papers, inaddition to the identical matter that will appear almost simultaneouslyeverywhere, will no doubt have its special matter and its specialadvertisements. Illustrations will be telegraphed just as well asmatter, and probably a much greater use will be made of sketch anddiagram than at present. If the theory advanced in this book thatdemocracy is a transitory confusion be sound, there will not be oneworld paper of this sort only--like Moses' serpent after its miraculousstruggle--but several, and as the non-provincial segregation of societygoes on, these various great papers will take on more and more decidedspecific characteristics, and lose more and more their local references. They will come to have not only a distinctive type of matter, adistinctive method of thought and manner of expression, but distinctivefundamental implications, and a distinctive class of writer. Thisdifference in character and tone renders the advent of any Napoleonicmaster of the newspaper world vastly more improbable than it wouldotherwise be. These specializing newspapers will, as they find theirclass, throw out many features that do not belong to that class. It ishighly probable that many will restrict the space devoted to news andsham news; that forged and inflated stuff made in offices, that bulksout the foreign intelligence of so many English papers, for example. Atpresent every paper contains a little of everything, inadequate sportingstuff, inadequate financial stuff, vague literary matter, voluminousreports of political vapourings, because no newspaper is quite sure ofthe sort of readers it has--probably no daily newspaper has yet adistinctive sort of reader. 

Many people, with their minds inspired by the number of editions whichevening papers pretend to publish and do not, incline to believe thatdaily papers may presently give place to hourly papers, each with thelast news of the last sixty minutes photographically displayed. As amatter of fact no human being wants that, and very few are so foolish asto think they do; the only kind of news that any sort of people clamoursfor hot and hot is financial and betting fluctuations, lottery lists andexamination results; and the elaborated and cheapened telegraphic andtelephonic system of the coming days, with tapes (or phonograph toreplace them) in every post-office and nearly every private house, sofar from expanding this department, will probably sweep it out of thepapers altogether. One will subscribe to a news agency which will wireall the stuff one cares to have so violently fresh, into a phonographicrecorder perhaps, in some convenient corner. There the thing will be inevery house, beside the barometer, to hear or ignore. With theseparation of that function what is left of the newspaper will revert toone daily edition--daily, I think, because of the power of habit to makethe newspaper the specific business of some definite moments in the day;the breakfast hour, I suppose, or the "up-to-town" journey with mostEnglishmen now. Quite possibly some one will discover some day thatthere is now machinery for folding and fastening a paper into a formthat will not inevitably get into the butter, or lead to bitterness in arailway carriage. This pitch of development reached, I incline toanticipate daily papers much more like the _Spectator_ in form thanthese present mainsails of our public life. They will probably notcontain fiction at all, and poetry only rarely, because no one but apartial imbecile wants these things in punctual daily doses, and we areanticipating an escape from a period of partial imbecility. My ownculture and turn of mind, which is probably akin to that of arespectable mechanic of the year 2000, inclines me towards a daily paperthat will have in addition to its concentrated and absolutelytrustworthy daily news, full and luminous accounts of new inventions, new theories, and new departures of all sorts (usually illustrated), witty and penetrating comments upon public affairs, criticisms of allsorts of things, representations of newly produced works of art, and anample amount of ably written controversy upon everything under the sun. The correspondence columns, instead of being an exercising place forbores and conspicuous people who are not mercenary, will be the mostample, the most carefully collected, and the most highly paid of alldepartments in this paper. Personal paragraphs will be relegated to someobscure and costly corner next to the births, deaths, and marriages. This paper will have, of course, many pages of business advertisements, and these will usually be well worth looking through, for the moreintelligent editors of the days to come will edit this department justlike any other, and classify their advertisements in a descending scaleof freshness and interest that will also be an ascending scale of price. The advertiser who wants to be an indecent bore, and vociferate for theten millionth time some flatulent falsehood about a pill, for instance, will pay at nuisance rates. Probably many papers will refuse to printnasty and distressful advertisements about people's insides at all. Theentire paper will be as free from either greyness or offensive stupidityin its advertisement columns as the shop windows in Bond Street to-day, and for much the same reason, --because the people who go that way do notwant that sort of thing. 

It has been supposed that, since the real income of the newspaper isderived from advertisements, large advertisers will combine in thefuture to own papers confined to the advertisements of their specificwares. Some such monopoly is already attempted; several publishing firmsown or partially own a number of provincial papers, which they adornwith strange "Book Chat" columns conspicuously deficient in theirinformation; and a well-known cycle tyre firm supplies "Cycling" columnsthat are mere pedestals for the Head-of-King-Charles make of tyre. Manyquack firms publish and give away annual almanacks replete witheconomical illustrations, offensive details, and bad jokes. But Iventure to think, in spite of such phenomena, that these suggestions andattempts are made with a certain disregard of the essential conditionsof sound advertisement. Sound advertisement consists in perpetualalertness and newness, in appearance in new places and in new aspects, in the constant access to fresh minds. The devotion of a newspaper tothe interest of one particular make of a commodity or group ofcommodities will inevitably rob its advertisement department of most ofits interest for the habitual readers of the paper. That is to say, thenewspaper will fail in what is one of the chief attractions of a goodnewspaper. Moreover, such a devotion will react upon all the othermatter in the paper, because the editor will need to be constantly alertto exclude seditious reflections upon the Health-Extract-of-Horse-Fleshor Saved-by-Boiling-Jam. His sense of this relation will taint hisself-respect and make him a less capable editor than a man whose soleaffair is to keep his paper interesting. To these more interesting rivalpapers the excluded competitor will be driven, and the reader willfollow in his wake. There is little more wisdom in the proprietor of anarticle in popular demand buying or creating a newspaper to contain allhis advertisements than in his buying a coal pit for the same purpose. Such a privacy of advertisement will never work, I think, on a largescale; it is probably at or near its maximum development now, and thisanticipation of the advertiser-owned paper, like that of hourly papers, and that wonderfully powerful cosmic newspaper syndicate, is simplyanother instance of prophesying based only on a present trend, anexpansion of the obvious, instead of an analysis of determining forces. 

[36] One striking illustration of the distinctive possibilities ofdemocratic government came to light during the last term of office ofthe present patriotic British Government. As a demonstration ofpatriotism large sums of money were voted annually for the purpose ofbuilding warships, and the patriotic common man paid the taxes gladlywith a dream of irresistible naval predominance to sweeten the payment. But the money was not spent on warships; only a portion of it was spent, and the rest remained to make a surplus and warm the heart of the commonman in his tax-paying capacity. This artful dodge was repeated forseveral years; the artful dodger is now a peer, no doubt abjectlyrespected, and nobody in the most patriotic party so far evolved is abit the worse for it. In the organizing expedients of all populargovernments, as in the prospectuses of unsound companies, thedisposition is to exaggerate the nominal capital at the expense of theworking efficiency. Democratic armies and navies are always short, andprobably will always be short, of ammunition, paint, training andreserve stores; battalions and ships, since they count as units, areover-numerous and go short-handed, and democratic army reform almostinvariably works out to some device for multiplying units by fission, and counting men three times instead of twice in some ingenious andplausible way. And this must be so, because the sort of men who comeinevitably to power under democratic conditions are men trained by allthe conditions of their lives to so set appearances before realities asat last to become utterly incapable of realities. 

VI

WAR

In shaping anticipations of the future of war there arises a certaindifficulty about the point of departure. One may either begin upon suchbroad issues as the preceding forecasts have opened, and havingdetermined now something of the nature of the coming State and the forceof its warlike inclination, proceed to speculate how this vastill-organized fourfold organism will fight; or one may set all thatmatter aside for a space, and having regard chiefly to the continuallymore potent appliances physical science offers the soldier, we may tryto develop a general impression of theoretically thorough war, go fromthat to the nature of the State most likely to be superlativelyefficient in such warfare, and so arrive at the conditions of survivalunder which these present governments of confusion will struggle oneagainst the other. The latter course will be taken here. We will dealfirst of all with war conducted for its own sake, with a model army, asefficient as an imaginative training can make it, and with a modelorganization for warfare of the State behind it, and then theexperience of the confused modern social organism as it is impelled, inan uncongenial metamorphosis, towards this imperative and finallyunavoidable efficient state, will come most easily within the scope ofone's imagination. 

The great change that is working itself out in warfare is the samechange that is working itself out in the substance of the social fabric. The essential change in the social fabric, as we have analyzed it, isthe progressive supersession of the old broad labour base by elaboratelyorganized mechanism, and the obsolescence of the once valid andnecessary distinction of gentle and simple. In warfare, as I havealready indicated, this takes the form of the progressive supersessionof the horse and the private soldier--which were the living and soleengines of the old time--by machines, and the obliteration of the olddistinction between leaders, who pranced in a conspicuously dangerousand encouraging way into the picturesque incidents of battle, and theled, who cheered and charged and filled the ditches and were slaughteredin a wholesale dramatic manner. The old war was a matter of long drearymarches, great hardships of campaigning, but also of heroic conclusivemoments. Long periods of campings--almost always with an outbreak ofpestilence--of marchings and retreats, much crude business of feedingand forage, culminated at last, with an effect of infinite relief, inan hour or so of "battle. " The battle was always a very intimatetumultuous affair, the men were flung at one another in vast excitedmasses, in living fighting machines as it were, spears or bayonetsflashed, one side or the other ceased to prolong the climax, and thething was over. The beaten force crumpled as a whole, and the victors asa whole pressed upon it. Cavalry with slashing sabres marked thecrowning point of victory. In the later stages of the old warfaremusketry volleys were added to the physical impact of the contendingregiments, and at last cannon, as a quite accessory method of breakingthese masses of men. So you "gave battle" to and defeated your enemy'sforces wherever encountered, and when you reached your objective in hiscapital the war was done.... The new war will probably have none ofthese features of the old system of fighting. 

The revolution that is in progress from the old war to a new war, different in its entire nature from the old, is marked primarily by thesteady progress in range and efficiency of the rifle and of thefield-gun--and more particularly of the rifle. The rifle developspersistently from a clumsy implement, that any clown may learn to use inhalf a day, towards a very intricate mechanism, easily put out of orderand easily misused, but of the most extraordinary possibilities in thehands of men of courage, character, and high intelligence. Its precisionat long range has made the business of its care, loading and aimsubsidiary to the far more intricate matter of its use in relation tothe contour of the ground within its reach. Even its elaboration as aninstrument is probably still incomplete. One can conceive it provided inthe future with cross-thread telescopic sights, the focussing of which, corrected by some ingenious use of hygroscopic material, might even findthe range, and so enable it to be used with assurance up to a mile ormore. It will probably also take on some of the characters of themachine-gun. It will be used either for single shots or to quiver andsend a spray of almost simultaneous bullets out of a magazine evenly andcertainly, over any small area the rifleman thinks advisable. It willprobably be portable by one man, but there is no reason really, exceptthe bayonet tradition, the demands of which may be met in other ways, why it should be the instrument of one sole man. It will, just asprobably, be slung with its ammunition and equipment upon bicyclewheels, and be the common care of two or more associated soldiers. Equipped with such a weapon, a single couple of marksmen even, by reasonof smokeless powder and carefully chosen cover, might make themselvespractically invisible, and capable of surprising, stopping, anddestroying a visible enemy in quite considerable numbers who blunderedwithin a mile of them. And a series of such groups of marksmen soarranged as to cover the arrival of reliefs, provisions, and freshammunition from the rear, might hold out against any visible attack foran indefinite period, unless the ground they occupied was searched veryably and subtly by some sort of gun having a range in excess of theirrifle fire. If the ground they occupied were to be properly tunnelledand trenched, even that might not avail, and there would be nothing forit but to attack them by an advance under cover either of the night orof darkness caused by smoke-shells, or by the burning of cover abouttheir position. Even then they might be deadly with magazine fire atclose quarters. Save for their liability to such attacks, a few hundredsof such men could hold positions of a quite vast extent, and a fewthousand might hold a frontier. Assuredly a mere handful of such mencould stop the most multitudinous attack or cover the most disorderlyretreat in the world, and even when some ingenious, daring, and luckynight assault had at last ejected them from a position, dawn wouldsimply restore to them the prospect of reconstituting in new positionstheir enormous advantage of defence. 

The only really effective and final defeat such an attenuated force ofmarksmen could sustain, would be from the slow and circumspect advanceupon it of a similar force of superior marksmen, creeping forward undercover of night or of smoke-shells and fire, digging pits during thesnatches of cessation obtained in this way, and so coming nearer andnearer and getting a completer and completer mastery of the defender'sground until the approach of the defender's reliefs, food, and freshammunition ceased to be possible. Thereupon there would be nothing forit but either surrender or a bolt in the night to positions in the rear, a bolt that might be hotly followed if it were deferred too late. 

Probably between contiguous nations that have mastered the art of war, instead of the pouring clouds of cavalry of the old dispensation, [37]this will be the opening phase of the struggle, a vast duel all alongthe frontier between groups of skilled marksmen, continually beingrelieved and refreshed from the rear. For a time quite possibly therewill be no definite army here or there, there will be no controllablebattle, there will be no Great General in the field at all. Butsomewhere far in the rear the central organizer will sit at thetelephonic centre of his vast front, and he will strengthen here andfeed there and watch, watch perpetually the pressure, the incessantremorseless pressure that is seeking to wear down his countervailingthrust. Behind the thin firing line that is actually engaged, thecountry for many miles will be rapidly cleared and devoted to thebusiness of war, big machines will be at work making second, third, andfourth lines of trenches that may be needed if presently the firing lineis forced back, spreading out transverse paths for the swift lateralmovement of the cyclists who will be in perpetual alertness to relievesudden local pressures, and all along those great motor roads our first"Anticipations" sketched, there will be a vast and rapid shifting to andfro of big and very long range guns. These guns will probably be foughtwith the help of balloons. The latter will hang above the firing lineall along the front, incessantly ascending and withdrawn; they will becontinually determining the distribution of the antagonist's forces, directing the fire of continually shifting great guns upon the apparatusand supports in the rear of his fighting line, forecasting his nightplans and seeking some tactical or strategic weakness in that sinewyline of battle. 

It will be evident that such warfare as this inevitable precision of gunand rifle forces upon humanity, will become less and less dramatic as awhole, more and more as a whole a monstrous thrust and pressure ofpeople against people. No dramatic little general spouting his troopsinto the proper hysterics for charging, no prancing merely braveofficers, no reckless gallantry or invincible stubbornness of men willsuffice. For the commander-in-chief on a picturesque horse sentimentallywatching his "boys" march past to death or glory in battalions, therewill have to be a loyal staff of men, working simply, earnestly, andsubtly to keep the front tight, and at the front, every little isolatedcompany of men will have to be a council of war, a little conspiracyunder the able man its captain, as keen and individual as a footballteam, conspiring against the scarcely seen company of the foe overyonder. The battalion commander will be replaced in effect by theorganizer of the balloons and guns by which his few hundreds of splendidindividuals will be guided and reinforced. In the place of hundreds ofthousands of more or less drunken and untrained young men marching intobattle--muddle-headed, sentimental, dangerous and futilehobbledehoys--there will be thousands of sober men braced up to theirhighest possibilities, intensely doing their best; in the place ofcharging battalions, shattering impacts of squadrons and wideharvest-fields of death, there will be hundreds of little rifle battlesfought up to the hilt, gallant dashes here, night surprises there, thesudden sinister faint gleam of nocturnal bayonets, brilliant guessesthat will drop catastrophic shell and death over hills and forestssuddenly into carelessly exposed masses of men. For eight miles oneither side of the firing lines--whose fire will probably neveraltogether die away while the war lasts--men will live and eat and sleepunder the imminence of unanticipated death.... Such will be the openingphase of the war that is speedily to come. 

And behind the thin firing line on either side a vast multitude ofpeople will be at work; indeed, the whole mass of the efficients in theState will have to be at work, and most of them will be simply at thesame work or similar work to that done in peace time--only now ascombatants upon the lines of communication. The organized staffs of thebig road managements, now become a part of the military scheme, will bedeporting women and children and feeble people and bringing up suppliesand supports; the doctors will be dropping from their civil duties intopre-appointed official places, directing the feeding and treatment ofthe shifting masses of people and guarding the valuable manhood of thefighting apparatus most sedulously from disease;[38] the engineers willbe entrenching and bringing up a vast variety of complicated andingenious apparatus designed to surprise and inconvenience the enemy innovel ways; the dealers in food and clothing, the manufacturers of allsorts of necessary stuff, will be converted by the mere declaration ofwar into public servants; a practical realization of socialisticconceptions will quite inevitably be forced upon the fighting State. TheState that has not incorporated with its fighting organization all itsable-bodied manhood and all its material substance, its roads, vehicles, engines, foundries, and all its resources of food and clothing; theState which at the outbreak of war has to bargain with railway andshipping companies, replace experienced station-masters by inexperiencedofficers, and haggle against alien interests for every sort of supply, will be at an overwhelming disadvantage against a State which hasemerged from the social confusion of the present time, got rid of everyvestige of our present distinction between official and governed, andorganized every element in its being. 

I imagine that in this ideal war as compared with the war of to-day, there will be a very considerable restriction of the rights of thenon-combatant. A large part of existing International Law involves acurious implication, a distinction between the belligerent governmentand its accredited agents in warfare and the general body of itssubjects. There is a disposition to treat the belligerent government, inspite of the democratic status of many States, as not fully representingits people, to establish a sort of world-citizenship in the common massoutside the official and military class. Protection of the non-combatantand his property comes at last--in theory at least--within a measurabledistance of notice boards: "Combatants are requested to keep off thegrass. " This disposition I ascribe to a recognition of that obsolescenceand inadequacy of the formal organization of States, which has alreadybeen discussed in this book. It was a disposition that was strongestperhaps in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, and strongernow than, in the steady and irresistible course of strenuous anduniversal military preparation, it is likely to be in the future. In ourimaginary twentieth century State, organized primarily for war, thistendency to differentiate a non-combatant mass in the fighting Statewill certainly not be respected, the State will be organized as a wholeto fight as a whole, it will have triumphantly asserted the universalduty of its citizens. The military force will be a much amplerorganization than the "army" of to-day, it will be not simply the fistsbut the body and brain of the land. The whole apparatus, the whole staffengaged in internal communication, for example, may conceivably not beState property and a State service, but if it is not it will assuredlybe as a whole organized as a volunteer force, that may instantly becomea part of the machinery of defence or aggression at the outbreak ofwar. [39] The men may very conceivably not have a uniform, for militaryuniforms are simply one aspect of this curious and transitory phase ofrestriction, but they will have their orders and their universal plan. As the bells ring and the recording telephones click into every housethe news that war has come, there will be no running to and fro upon thepublic ways, no bawling upon the moving platforms of the central urbannuclei, no crowds of silly useless able-bodied people gaping atinflammatory transparencies outside the offices of sensational papersbecause the egregious idiots in control of affairs have found them nobetter employment. Every man will be soberly and intelligently settingabout the particular thing he has to do--even the rich shareholding sortof person, the hereditary mortgager of society, will be given somethingto do, and if he has learnt nothing else he will serve to tie up parcelsof ammunition or pack army sausage. Very probably the best of suchpeople and of the speculative class will have qualified as cyclistmarksmen for the front, some of them may even have devoted the leisureof peace to military studies and may be prepared with novel weapons. Recruiting among the working classes--or, more properly speaking, amongthe People of the Abyss--will have dwindled to the vanishing point;people who are no good for peace purposes are not likely to be any goodin such a grave and complicated business as modern war. The spontaneoustraffic of the roads in peace, will fall now into two streams, one ofwomen and children coming quietly and comfortably out of danger, theother of men and material going up to the front. There will be nopanics, no hardships, because everything will have been amplypre-arranged--we are dealing with an ideal State. Quietly andtremendously that State will have gripped its adversary and tightenedits muscles--that is all. 

Now the strategy of this new sort of war in its opening phase willconsist mainly in very rapid movements of guns and men behind that thinscreen of marksmen, in order to deal suddenly and unexpectedly someforcible blow, to snatch at some position into which guns and men may bethrust to outflank and turn the advantage of the ground against someportion of the enemy's line. The game will be largely to crowd andcrumple that line, to stretch it over an arc to the breaking point, tosecure a position from which to shell and destroy its supports andprovisions, and to capture or destroy its guns and apparatus, and sotear it away from some town or arsenal it has covered. And a factor ofprimary importance in this warfare, because of the importance of seeingthe board, a factor which will be enormously stimulated to develop inthe future, will be the aerial factor. Already we have seen the captiveballoon as an incidental accessory of considerable importance even inthe wild country warfare of South Africa. In the warfare that will go onin the highly-organized European States of the opening century, thespecial military balloon used in conjunction with guns, conceivably ofsmall calibre but of enormous length and range, will play a part ofquite primary importance. These guns will be carried on vast mechanicalcarriages, possibly with wheels of such a size as will enable them totraverse almost all sorts of ground. [40] The aeronauts, provided withlarge scale maps of the hostile country, will mark down to the gunnersbelow the precise point upon which to direct their fire, and over hilland dale the shell will fly--ten miles it may be--to its billet, camp, massing night attack, or advancing gun. 

Great multitudes of balloons will be the Argus eyes of the entiremilitary organism, stalked eyes with a telephonic nerve in each stalk, and at night they will sweep the country with search-lights and comesoaring before the wind with hanging flares. Certainly they will besteerable. Moreover, when the wind admits, there will be freely-movingsteerable balloons wagging little flags to their friends below. And sofar as the resources of the men on the ground go, the balloons will bealmost invulnerable. The mere perforation of balloons with shot doesthem little harm, and the possibility of hitting a balloon that isdrifting about at a practically unascertainable distance and height soprecisely as to blow it to pieces with a timed shell, and to do this inthe little time before it is able to give simple and preciseinstructions as to your range and position to the unseen gunners itdirects, is certainly one of the most difficult and trying undertakingsfor an artilleryman that one can well imagine. I am inclined to thinkthat the many considerations against a successful attack on balloonsfrom the ground, will enormously stimulate enterprise and invention inthe direction of dirigible aerial devices that can fight. Few people, Ifancy, who know the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim, andChanute, but will be inclined to believe that long before the year A. D. 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will havesoared and come home safe and sound. Directly that is accomplished thenew invention will be most assuredly applied to war. 

The nature of the things that will ultimately fight in the sky is amatter for curious speculation. We begin with the captive balloon. Against that the navigable balloon will presently operate. I am inclinedto think the practicable navigable balloon will be first attained by theuse of a device already employed by Nature in the swimming-bladder offishes. This is a closed gas-bag that can be contracted or expanded. Ifa gas-bag of thin, strong, practically impervious substance could beenclosed in a net of closely interlaced fibres (interlaced, for example, on the pattern of the muscles of the bladder in mammals), the ends ofthese fibres might be wound and unwound, and the effect of contractilityattained. A row of such contractile balloons, hung over a long car whichwas horizontally expanded into wings, would not only allow that car torise and fall at will, but if the balloon at one end were contractedand that at the other end expanded, and the intermediate ones allowed toassume intermediate conditions, the former end would drop, the expandedwings would be brought into a slanting condition over a smaller area ofsupporting air, and the whole apparatus would tend to glide downwards inthat direction. The projection of a small vertical plane upon eitherside would make the gliding mass rotate in a descending spiral, and sowe have all the elements of a controllable flight. Such an affair wouldbe difficult to overset. It would be able to beat up even in a fairwind, and then it would be able to contract its bladders and fall down along slant in any direction. From some such crude beginning a form likea soaring, elongated, flat-brimmed hat might grow, and the possibilitiesof adding an engine-driven screw are obvious enough. 

It is difficult to see how such a contrivance could carry guns of anycalibre unless they fired from the rear in the line of flight. Theproblem of recoil becomes a very difficult one in aerial tactics. Itwould probably have at most a small machine-gun or so, which might firean explosive shell at the balloons of the enemy, or kill their aeronautswith distributed bullets. The thing would be a sort of air-shark, andone may even venture to picture something of the struggle the deadlockedmarksmen of 1950, lying warily in their rifle-pits, will see. 

One conceives them at first, each little hole with its watchful, well-equipped couple of assassins, turning up their eyes in expectation. The wind is with our enemy, and his captive balloons have beendisagreeably overhead all through the hot morning. His big guns havesuddenly become nervously active. Then, a little murmur along the pitsand trenches, and from somewhere over behind us, this air-shark drivesup the sky. The enemy's balloons splutter a little, retract, and gorushing down, and we send a spray of bullets as they drop. Then againstour aerostat, and with the wind driving them clean overhead of us, comethe antagonistic flying-machines. I incline to imagine there will be asteel prow with a cutting edge at either end of the sort of aerostat Iforesee, and conceivably this aerial ram will be the most importantweapon of the affair. When operating against balloons, such afighting-machine will rush up the air as swiftly as possible, and then, with a rapid contraction of its bladders, fling itself like a knife atthe sinking war-balloon of the foe. Down, down, down, through a vastalert tension of flight, down it will swoop, and, if its stoop issuccessful, slash explosively at last through a suffocating moment. Rifles will crack, ropes tear and snap; there will be a rending andshouting, a great thud of liberated gas, and perhaps a flare. Quitecertainly those flying machines will carry folded parachutes, and thelast phase of many a struggle will be the desperate leap of theaeronauts with these in hand, to snatch one last chance of life out ofa mass of crumpling, fallen wreckage. 

But in such a fight between flying-machine and flying-machine as we aretrying to picture, it will be a fight of hawks, complicated by bulletsand little shells. They will rush up and up to get the pitch of oneanother, until the aeronauts sob and sicken in the rarefied air, and theblood comes to eyes and nails. The marksmen below will strain at last, eyes under hands, to see the circling battle that dwindles in thezenith. Then, perhaps, a wild adventurous dropping of one close beneaththe other, an attempt to stoop, the sudden splutter of guns, a tiltingup or down, a disengagement. What will have happened? One combatant, perhaps, will heel lamely earthward, dropping, dropping, with half itsbladders burst or shot away, the other circles down in pursuit.... "Whatare they doing?" Our marksmen will snatch at their field-glasses, tremulously anxious, "Is that a white flag or no?... If they drop now wehave 'em!"

But the duel will be the rarer thing. In any affair of ramming there isan enormous advantage for the side that can contrive, anywhere in thefield of action, to set two vessels at one. The mere ascent of oneflying-ram from one side will assuredly slip the leashes of two on theother, until the manoeuvring squadrons may be as thick as starlings inOctober. They will wheel and mount, they will spread and close, therewill be elaborate manoeuvres for the advantage of the wind, there willbe sudden drops to the shelter of entrenched guns. The actual impact ofbattle will be an affair of moments. They will be awful moments, but notmore terrible, not more exacting of manhood than the moments that willcome to men when there is--and it has not as yet happened on thisearth--equal fighting between properly manned and equipped ironclads atsea. (And the well-bred young gentlemen of means who are privileged toofficer the British Army nowadays will be no more good at this sort ofthing than they are at controversial theology or electrical engineeringor anything else that demands a well-exercised brain. )... 

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war must become a conflict between a seeing host and one that isblind. The victor in that aerial struggle will tower with pitilesslywatchful eyes over his adversary, will concentrate his guns and all hisstrength unobserved, will mark all his adversary's roads andcommunications, and sweep them with sudden incredible disasters of shotand shell. The moral effect of this predominance will be enormous. Allover the losing country, not simply at his frontier but everywhere, thevictor will soar. Everybody everywhere will be perpetually andconstantly looking up, with a sense of loss and insecurity, with a vaguestress of painful anticipations. By day the victor's aeroplanes willsweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in the adversary's rear, andwill drop explosives and incendiary matters upon them, [41] so that noapparatus or camp or shelter will any longer be safe. At night his highfloating search-lights will go to and fro and discover and check everydesperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of thefighting line. The phase of tension will pass, that weakening oppositionwill give, and the war from a state of mutual pressure and petty combatwill develop into the collapse of the defensive lines. A general advancewill occur under the aerial van, ironclad road fighting-machines mayperhaps play a considerable part in this, and the enemy's line ofmarksmen will be driven back or starved into surrender, or broken up andhunted down. As the superiority of the attack becomes week by week moreand more evident, its assaults will become more dashing andfar-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there willbe swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and thenever-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men onthe losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, forlightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for amoment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful andnervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into anelemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside thewisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chanceto get their own again or die. 

Such adventures may rescue pride and honour, may cause momentary dismayin the victor and palliate disaster, but they will not turn back theadvance of the victors, or twist inferiority into victory. Presently theadvance will resume. With that advance the phase of indecisive contestwill have ended, and the second phase of the new war, the business offorcing submission, will begin. This should be more easy in the futureeven than it has proved in the past, in spite of the fact that centralgovernments are now elusive, and small bodies of rifle-armed guerillasfar more formidable than ever before. It will probably be brought aboutin a civilized country by the seizure of the vital apparatus of theurban regions--the water supply, the generating stations for electricity(which will supply all the heat and warmth of the land), and the chiefways used in food distribution. Through these expedients, even while theformal war is still in progress, an irresistible pressure upon a localpopulation will be possible, and it will be easy to subjugate or tocreate afresh local authorities, who will secure the invader from anydanger of a guerilla warfare upon his rear. Through that sort of anexpedient an even very obdurate loser will be got down to submission, area by area. With the destruction of its military apparatus and theprospective loss of its water and food supply, however, the defeatedcivilized State will probably be willing to seek terms as a whole, andbring the war to a formal close. 

In cases where, instead of contiguous frontiers, the combatants areseparated by the sea, the aerial struggle will probably be preceded oraccompanied by a struggle for the command of the sea. Of this warfarethere have been many forecasts. In this, as in all the warfare of thecoming time, imaginative foresight, a perpetual alteration of tactics, aperpetual production of unanticipated devices, will count enormously. Other things being equal, victory will rest with the force mentally mostactive. What type of ship may chance to be prevalent when the greatnaval war comes is hard guessing, but I incline to think that the navalarchitects of the ablest peoples will concentrate more and more uponspeed and upon range and penetration, and, above all, upon precision offire. I seem to see a light type of ironclad, armoured thickly only overits engines and magazines, murderously equipped, and with a ram--asalert and deadly as a striking snake. In the battles of the open shewill have little to fear from the slow fumbling treacheries of thesubmarine, she will take as little heed of the chance of a torpedo as abarefooted man in battle does of the chance of a fallen dagger in hispath. Unless I know nothing of my own blood, the English and Americanswill prefer to catch their enemies in ugly weather or at night, and thenthey will fight to ram. The struggle on the high seas between any twonaval powers (except, perhaps, the English and American, who have bothquite unparalleled opportunities for coaling) will not last more than aweek or so. One or other force will be destroyed at sea, driven into itsports and blockaded there, or cut off from its supply of coal (or otherforce-generator), and hunted down to fight or surrender. An inferiorfleet that tries to keep elusively at sea will always find a superiorfleet between itself and coal, and will either have to fight at once orbe shot into surrender as it lies helpless on the water. Somecommerce-destroying enterprise on the part of the loser may go on, but Ithink the possibilities of that sort of thing are greatly exaggerated. The world grows smaller and smaller, the telegraph and telephone goeverywhere, wireless telegraphy opens wider and wider possibilities tothe imagination, and how the commerce-destroyer is to go on for longwithout being marked down, headed off, cut off from coal, and forced tofight or surrender, I do not see. The commerce-destroyer will have avery short run; it will have to be an exceptionally good and costlyship in the first place, it will be finally sunk or captured, andaltogether I do not see how that sort of thing will pay when once thecommand of the sea is assured. A few weeks will carry the effectivefrontier of the stronger power up to the coast-line of the weaker, andpermit of the secure resumption of the over-sea trade of the former. Andthen will open a second phase of naval warfare, in which the submarinemay play a larger part. 

I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refusesto see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew andfounder at sea. It must involve physical inconvenience of the mostdemoralizing sort simply to be in one for any length of time. Afirst-rate man who has been breathing carbonic acid and oil vapour undera pressure of four atmospheres becomes presently a second-rate man. Imagine yourself in a submarine that has ventured a few miles out ofport, imagine that you have headache and nausea, and that some ship ofthe _Cobra_ type is flashing itself and its search-lights about wheneveryou come up to the surface, and promptly tearing down on your descendingbubbles with a ram, trailing perhaps a tail of grapples or a net aswell. Even if you get their boat, these nicely aerated men you arefighting know they have a four to one chance of living; while for yoursubmarine to be "got" is certain death. You may, of course, throw out atorpedo or so, with as much chance of hitting vitally as you would haveif you were blindfolded, turned round three times, and told to firerevolver-shots at a charging elephant. The possibility of sweeping for asubmarine with a seine would be vividly present in the minds of asubmarine crew. If you are near shore you will probably be nearrocks--an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun orpompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In noway can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night withinsight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in gropingits way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better toattack such a vessel and capture it boldly with a few desperate men on atug. At the utmost the submarine will be used in narrow waters, inrivers, or to fluster or destroy ships in harbour or with poor-spiritedcrews--that is to say, it will simply be an added power in the hands ofthe nation that is predominant at sea. And, even then, it can be merelydestructive, while a sane and high-spirited fighter will always bedissatisfied if, with an indisputable superiority of force, he fails totake. [42]

No; the naval warfare of the future is for light, swift ships, almostrecklessly not defensive and with splendid guns and gunners. They willhit hard and ram, and warfare which is taking to cover on land willabandon it at sea. And the captain, and the engineer, and the gunnerwill have to be all of the same sort of men: capable, headlong men, withbrains and no ascertainable social position. They will differ from theofficers of the British Navy in the fact that the whole male sex of thenation will have been ransacked to get them. The incredible stupiditythat closes all but a menial position in the British Navy to the sons ofthose who cannot afford to pay a hundred a year for them for some years, necessarily brings the individual quality of the British naval officerbelow the highest possible, quite apart from the deficiencies that mustexist on account of the badness of secondary education in England. TheBritish naval officer and engineer are not made the best of, good asthey are, indisputably they might be infinitely better both in qualityand training. The smaller German navy, probably, has an ampler pick ofmen relatively, is far better educated, less confident, and morestrenuous. But the abstract navy I am here writing of will be superiorto either of these, and like the American, in the absence of anydistinction between officers and engineers. The officer will be anengineer. 

The military advantages of the command of the sea will probably begreater in the future than they have been in the past. A fleet withaerial supports would be able to descend upon any portion of theadversary's coast it chose, and to dominate the country inland forseveral miles with its gun-fire. All the enemy's sea-coast towns wouldbe at its mercy. It would be able to effect landing and send raids ofcyclist-marksmen inland, whenever a weak point was discovered. Landingswill be enormously easier than they have ever been before. Once a wedgeof marksmen has been driven inland they would have all the militaryadvantages of the defence when it came to eject them. They might, forexample, encircle and block some fortified post, and force costly anddisastrous attempts to relieve it. The defensive country would stand atbay, tethered against any effective counter-blow, keeping guns, supplies, and men in perpetual and distressing movement to and fro alongits sea-frontiers. Its soldiers would get uncertain rest, irregularfeeding, unhealthy conditions of all sorts in hastily made camps. Theattacking fleet would divide and re-unite, break up and vanish, amazingly reappear. The longer the defender's coast the more wretchedhis lot. Never before in the world's history was the command of the seaworth what it is now. But the command of the sea is, after all, likemilitary predominance on land, to be insured only by superiority ofequipment in the hands of a certain type of man, a type of man that itbecomes more and more impossible to improvise, that a country must livefor through many years, and that no country on earth at present can besaid to be doing its best possible to make. 

All this elaboration of warfare lengthens the scale between theoreticalefficiency and absolute unpreparedness. There was a time when any tribethat had men and spears was ready for war, and any tribe that had somecunning or emotion at command might hope to discount any littledisparity in numbers between itself and its neighbour. Luck andstubbornness and the incalculable counted for much; it was half thebattle not to know you were beaten, and it is so still. Even to-day, agreat nation, it seems, may still make its army the plaything of itsgentlefolk, abandon important military appointments to feminineintrigue, and trust cheerfully to the homesickness and essential modestyof its influential people, and the simpler patriotism of its colonialdependencies when it comes at last to the bloody and wearisome businessof "muddling through. " But these days of the happy-go-lucky optimist arenear their end. War is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences. Every additional weapon, every new complication of the art of war, intensifies the need of deliberate preparation, and darkens the outlookof a nation of amateurs. Warfare in the future, on sea or land alike, will be much more one-sided than it has ever been in the past, much moreof a foregone conclusion. Save for national lunacy, it will be broughtabout by the side that will win, and because that side knows that itwill win. More and more it will have the quality of surprise, ofpitiless revelation. Instead of the seesaw, the bickering interchange ofbattles of the old time, will come swiftly and amazingly blow, and blow, and blow, no pause, no time for recovery, disasters cumulative andirreparable. 

The fight will never be in practice between equal sides, never be thattheoretical deadlock we have sketched, but a fight between the moreefficient and the less efficient, between the more inventive and themore traditional. While the victors, disciplined and grimly intent, fullof the sombre yet glorious delight of a grave thing well done, will, without shouting or confusion, be fighting like one great national body, the losers will be taking that pitiless exposure of helplessness in sucha manner as their natural culture and character may determine. War forthe losing side will be an unspeakable pitiable business. There will befirst of all the coming of the war, the wave of excitement, thebelligerent shouting of the unemployed inefficients, the flag-waving, the secret doubts, the eagerness for hopeful news, the impatience of thewarning voice. I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the greyold general--the general who learnt his art of war away in the vanishednineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with hisepaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historicalvalue, his spurs and his sword--riding along on his obsolete horse, bythe side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. Andthe column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and theboys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the oldtime. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up intheir schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers havemingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of theirfaith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The"smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose forthem, lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slopetheir obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doingwhat they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they havenot been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds anddisease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they aregoing to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; Religion and theRatepayer and the Rights of the Parent working through theinstrumentality of the Best Club in the World have kept their souls andminds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered, with thethinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys whowill never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thussent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed insome avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolutestranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, andat any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches thesubaltern--the son of the school-burking, shareholding class--a slightlytaller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns therealities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how tokeep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality withthe men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical headmaster to usea crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop. "... The major yousee is a man of the world, and very pleasantly meets the grey general'seye. He is, one may remark by the way, something of an army reformer, without offence, of course, to the Court people or the Governmentpeople. His prospects--if only he were not going to be shot--arebrilliant enough. He has written quite cleverly on the question ofRecruiting, and advocated as much as twopence more a day and billiardrooms under the chaplain's control; he has invented a military bicyclewith a wheel of solid iron that can be used as a shield; and a warcorrespondent and, indeed, any one who writes even the most casual andirresponsible article on military questions is a person worth hiscultivating. He is the very life and soul of army reform, as it is knownto the governments of the grey--that is to say, army reform without asingle step towards a social revolution.... 

So the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to theshambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision thathaunts my mind. 

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do, againstmodern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wastefuland pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantrybattalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, wheneverthey come against a sanely-organized army. There is nowhere they cancome in, there is nothing they can do. The scattered invisible marksmenwith their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them offindividually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesalesurrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yetthe bitterest and cruellest things will have to happen, thousands andthousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways andgiven over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painfuldisease, before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business forhalf-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and menof pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon verycarefully-educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition. [43]... 

Well, in the ampler prospect even this haunting tragedy of innumerableavoidable deaths is but an incidental thing. They die, and theirtroubles are over. The larger fact after all is the inexorable tendencyin things to make a soldier a skilled and educated man, and to link him, in sympathy and organization, with the engineer and the doctor, and allthe continually developing mass of scientifically educated men that theadvance of science and mechanism is producing. We are dealing with theinter-play of two world-wide forces, that work through distinctive andcontrasted tendencies to a common end. We have the force of inventioninsistent upon a progress of the peace organization, which tends on theone hand to throw out great useless masses of people, the People of theAbyss, and on the other hand to develop a sort of adiposity offunctionless wealthy, a speculative elephantiasis, and to promote thedevelopment of a new social order of efficients, only very painfully andslowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses. And on theother hand we have the warlike drift of such a social body, theinevitable intensification of international animosities in such a body, the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash sucha body, to smash it just as far as it is such a body, under the hammerof war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure thesame result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends. Whilewe are as yet only thinking of a physiological struggle, of complexreactions and slow absorptions, comes War with the surgeon's knife. Warcomes to simplify the issue and line out the thing with knife-likecuts. 

The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people mustdevelop and consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten inwar and give way upon all points where its interests conflict with theinterests of more capable people. It must foster and accelerate thatnatural segregation, which has been discussed in the third and fourthchapters of these "Anticipations, " or perish. The war of the coming timewill really be won in schools and colleges and universities, wherevermen write and read and talk together. The nation that produces in thenear future the largest proportional development of educated andintelligent engineers and agriculturists, of doctors, schoolmasters, professional soldiers, and intellectually active people of all sorts;the nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeedsmost subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homesthat gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguishincompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; thenation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of itsirresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the nationthat will be the most powerful in warfare as in peace, will certainly bethe ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000. In the long runno heroism and no accidents can alter that. No flag-waving, nopatriotic leagues, no visiting of essentially petty imperial personageshither and thither, no smashing of the windows of outspoken people norseizures of papers and books, will arrest the march of national defeat. And this issue is already so plain and simple, the alternatives arebecoming so pitilessly clear, that even in the stupidest court and thestupidest constituencies, it must presently begin in some dim way to befelt. A time will come when so many people will see this issue clearlythat it will gravely affect political and social life. The patrioticparty--the particular gang, that is, of lawyers, brewers, landlords, andrailway directors that wishes to be dominant--will be forced to becomean efficient party in profession at least, will be forced to stimulateand organize that educational and social development that may at lasteven bring patriotism under control. The rulers of the grey, thedemocratic politician and the democratic monarch, will be obliged yearby year by the very nature of things to promote the segregation ofcolours within the grey, to foster the power that will finally supersededemocracy and monarchy altogether, the power of the scientificallyeducated, disciplined specialist, and that finally is the power ofsaints, the power of the thing that is provably right. It may bedelayed, but it cannot be defeated; in the end it must arrive--if notto-day and among our people, then to-morrow and among another people, who will triumph in our overthrow. This is the lesson that must belearnt, that some tongue and kindred of the coming time must inevitablylearn. But what tongue it will be, and what kindred that will firstattain this new development, opens far more complex and far less certainissues than any we have hitherto considered. 

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Even along such vast frontiers as the Russian and Austrian, forexample, where M. Bloch anticipates war will be begun with an invasionof clouds of Russian cavalry and great cavalry battles, I am inclined tothink this deadlock of essentially defensive marksmen may still be themore probable thing. Small bodies of cyclist riflemen would rush forwardto meet the advancing clouds of cavalry, would drop into invisibleambushes, and announce their presence--in unknown numbers--withcarefully aimed shots difficult to locate. A small number of such mencould always begin their fight with a surprise at the most advantageousmoment, and they would be able to make themselves very deadly against acomparatively powerful frontal attack. If at last the attack were drivenhome before supports came up to the defenders, they would still be ableto cycle away, comparatively immune. To attempt even very wide flankingmovements against such a snatched position would be simply to run risksof blundering upon similar ambushes. The clouds of cavalry would have tospread into thin lines at last and go forward with the rifle. Invadingclouds of cyclists would be in no better case. A conflict of cyclistsagainst cyclists over a country too spacious for unbroken lines, wouldstill, I think, leave the struggle essentially unchanged. The advance ofsmall unsupported bodies would be the wildest and most unprofitableadventure; every advance would have to be made behind a screen ofscouts, and, given a practical equality in the numbers and manhood ofthe two forces, these screens would speedily become simply veryattenuated lines. 

[38] So far, pestilence has been a feature of almost every sustained warin the world, but there is really no reason whatever why it should beso. There is no reason, indeed, why a soldier upon active service on thevictorious side should go without a night's rest or miss a meal. If hedoes, there is muddle and want of foresight somewhere, and that ourhypothesis excludes. 

[39] Lady Maud Rolleston, in her very interesting _Yeoman Service_, complains of the Boers killing an engine-driver during an attack on atrain at Kroonstadt, "which was, " she writes, "an abominable action, ashe is, in law, a non-combatant. " The implicit assumption of thiscomplaint would cover the engineers of an ironclad or the guides of anight attack, everybody, in fact, who was not positively weapon in hand. 

[40] Experiments will probably be made in the direction of armouredguns, armoured search-light carriages, and armoured shelters for men, that will admit of being pushed forward over rifle-swept ground. To suchpossibilities, to possibilities even of a sort of land ironclad, myinductive reason inclines; the armoured train seems indeed a distinctbeginning of this sort of thing, but my imagination proffers nothing buta vision of wheels smashed by shells, iron tortoises gallantly rushed byhidden men, and unhappy marksmen and engineers being shot at as theybolt from some such monster overset. The fact of it is, I detest andfear these thick, slow, essentially defensive methods, either for landor sea fighting. I believe invincibly that the side that can go fastestand hit hardest will always win, with or without or in spite of massivedefences, and no ingenuity in devising the massive defence will shakethat belief. 

[41] Or, in deference to the Rules of War, fire them out of guns oftrivial carrying power. 

[42] A curious result might very possibly follow a success of submarineson the part of a naval power finally found to be weaker and defeated. The victorious power might decide that a narrow sea was no longer, underthe new conditions, a comfortable boundary line, and might insist onmarking its boundary along the high-water mark of its adversary'sadjacent coasts. 

[43] There comes to hand as I correct these proofs a very typicalillustration of the atmosphere of really almost imbecile patronage inwhich the British private soldier lives. It is a circular from some oneat Lydd, some one who evidently cannot even write English, but who isnevertheless begging for an iron hut in which to inflict lessons on oursoldiers. "At present, " says this circular, "it is pretty to see in theHome a group of Gunners busily occupied in wool-work or learningbasket-making, whilst one of their number sings or recites, and othersare playing games or letter-writing, but even quite recently the membersof the Bible Reading Union and one of the ladies might have been seenpainfully crowded behind screens, choosing the 'Golden Text' withlowered voices, and trying to pray 'without distraction, ' whilst at theother end of the room men were having supper, and halfway down a dozenIrish militia (who don't care to read, but are keen on a story) weregathered round another lady, who was telling them an amusing temperancetale, trying to speak so that the Bible readers should not hear her andyet that the Leinsters _should_ was a difficulty, but when the Irishmenbegged for a song--difficulty became _impossibility_, and their friendhad to say, '_No. _' Yet this is just the double work required inSoldiers' Homes, and above all at Lydd, where there is so little safeamusement to be had in camp, and none in the village. " These pooryoungsters go from this "safe amusement" under the loving care of "ladyworkers, " this life of limitation, make-believe and spiritual servitudethat a self-respecting negro would find intolerable, into a warfare thatexacts initiative and a freely acting intelligence from all who takepart in it, under the bitterest penalties of shame and death. What canyou expect of them? And how can you expect any men of capacity andenergy, any men even of mediocre self-respect to knowingly placethemselves under the tutelage of the sort of people who dominate theseorganized degradations? I am amazed the army gets so many capablerecruits as it does. And while the private lives under these conditions, the would-be capable officer stifles amidst equally impossiblesurroundings. He must associate with the uneducated products of thepublic schools, and listen to their chatter about the "sports" thatdelight them, suffer social indignities from the "army woman, " worry andwaste money on needless clothes, and expect to end by being shamed orkilled under some unfairly promoted incapable. Nothing illustrates theintellectual blankness of the British army better than its absolutedearth of military literature. No one would dream of gaining any profitby writing or publishing a book upon such a subject, for example, asmountain warfare in England, because not a dozen British officers wouldhave the sense to buy such a book, and yet the British army iscontinually getting into scrapes in mountain districts. A few unselfishmen like Major Peech find time to write an essay or so, and that is all. On the other hand, I find no less than five works in French on thissubject in MM. Chapelet & Cie. 's list alone. On guerilla warfare again, and after two years of South Africa, while there is nothing in Englishbut some scattered papers by Dr. T. Miller Maguire, there are nearly adozen good books in French. As a supplement to these facts is thespectacle of the officers of the Guards telegraphing to Sir ThomasLipton on the occasion of the defeat of his Shamrock II. , "Hard luck. Beof good cheer. Brigade of Guards wish you every success. " This is notthe foolish enthusiasm of one or two subalterns, it is collective. Theyfollowed that yacht race with emotion! is a really important thing tothem. No doubt the whole mess was in a state of extreme excitement. Howcan capable and active men be expected to live and work between thisupper and that nether millstone? The British army not only does notattract ambitious, energetic men, it repels them. I must confess that Isee no hope either in the rulers, the traditions, or the manhood of theBritish regular army, to forecast its escape from the bog of ignoranceand negligence in which it wallows. Far better than any of projectedreforms would it be to let the existing army severely alone, to cease torecruit for it, to retain (at the expense of its officers, assistedperhaps by subscriptions from ascendant people like Sir Thomas Lipton)its messes, its uniforms, its games, bands, entertainments, and splendidmemories as an appendage of the Court, and to create, in absoluteindependence of it, battalions and batteries of efficient professionalsoldiers, without social prestige or social distinctions, without bands, dress uniforms, colours, chaplains or honorary colonels, and to embodythese as a real marching army perpetually _en route_ throughout theempire--a reading, thinking, experimenting army under an absolutelydistinct war office, with its own colleges, depôts and training campsperpetually ready for war. I cannot help but think that, if a hint weretaken from the _Turbinia_ syndicate, a few enterprising persons of meansand intelligence might do much by private experiment to supplement andreplace the existing state of affairs. 

VII

THE CONFLICT OF LANGUAGES

We have brought together thus far in these Anticipations the materialfor the picture of a human community somewhere towards the year 2000. Wehave imagined its roads, the type and appearance of its homes, itssocial developments, its internal struggle for organization; we havespeculated upon its moral and æsthetic condition, read its newspaper, made an advanced criticism upon the lack of universality in itsliterature, and attempted to imagine it at war. We have decided inparticular that unlike the civilized community of the immediate pastwhich lived either in sharply-defined towns or agriculturally over awide country, this population will be distributed in a quite differentway, a little more thickly over vast urban regions and a little lessthickly over less attractive or less convenient or less industrial partsof the world. And implicit in all that has been written there hasappeared an unavoidable assumption that the coming community will bevast, something geographically more extensive than most, andgeographically different from almost all existing communities, that theoutline its creative forces will draw not only does not coincide withexisting political centres and boundaries, but will be more often thannot in direct conflict with them, uniting areas that are separated andseparating areas that are united, grouping here half a dozen tongues andpeoples together and there tearing apart homogeneous bodies anddistributing the fragments among separate groups. And it will now bewell to inquire a little into the general causes of these existingdivisions, the political boundaries of to-day, and the still oldercontours of language and race. 

It is first to be remarked that each of these sets of boundaries issuperposed, as it were, on the older sets. The race areas, for example, which are now not traceable in Europe at all must have represented oldregions of separation; the language areas, which have little or noessential relation to racial distribution, have also given way longsince to the newer forces that have united and consolidated nations. Andthe still newer forces that have united and separated the nineteenthcentury states have been, and in many cases are still, in manifestconflict with "national" ideas. 

Now, in the original separation of human races, in the subsequentdifferentiation and spread of languages, in the separation of men intonationalities, and in the union and splitting of states and empires, wehave to deal essentially with the fluctuating manifestations of thesame fundamental shaping factor which will determine the distribution ofurban districts in the coming years. Every boundary of theethnographical, linguistic, political, and commercial map--as a littleconsideration will show--has indeed been traced in the first place bythe means of transit, under the compulsion of geographical contours. 

There are evident in Europe four or five or more very distinct racialtypes, and since the methods and rewards of barbaric warfare and thenature of the chief chattels of barbaric trade have always beendiametrically opposed to racial purity, their original separation couldonly have gone on through such an entire lack of communication asprevented either trade or warfare between the bulk of thedifferentiating bodies. These original racial types are now inextricablymingled. Unobservant, over-scholarly people talk or write in theprofoundest manner about a Teutonic race and a Keltic race, andinstitute all sorts of curious contrasts between these phantoms, butthese are not races at all, if physical characteristics have anything todo with race. The Dane, the Bavarian, the Prussian, the Frieslander, theWessex peasant, the Kentish man, the Virginian, the man from New Jersey, the Norwegian, the Swede, and the Transvaal Boer, are generalized about, for example, as Teutonic, while the short, dark, cunning sort ofWelshman, the tall and generous Highlander, the miscellaneous Irish, the square-headed Breton, and any sort of Cornwall peasant are Keltswithin the meaning of this oil-lamp anthropology. [44] People who believein this sort of thing are not the sort of people that one attempts toconvert by a set argument. One need only say the thing is not so; thereis no Teutonic race, and there never has been; there is no Keltic race, and there never has been. No one has ever proved or attempted to provethe existence of such races, the thing has always been assumed; they aredogmas with nothing but questionable authority behind them, and the onusof proof rests on the believer. This nonsense about Keltic and Teutonicis no more science than Lombroso's extraordinary assertions aboutcriminals, or palmistry, or the development of religion from a solarmyth. Indisputably there are several races intermingled in the Europeanpopulations--I am inclined to suspect the primitive European races maybe found to be so distinct as to resist confusion and pamnyxia throughhybridization--but there is no inkling of a satisfactory analysis yetthat will discriminate what these races were and define them in termsof physical and moral character. The fact remains there is no such thingas a racially pure and homogeneous community in Europe distinct fromother communities. Even among the Jews, according to Erckert and Chantreand J. Jacobs, there are markedly divergent types, there may have beentwo original elements and there have been extensive local intermixtures. 

Long before the beginnings of history, while even language was in itsfirst beginnings--indeed as another aspect of the same process as thebeginning of language--the first complete isolations that establishedrace were breaking down again, the little pools of race were runningtogether into less homogeneous lagoons and marshes of humanity, thefirst paths were being worn--war paths for the most part. Stilldifferentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, woulddevelop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes. There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization, with iron weapons and war discipline, with established paths and asocial rule and presently with the coming of the horse, what one mightcall the areas of assimilation would increase in size. A stage would bereached when the only checks to transit of a sufficiently convenientsort to keep language uniform would be the sea or mountains or a broadriver or--pure distance. And presently the rules of the game, so tospeak, would be further altered and the unifications and isolations thatwere establishing themselves upset altogether and brought into novelconflict by the beginnings of navigation, whereby an impassable barrierbecame a highway. 

The commencement of actual European history coincides with the closingphases of what was probably a very long period of a foot and(occasional) horseback state of communications; the adjustments soarrived at being already in an early state of rearrangement through theadvent of the ship. The communities of Europe were still for the largerpart small isolated tribes and kingdoms, such kingdoms as a mainlypedestrian militia, or at any rate a militia without transport, anddrawn from (and soon drawn home again by) agricultural work, might holdtogether. The increase of transit facilities between such communities, by the development of shipping and the invention of the wheel and themade road, spelt increased trade perhaps for a time, but very speedily amore extensive form of war, and in the end either the wearing away ofdifferences and union, or conquest. Man is the creature of a strugglefor existence, incurably egoistic and aggressive. Convince him of thegospel of self-abnegation even, and he instantly becomes its zealousmissionary, taking great credit that his expedients to ram it into theminds of his fellow-creatures do not include physical force--and if thatis not self-abnegation, he asks, what is? So he has been, and so he islikely to remain. Not to be so, is to die of abnegation and extinguishthe type. Improvement in transit between communities formerly for allpractical purposes isolated, means, therefore, and always has meant, andI imagine, always will mean, that now they can get at one another. Andthey do. They inter-breed and fight, physically, mentally, andspiritually. Unless Providence is belied in His works that is what theyare meant to do. 

A third invention which, though not a means of transit like the wheeledvehicle and the ship, was yet a means of communication, rendered stilllarger political reactions possible, and that was the development ofsystems of writing. The first empires and some sort of written speecharose together. Just as a kingdom, as distinguished from a mere tribalgroup of villages, is almost impossible without horses, so is an empirewithout writing and post-roads. The history of the whole world for threethousand years is the history of a unity larger than the small kingdomof the Heptarchy type, endeavouring to establish itself under the stressof these discoveries of horse-traffic and shipping and the written word, the history, that is, of the consequences of the partial shattering ofthe barriers that had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion ofmore than tribal communities through all the long ages before the dawnof history. 

East of the Gobi Pamir barrier there has slowly grown up under these newconditions the Chinese system. West and north of the Sahara Gobi barrierof deserts and mountains, the extraordinarily strong and spaciousconceptions of the Romans succeeded in dominating the world, and do, indeed, in a sort of mutilated way, by the powers of great words andwide ideas, in Cæsarism and Imperialism, in the titles of Czar, Kaiser, and Imperator, in Papal pretension and countless political devices, dominate it to this hour. For awhile these conceptions sustained aunited and to a large extent organized empire over very much of thisspace. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a politicalunion, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of athin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs andrefinements, over the scarcely touched national masses. It checked, perhaps, but it nowhere succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitabledifferentiation of province from province and nation from nation. Theforces of transit that permitted the Roman imperialism and its partialsuccessors to establish wide ascendancies, were not sufficient to carrythe resultant unity beyond the political stage. There was unity, but notunification. Tongues and writing ceased to be pure without ceasing tobe distinct. Sympathies, religious and social practices, ran apart androunded themselves off like drops of oil on water. Travel was restrictedto the rulers and the troops and to a wealthy leisure class; commercewas for most of the constituent provinces of the empire a commerce insuperficialities, and each province--except for Italy, which latterlybecame dependent on an over-seas food supply--was in all essentialthings autonomous, could have continued in existence, rulers and ruled, arts, luxuries, and refinements just as they stood, if all other landsand customs had been swept out of being. Local convulsions andrevolutions, conquests and developments, occurred indeed, but though thestones were altered the mosaic remained, and the general size andcharacter of its constituent pieces remained. So it was under theRomans, so it was in the eighteenth century, and so it would probablyhave remained as long as the post-road and the sailing-ship were themost rapid forms of transit within the reach of man. Wars and powers andprinces came and went, that was all. Nothing was changed, there was onlyone state the more or less. Even in the eighteenth century the processof real unification had effected so little, that not one of the largerkingdoms of Europe escaped a civil war--not a class war, but a really_internal_ war--between one part of itself and another, in that hundredyears. In spite of Rome's few centuries of unstable empire, internalwars, a perpetual struggle against finally triumphant disruption seemedto be the unavoidable destiny of every power that attempted to rule overa larger radius than at most a hundred miles. 

So evident was this that many educated English persons thought then, andmany who are not in the habit of analyzing operating causes, still thinkto-day, that the wide diffusion of the English-speaking people is a merepreliminary to their political, social, and linguistic disruption--theeighteenth-century breach with the United States is made a precedent of, and the unification that followed the war of Union and the growingunification of Canada is overlooked--that linguistic differences, differences of custom, costume, prejudice, and the like, will finallymake the Australian, the Canadian of English blood, the Virginian, andthe English Africander, as incomprehensible and unsympathetic one toanother as Spaniard and Englishman or Frenchman and German are now. Onsuch a supposition all our current Imperialism is the most foolishdefiance of the inevitable, the maddest waste of blood, treasure, andemotion that man ever made. So, indeed, it might be--so, indeed, Icertainly think it would be--if it were not that the epoch of post-roadand sailing-ship is at an end. We are in the beginning of a new time, with such forces of organization and unification at work in mechanicaltraction, in the telephone and telegraph, in a whole wonderland ofnovel, space-destroying appliances, and in the correlated inevitableadvance in practical education, as the world has never felt before. 

The operation of these unifying forces is already to be very distinctlytraced in the check, the arrest indeed, of any further differentiationin existing tongues, even in the most widely spread. In fact, it is morethan an arrest even, the forces of differentiation have been driven backand an actual process of assimilation has set in. In England at thecommencement of the nineteenth century the common man of Somerset andthe common man of Yorkshire, the Sussex peasant, the Caithness cottarand the common Ulsterman, would have been almost incomprehensible to oneanother. They differed in accent, in idiom, and in their very names forthings. They differed in their ideas about things. They were, in plainEnglish, foreigners one to another. Now they differ only in accent, andeven that is a dwindling difference. Their language has become amplerbecause now they read. They read books--or, at any rate, they learn toread out of books--and certainly they read newspapers and those scrappyperiodicals that people like bishops pretend to think so detrimental tothe human mind, periodicals that it is cheaper to make at centres anduniformly, than locally in accordance with local needs. Since thenewspaper cannot fit the locality, the locality has to broaden its mindto the newspaper, and to ideas acceptable in other localities. The wordand the idiom of the literary language and the pronunciation suggestedby its spelling tends to prevail over the local usage. And moreoverthere is a persistent mixing of peoples going on, migration in search ofemployment and so on, quite unprecedented before the railways came. Fewpeople are content to remain in that locality and state of life "intowhich it has pleased God to call them. " As a result, dialectic purityhas vanished, dialects are rapidly vanishing, and novel differentiationsare retarded or arrested altogether. Such novelties as do establishthemselves in a locality are widely disseminated almost at once in booksand periodicals. 

A parallel arrest of dialectic separation has happened in France, inItaly, in Germany, and in the States. It is not a process peculiar toany one nation. It is simply an aspect of the general process that hasarisen out of mechanical locomotion. The organization of elementaryeducation has no doubt been an important factor, but the essentialinfluence working through this circumstance is the fact that paper isrelatively cheap to type-setting, and both cheap to authorship--even thecommonest sorts of authorship--and the wider the area a periodical orbook serves the bigger, more attractive, and better it can be made forthe same money. And clearly this process of assimilation will continue. Even local differences of accent seem likely to follow. The itinerantdramatic company, the itinerant preacher, the coming extension oftelephones and the phonograph, which at any time in some application tocorrespondence or instruction may cease to be a toy, all these thingsattack, or threaten to attack, the weeds of differentiation before theycan take root.... 

And this process is not restricted to dialects merely. The native of asmall country who knows no other language than the tongue of his countrybecomes increasingly at a disadvantage in comparison with the user ofany of the three great languages of the Europeanized world. For hisliterature he depends on the scanty writers who are in his own case andwrite, or have written, in his own tongue. Necessarily they are few, because necessarily with a small public there can be only subsistencefor a few. For his science he is in a worse case. His country canproduce neither teachers nor discoverers to compare with the numbers ofsuch workers in the larger areas, and it will neither pay them to writeoriginal matter for his instruction nor to translate what has beenwritten in other tongues. The larger the number of people reading atongue, the larger--other things being equal--will be not only theoutput of more or less original literature in that tongue, but also themore profitable and numerous will be translations of whatever has valuein other tongues. Moreover, the larger the reading public in anylanguage the cheaper will it be to supply copies of the desired work. In the matter of current intelligence the case of the speaker of thesmall language is still worse. His newspaper will need to be cheaplyserved, his home intelligence will be cut and restricted, his foreignnews belated and second hand. Moreover, to travel even a little distanceor to conduct anything but the smallest business enterprise will beexceptionally inconvenient to him. The Englishman who knows no languagebut his own may travel well-nigh all over the world and everywhere meetsome one who can speak his tongue. But what of the Welsh-speakingWelshman? What of the Basque and the Lithuanian who can speak only hismother tongue? Everywhere such a man is a foreigner and with all theforeigner's disadvantages. In most places he is for all practicalpurposes deaf and dumb. 

The inducements to an Englishman, Frenchman or German to becomebi-lingual are great enough nowadays, but the inducements to a speakerof the smaller languages are rapidly approaching compulsion. He must doit in self-defence. To be an educated man in his own vernacular hasbecome an impossibility, he must either become a mental subject of oneof the greater languages or sink to the intellectual status of apeasant. But if our analysis of social development was correct thepeasant of to-day will be represented to-morrow by the people of noaccount whatever, the classes of extinction, the People of the Abyss. If that analysis was correct, the essential nation will be all ofeducated men, that is to say, the essential nation will speak somedominant language or cease to exist, whatever its primordial tongue mayhave been. It will pass out of being and become a mere local area of thelower social stratum, --a Problem for the philanthropic amateur. 

The action of the force of attraction of the great tongues iscumulative. It goes on, as bodies fall, with a steady acceleration. Themore the great tongues prevail over the little languages the less willbe the inducement to write and translate into these latter, the less theinducement to master them with any care or precision. And so this attackupon the smaller tongues, this gravitation of those who are born tospeak them, towards the great languages, is not only to be seen going onin the case of such languages as Flemish, Welsh, or Basque, but even inthe case of Norwegian and of such a great and noble tongue as theItalian, I am afraid that the trend of things makes for a similarsuppression. All over Italy is the French newspaper and the French book. French wins its way more and more there, as English, I understand, isdoing in Norway, and English and German in Holland. And in the comingyears when the reading public will, in the case of the Western nations, be practically the whole functional population, when travel will be moreextensive and abundant, and the inter-change of printed matter stillcheaper and swifter--and above all with the spread of the telephone--theprocess of subtle, bloodless, unpremeditated annexation will conceivablyprogress much more rapidly even than it does at present. The TwentiethCentury will see the effectual crowding out of most of the weakerlanguages--if not a positive crowding out, yet at least (as in Flanders)a supplementing of them by the superposition of one or other of alimited number of world-languages over the area in which each is spoken. This will go on not only in Europe, but with varying rates of progressand local eddies and interruptions over the whole world. Except in thespecial case of China and Japan, where there may be a uniquedevelopment, the peoples of the world will escape from the wreckage oftheir too small and swamped and foundering social systems, only up theladders of what one may call the aggregating tongues. 

What will these aggregating world-languages be? If one has regard onlyto its extension during the nineteenth century one may easily incline tooverrate the probabilities of English becoming the chief of these. But agreat part of the vast extension of English that has occurred has beendue to the rapid reproduction of originally English-speaking peoples, the emigration of foreigners into English-speaking countries inquantities too small to resist the contagion about them, and thecompulsion due to the political and commercial preponderance of apeople too illiterate to readily master strange tongues. None of thesecauses have any essential permanence. When one comes to look moreclosely into the question one is surprised to discover how slow theextension of English has been in the face of apparently far lessconvenient tongues. English still fails to replace the French languagein French Canada, and its ascendency is doubtful to-day in South Africa, after nearly a century of British dominion. It has none of thecontagious quality of French, and the small class that monopolizes thedirection of British affairs, and probably will monopolize it yet forseveral decades, has never displayed any great zeal to propagate itsuse. Of the few ideas possessed by the British governing class, thedestruction and discouragement of schools and colleges is, unfortunately, one of the chief, and there is an absolute incapacity tounderstand the political significance of the language question. TheHindoo who is at pains to learn and use English encounters somethinguncommonly like hatred disguised in a facetious form. He will certainlyread little about himself in English that is not grossly contemptuous, to reward him for his labour. The possibilities that have existed, andthat do still in a dwindling degree exist, for resolute statesmen tomake English the common language of communication for all Asia south andeast of the Himalayas, will have to develop of their own force ordwindle and pass away. They may quite probably pass away. There is nosign that either the English or the Americans have a sufficient sense ofthe importance of linguistic predominance in the future of their race tointerfere with natural processes in this matter for many years to come. 

Among peoples not actually subject to British or American rule, and whoare neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learnEnglish, rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initialassumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amountof science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the manwho learns it. It becomes, therefore, a fact of very great significancethat the actual number of books published in English is less than thatin French or German, and that the proportion of serious books is verygreatly less. A large proportion of English books are novels adapted tothe minds of women, or of boys and superannuated business men, storiesdesigned rather to allay than stimulate thought--they are the onlybooks, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. Inthis connection they do not count, however; no foreigner is likely tolearn English for the pleasure of reading Miss Marie Corelli in theoriginal, or of drinking untranslatable elements from _The Helmet ofNavarre_. The present conditions of book production for the Englishreading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect. There is neither honour nor reward--there is not even food orshelter--for the American or Englishman who devotes a year or so of hislife to the adequate treatment of any spacious question, and so small isthe English reading public with any special interest in science, that agreat number of important foreign scientific works are never translatedinto English at all. Such interesting compilations as Bloch's work onwar, for example, must be read in French; in English only a briefsummary of his results is to be obtained, under a sensationalheading. [45] Schopenhauer again is only to be got quite stupidlyBowdlerized, explained, and "selected" in English. Many translationsthat are made into English are made only to sell, they are too often thework of sweated women and girls--very often quite without any specialknowledge of the matter they translate--they are difficult to read anduntrustworthy to quote. The production of books in English, except theauthor be a wealthy amateur, rests finally upon the publishers, andpublishers to-day stand a little lower than ordinary tradesmen in notcaring at all whether the goods they sell are good or bad. Unusualbooks, they allege--and all good books are unusual--are "difficult tohandle, " and the author must pay the fine--amounting, more often thannot, to the greater portion of his interest in the book. There is nocriticism to control the advertising enterprises of publishers andauthors, and no sufficiently intelligent reading public hasdifferentiated out of the confusion to encourage attempts at criticaldiscrimination. The organs of the great professions and technical tradesare as yet not alive to the part their readers must play in the publiclife of the future, and ignore all but strictly technical publications. A bastard criticism, written in many cases by publishers' employees, acriticism having a very direct relation to the advertisement columns, distributes praise and blame in the periodic press. There is no body ofgreat men either in England or America, no intelligence in the BritishCourt, that might by any form of recognition compensate thephilosophical or scientific writer for poverty and popular neglect. Themore powerful a man's intelligence the more distinctly he must see thatto devote himself to increase the scientific or philosophical wealth ofthe English tongue will be to sacrifice comfort, the respect of the bulkof his contemporaries, and all the most delightful things of life, forthe barren reward of a not very certain righteous self-applause. Bybrewing and dealing in tied houses, [46] or by selling pork and tea, orby stock-jobbing and by pandering with the profits so obtained to thepleasures of the established great, a man of energy may hope to rise toa pitch of public honour and popularity immeasurably in excess ofanything attainable through the most splendid intellectual performances. Heaven forbid I should overrate public honours and the company ofprinces! But it is not always delightful to be splashed by the wheels ofcabs. Always before there has been at least a convention that the Courtof this country, and its aristocracy, were radiant centres of moral andintellectual influence, that they did to some extent check and correctthe judgments of the cab-rank and the beer-house. But the British Crownof to-day, so far as it exists for science and literature at all, existsmainly to repudiate the claims of intellectual performance to publicrespect. 

These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study, mightvery well rest there. But they must be recognized here because theintellectual decline of the published literature of the Englishlanguage--using the word to cover all sorts of books--involves finallythe decline of the language and of all the spacious politicalpossibilities that go with the wide extension of a language. Conceivably, if in the coming years a deliberate attempt were made toprovide sound instruction in English to all who sought it, and to allwithin the control of English-speaking Governments, if honour andemolument were given to literary men instead of being left to them tomost indelicately take, and if the present sordid trade of publishingwere so lifted as to bring the whole literature, the whole science, andall the contemporary thought of the world--not some selection of theworld's literature, not some obsolete Encyclopædia sold meanly andbasely to choke hungry minds, but a real publication of all that hasbeen and is being done--within the reach of each man's need and desirewho had the franchise of the tongue, then by the year 2000 I wouldprophesy that the whole functional body of human society would read, andperhaps even write and speak, our language. And not only that, but itmight be the prevalent and everyday language of Scandinavia and Denmarkand Holland, of all Africa, all North America, of the Pacific coasts ofAsia and of India, the universal international language, and in a fairway to be the universal language of mankind. But such an enterprisedemands a resolve and intelligence beyond all the immediate signs of thetimes; it implies a veritable renascence of intellectual life among theEnglish-speaking peoples. The probabilities of such a renascence willbe more conveniently discussed at a later stage, when we attempt to drawthe broad outline of the struggle for world-wide ascendency that thecoming years will see. But here it is clear that upon the probability ofsuch a renascence depends the extension of the language, and not onlythat, but the preservation of that military and naval efficiency uponwhich, in this world of resolute aggression, the existence of theEnglish-speaking communities finally depends. 

French and German will certainly be aggregating languages during thegreater portion of the coming years. Of the two I am inclined to thinkFrench will spread further than German. There is a disposition in theworld, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects ofall things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts thatthe French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do notbreed with the _abandon_ of rabbits or negroes. These are considerationsthat affect the dissemination of French very little. The French readingpublic is something different and very much larger than the existingFrench political system. The number of books published in French isgreater than that published in English; there is a critical receptionfor a work published in French that is one of the few things worth awriter's having, and the French translators are the most alert andefficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and torecall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing ofFrench. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former havethe whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos andno limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frankindecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazementto discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book, the _Text-book of Psychology_ of Professor William James, [ERRATUM: for'The Text Book of Psychology, ' _read_ 'The Principles of Psychology'. ]in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera--three copies of a book that I havenever seen anywhere in England outside my own house, --and I am anattentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all sopleasant in the page, and so cheap--they are for a people that buys toread. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downsof gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still morehorribly "illustrated, " the exasperating pointless variety in the sizeand thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book isthat it is something sold by a dealer in _bric-à-brac_, honestly sorrythe thing is a book, but who has done _his_ best to remedy it, anyhow!And all the English shopful is either brand new fiction or illustratedtravel (of '_Buns with the Grand Lama_' type), or gilded versions of theclassics of past times done up to give away. While the French bookshopreeks of contemporary intellectual life!

These things count for French as against English now, and they willcount for infinitely more in the coming years. And over German alsoFrench has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance ofbooks published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader hasquite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There isa mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner aspopular English and American romance. And German compared with French isan unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with ahideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic tosacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful parallel to whatone may call the "honest Saxon" movement among the English, that queermental twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished prefacea "Foreword, " and find a pleasurable advantage over theirfellow-creatures in a familiarity with "eftsoons. " This tendency inGerman has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom, and checkedthe development of new words of classical origin. In particular it hasstood in the way of the international use of scientific terms. TheEnglishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community oftechnical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it isfrequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of hissubject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French, than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the sametongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not soimmediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with theirLatin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are somany "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free toqualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their originalintention. In the growing and changing body of science this counts formuch. The indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromisedby its everyday relations, to the end of time it drags a lengtheningchain of unsuitable associations. And the shade of meaning, the limitedqualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a meretwist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriouslyoverstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis.... Moreover, against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostilepeople who fear German preponderance, and who have set their heartsagainst its use. In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, andHungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as cleara prospect of predominance. 

These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they willperhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, andperhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about theRhine. Politically this region lies now in six independent States, buteconomically it must become one in the next fifty years. It will almostcertainly be the greatest urban region in all the world except thatwhich will arise in the eastern States of North America, and that whichmay arise somewhere about Hankow. It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, itwill drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and flingan arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital ofthe old world. Paris will be its West End, and it will stretch aspider's web of railways and great roads of the new sort over the wholecontinent. Even when the coal-field industries of the plain give placeto the industrial application of mountain-born electricity, this greatcity region will remain, I believe, in its present position at theseaport end of the great plain of the Old World. Considerations oftransit will keep it where it has grown, and electricity will be broughtto it in mighty cables from the torrents of the central Europeanmountain mass. Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven, oreven some port in the south-west of Ireland--unless, which is veryunlikely, the velocity of secure sea-travel can be increased beyond thatof land locomotion. I do not see how this great region is to unifyitself without some linguistic compromise--the Germanization of theFrench-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion toentertain. Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications, with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally orinformally a bi-lingual compromise will come into operation, and to mymind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upperhand. Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English-speakingpeoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force thisEuropean city to be tri-lingual, and prepare the way by which the wholeworld may at last speak together in one tongue. 

These are the aggregating tongues. I do not think that any other tonguesthan these are quite likely to hold their own in the coming time. Italian may flourish in the city of the Po valley, but only with Frenchbeside it. Spanish and Russian are mighty languages, but without areading public how can they prevail, and what prospect of a readingpublic has either? They are, I believe, already judged. By A. D. 2000 allthese languages will be tending more and more to be the second tonguesof bi-lingual communities, with French, or English, or less probablyGerman winning the upper hand. 

But when one turns to China there are the strangest possibilities. It isin Eastern Asia alone that there seems to be any possibility of asynthesis sufficiently great to maintain itself, arising outside of, and independently of, the interlocked system of mechanically sustainedsocieties that is developing out of mediæval Christendom. ThroughoutEastern Asia there is still, no doubt, a vast wilderness of languages, but over them all rides the Chinese writing. And very strong--strongenough to be very gravely considered--is the possibility of that writingtaking up an orthodox association of sounds, and becoming a worldspeech. The Japanese written language, the language of Japaneseliterature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh Chinesewords and expressions are continually taking root in Japan. The Japaneseare a people quite abnormal and incalculable, with a touch of romance, aconception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness ofintelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of anyother existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, butwhen I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House ofCommons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itselfas a club--when I turn from that to this race of brave and smilingpeople, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose theJapanese were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process ofsynthesis were possible in China! Suppose, after all, I am not thevictim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant andbold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have thembe! They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among theeducated Chinese.... But this is no doubt the lesser probability. Infront and rear of China the English language stands. It has the start ofall other languages--the mechanical advantage--the position. And if onlywe, who think and write and translate and print and put forth, couldmake it worth the world's having!

FOOTNOTES:

[44] Under the intoxication of the Keltic Renascence the most diversesorts of human beings have foregathered and met face to face, and beenphotographed Pan-Keltically, and have no doubt gloated over thesecollective photographs, without any of them realizing, it seems, what amiscellaneous thing the Keltic race must be. There is nothing that mayor may not be a Kelt, and I know, for example, professional Kelts whoare, so far as face, manners, accents, morals, and ideals go, indistinguishable from other people who are, I am told, indisputablyAssyroid Jews. 

[45] _Is War Now Impossible?_ and see also footnote, p. 210. 

[46] It is entirely for their wealth that brewers have been ennobled inEngland, never because of their services as captains of a greatindustry. Indeed, these services have been typically poor. While thesemen were earning their peerages by the sort of proceedings that dosecure men peerages under the British Crown, the German brewers weredeveloping the art and science of brewing with remarkable energy andsuccess. The Germans and Bohemians can now make light beers that theEnglish brewers cannot even imitate; they are exporting beer to Englandin steadily increasing volume. 

VIII

THE LARGER SYNTHESIS

We have seen that the essential process arising out of the growth ofscience and mechanism, and more particularly out of the still developingnew facilities of locomotion and communication science has afforded, isthe deliquescence of the social organizations of the past, and thesynthesis of ampler and still ampler and more complicated and still morecomplicated social unities. The suggestion is powerful, the conclusionis hard to resist, that, through whatever disorders of danger andconflict, whatever centuries of misunderstanding and bloodshed, men maystill have to pass, this process nevertheless aims finally, and willattain to the establishment of one world-state at peace within itself. In the economic sense, indeed, a world-state is already established. Even to-day we do all buy and sell in the same markets--albeit theowners of certain ancient rights levy their tolls here and there--andthe Hindoo starves, the Italian feels the pinch, before the Germans orthe English go short of bread. There is no real autonomy any more inthe world, no simple right to an absolute independence such as formerlythe Swiss could claim. The nations and boundaries of to-day do no morethan mark claims to exemptions, privileges, and corners in themarket--claims valid enough to those whose minds and souls are turnedtowards the past, but absurdities to those who look to the future as theend and justification of our present stresses. The claim to politicalliberty amounts, as a rule, to no more than the claim of a man to livein a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying ratesbecause he had an excellent great-grandfather. Against all these oldisolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanicaland scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon thegeneral recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and couragewith which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends verylargely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming yearswill hold. 

The final attainment of this great synthesis, like the socialdeliquescence and reconstruction dealt with in the earlier of theseanticipations, has an air of being a process independent of anycollective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of agreater Will; it is working now, and may work out to its end vastly, andyet at times almost imperceptibly, as some huge secular movement inNature, the raising of a continent, the crumbling of a mountain-chain, goes on to its appointed culmination. Or one may compare the process toa net that has surrounded, and that is drawn continually closer andcloser upon, a great and varied multitude of men. We may cherishanimosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot andcounter-plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for allthat. 

Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existingnational organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least fivespacious movements of coalescence exist to-day; there is the movementcalled Anglo-Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement ofBritish Imperialism, the Pan-Germanic movement, Pan-Slavism, and theconception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples. Under the outrageoustreatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoplesis pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before manyyears. These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and theyall aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like ingreater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in theworld, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral, customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of otherpossible coalescences. But these syntheses or other similar syntheticconceptions, if they do not contrive to establish a rational socialunity by sanely negotiated unions, will be forced to fight for physicalpredominance in the world. The whole trend of forces in the world isagainst the preservation of _local_ social systems however greatly andspaciously conceived. Yet it is quite possible that several or all ofthe cultures that will arise out of the development of thesePan-this-and-that movements may in many of their features survive, asthe culture of the Jews has survived, political obliteration, and maydisseminate themselves, as the Jewish system has disseminated itself, over the whole world-city. Unity by no means involves homogeneity. Thegreater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, themore intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed andcharacter within it. 

It is doubtful if either the Latin or the Pan-Slavic idea contains thepromise of any great political unification. The elements of the Latinsynthesis are dispersed in South and Central America and about theMediterranean basin in a way that offers no prospect of an economicunity between them. The best elements of the French people lie in thewestern portion of what must become the greatest urban region of the OldWorld, the Rhine-Netherlandish region; the interests of North Italy drawthat region away from the Italy of Rome and the South towards the Swissand South Germany, and the Spanish and Portuguese speaking halfbreedsof South America have not only their own coalescences to arrange, butthey lie already under the political tutelage of the United States. Nowhere except in France and North Italy is there any prospect of suchan intellectual and educational evolution as is necessary before a greatscheme of unification can begin to take effect. And the difficulties inthe way of the pan-Slavic dream are far graver. Its realization isenormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact thatin the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinctliteratures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equallyinsufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace allother Slavonic dialects. Russia, which should form the central mass ofthis synthesis, stagnates, relatively to the Western states, under therule of reactionary intelligences; it does not develop, and does notseem likely to develop, the merest beginnings of that great educatedmiddle class, with which the future so enormously rests. The Russia ofto-day is indeed very little more than a vast breeding-ground for anilliterate peasantry, and the forecasts of its future greatness entirelyignore that dwindling significance of mere numbers in warfare which isthe clear and necessary consequence of mechanical advance. To a largeextent, I believe, the Western Slavs will follow the Prussians andLithuanians, and be incorporated in the urbanization of Western Europe, and the remoter portions of Russia seem destined to become--are indeedbecoming--Abyss, a wretched and disorderly Abyss that will not even beformidable to the armed and disciplined peoples of the new civilization, the last quarter of the earth, perhaps, where a barbaric or absenteenobility will shadow the squalid and unhappy destinies of a multitude ofhopeless and unmeaning lives. 

To a certain extent, Russia may play the part of a vaster Ireland, inher failure to keep pace with the educational and economic progress ofnations which have come into economic unity with her. She will be anIreland without emigration, a place for famines. And while Russia delaysto develop anything but a fecund orthodoxy and this simple peasant life, the grooves and channels are growing ever deeper along which thecurrents of trade, of intellectual and moral stimulus, must presentlyflow towards the West. I see no region where anything like thecomparatively dense urban regions that are likely to arise about theRhineland and over the eastern states of America, for example, candevelop in Russia. With railways planned boldly, it would have beenpossible, it might still be possible, to make about Odessa a parallel toChicago, but the existing railways run about Odessa as though Asia wereunknown; and when at last the commercial awakening of what is now theTurkish Empire comes, the railway lines will probably run, not north orsouth, but from the urban region of the more scientific centralEuropeans down to Constantinople. The long-route land communications inthe future will become continually more swift and efficient than Balticnavigation, and it is unlikely, therefore, that St. Petersburg has anygreat possibilities of growth. It was founded by a man whose idea of thecourse of trade and civilization was the sea wholly and solely, and inthe future the sea must necessarily become more and more a last resort. With its spacious prospects, its architectural magnificence, itspolitical quality, its desertion by the new commerce, and its terriblepeasant hinterland, it may come about that a striking analogy betweenSt. Petersburg and Dublin will finally appear. 

So much for the Pan-Slavic synthesis. It seems improbable that it canprevail against the forces that make for the linguistic and economicannexation of the greater part of European Russia and of the minorSlavonic masses, to the great Western European urban region. 

The political centre of gravity of Russia, in its resistance to theseeconomic movements, is palpably shifting eastward even to-day, but thatcarries it away from the Central European synthesis only towards thevastly more enormous attracting centre of China. Politically the RussianGovernment may come to dominate China in the coming decades, but thereality beneath any such formal predominance will be the absorption ofRussia beyond the range of the European pull by the synthesis of EasternAsia. Neither the Russian literature nor the Russian language andwriting, nor the Russian civilization as a whole have the qualities tomake them irresistible to the energetic and intelligent millions of thefar East. The chances seem altogether against the existence of a greatSlavonic power in the world at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury. They seem, at the first glance, to lie just as heavily infavour of an aggressive Pan-Germanic power struggling towards a greatand commanding position athwart Central Europe and Western Asia, andturning itself at last upon the defeated Slavonic disorder. There can beno doubt that at present the Germans, with the doubtful exception of theUnited States, have the most efficient middle class in the world, theirrapid economic progress is to a very large extent, indeed, a triumph ofintelligence, and their political and probably their military and navalservices are still conducted with a capacity and breadth of view thatfind no parallel in the world. But the very efficiency of the German asa German to-day, and the habits and traditions of victory he hasaccumulated for nearly forty years, may prove in the end a very doubtfulblessing to Europe as a whole, or even to his own grandchildren. Geographical contours, economic forces, the trend of invention andsocial development, point to a unification of all Western Europe, butthey certainly do not point to its Germanization. I have already givenreasons for anticipating that the French language may not only hold itsown, but prevail against German in Western Europe. And there are certainother obstacles in the way even of the union of indisputable Germans. One element in Germany's present efficiency must become more and more ofan encumbrance as the years pass. The Germanic idea is deeply interwovenwith the traditional Empire and with the martinet methods of thePrussian monarchy. The intellectual development of the Germans isdefined to a very large extent by a court-directed officialdom. In manythings that court is still inspired by the noble traditions of educationand discipline that come from the days of German adversity, and thepredominance of the Imperial will does, no doubt, give a unity ofpurpose to German policy and action that adds greatly to its efficacy. But for a capable ruler, even more than for a radiantly stupid monarch, the price a nation must finally pay is heavy. Most energetic and capablepeople are a little intolerant of unsympathetic capacity, are apt on theunder side of their egotism to be jealous, assertive, and aggressive. Inthe present Empire of Germany there are no other great figures tobalance the Imperial personage, and I do not see how other great figuresare likely to arise. A great number of fine and capable persons must befailing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow of this tooprepotent monarchy. There are certain limiting restrictions imposed uponGermans through the Imperial activity, that must finally be bad for theintellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. Forexample, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity witha ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the publicmind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of thiseccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard criticismas hostility stifles the public thought of Germany. He interferes inuniversity affairs and in literary and artistic matters with a quiteremarkable confidence and incalculable consequences. The inertia of acentury carries him and his Germany onward from success to success, butfor all that one may doubt whether the extraordinary intellectualitythat distinguished the German atmosphere in the early years of thecentury, and in which such men as Blumenthal and Moltke grew togreatness, in which Germany grew to greatness, is not steadily fading inthe heat and blaze of the Imperial sunshine. Discipline and educationhave carried Germany far; they are essential things, but an equallyessential need for the coming time is a free play for men of initiativeand imagination. Is Germany to her utmost possibility making capablemen? That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policyis wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound. Oris Germany doing no more than cash the promises of those earlier days?

After all, I do not see that she is in a greatly stronger position thanwas France in the early sixties, and, indeed, in many respects herpresent predominance is curiously analogous to that of the French Empirein those years. Death at any time may end the career of the presentruler of Germany--there is no certain insurance of one single life. Thiswithdrawal would leave Germany organized entirely with reference to aCourt, and there is no trustworthy guarantee that the succeeding RoyalPersonality may not be something infinitely more vain and aggressive, orsomething weakly self-indulgent or unpatriotic and morally indifferent. Much has been done in the past of Germany, the infinitely less exactingpast, by means of the tutor, the Chamberlain, the Chancellor, thewide-seeing power beyond the throne, who very unselfishly intrigues hismonarch in the way that he should go. But that sort of thing isremarkably like writing a letter by means of a pen held in lazy tongsinstead of the hand. A very easily imagined series of accidents mayplace the destinies of Germany in such lazy tongs again. When thatoccasion comes, will the new class of capable men on which we haveconvinced ourselves in these anticipations the future depends--will itbe ready for its enlarged responsibilities, or will the flower of itspossible members be in prison for _lèse majesté_, or naturalizedEnglishmen or naturalized Americans or troublesome privates underofficers of indisputably aristocratic birth, or well-broken labourers, won "back to the land, " under the auspices of an Agrarian League?

In another way the intensely monarchical and aristocratic organizationof the German Empire will stand in the way of the political synthesis ofgreater Germany. Indispensable factors in that synthesis will be Hollandand Switzerland--little, advantageously situated peoples, saturated withideas of personal freedom. One can imagine a German Swiss, at any rate, merging himself in a great Pan-Germanic republican state, but to bow theknee to the luridly decorated God of His Imperial Majesty's Fathers willbe an altogether more difficult exploit for a self-respecting man.... 

Moreover, before Germany can unify to the East she must fight theRussian, and to unify to the West she must fight the French and perhapsthe English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers. Ithink the military strength of France is enormously underrated. Uponthis matter M. Bloch should be read. Indisputably the French were beatenin 1870, indisputably they have fallen behind in their long struggle tomaintain themselves equal with the English on the sea, but neither ofthese things efface the future of the French. The disasters of 1870 wereprobably of the utmost benefit to the altogether too sanguine Frenchimagination. They cleared the French mind of the delusion that personalImperialism is the way to do the desirable thing, a delusion manyGermans (and, it would seem, a few queer Englishmen and still queererAmericans) entertain. The French have done much to demonstrate thepossibility of a stable military republic. They have disposed of crownand court, and held themselves in order for thirty good years; they havedissociated their national life from any form of religious profession;they have contrived a freedom of thought and writing that, in spite ofmuch conceit to the contrary, is quite impossible among theEnglish-speaking peoples. I find no reason to doubt the implication ofM. Bloch that on land to-day the French are relatively far stronger thanthey were in 1870, that the evolution of military expedients has beenall in favour of the French character and intelligence, and that even asingle-handed war between France and Germany to-day might have a verydifferent issue from that former struggle. In such a conflict it will beGermany, and not France, that will have pawned her strength to theEnglish-speaking peoples on the high seas. And France will not fightalone. She will fight for Switzerland or Luxembourg, or the mouth of theRhine. She will fight with the gravity of remembered humiliations, withthe whole awakened Slav-race at the back of her antagonist, and veryprobably with the support of the English-speaking peoples. 

It must be pointed out how strong seems the tendency of the GermanEmpire to repeat the history of Holland upon a larger scale. While theDutch poured out all their strength upon the seas, in a conflict withthe English that at the utmost could give them only trade, they let thepossibilities of a great Low German synthesis pass utterly out of being. (In those days Low Germany stretched to Arras and Douay. ) Theypositively dragged the English into the number of their enemies. Andto-day the Germans invade the sea with a threat and intention that willcertainly create a countervailing American navy, fundamentally modifythe policy of Great Britain, such as it is, and very possibly go far toeffect the synthesis of the English-speaking peoples. 

So involved, I do not see that the existing Germanic synthesis is likelyto prevail in the close economic unity, the urban region that will arisein Western Europe. I imagine that the German Empire--that is, theorganized expression of German aggression to-day--will be eithershattered or weakened to the pitch of great compromises by a series ofwars by land and sea; it will be forced to develop the autonomy of itsrational middle class in the struggles that will render thesecompromises possible, and it will be finally not Imperial German ideas, but central European ideas possibly more akin to Swiss conceptions, acivilized republicanism finding its clearest expression in the Frenchlanguage, that will be established upon a bilingual basis throughoutWestern Europe, and increasingly predominant over the whole Europeanmainland and the Mediterranean basin, as the twentieth century closes. The splendid dream of a Federal Europe, which opened the nineteenthcentury for France, may perhaps, after all, come to something likerealization at the opening of the twenty-first. But just how long thesethings take, just how easily or violently they are brought about, depends, after all, entirely upon the rise in general intelligence inEurope. An ignorant, a merely trained or a merely cultured people, willnot understand these coalescences, will fondle old animosities and stagehatreds, and for such a people there must needs be disaster, forcibleconformities and war. Europe will have her Irelands as well as herScotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling, bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand. There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, greatopportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, languageleagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national"costumes as the world has never seen. The cry of the little nationswill go up to heaven, asserting the inalienable right of all littlenations to sit down firmly in the middle of the high-road, in the midstof the thickening traffic, and with all their dear little toys aboutthem, play and play--just as they used to play before the road hadcome.... 

And while the great states of the continent of Europe are hammering downtheir obstructions of language and national tradition or raising theeducational level above them until a working unity is possible, andwhile the reconstruction of Eastern Asia--whether that be under Russian, Japanese, English, or native Chinese direction--struggles towardsattainment, will there also be a great synthesis of the English-speakingpeoples going on? I am inclined to believe that there will be such asynthesis, and that the head and centre of the new unity will be thegreat urban region that is developing between Chicago and the Atlantic, and which will lie mainly, but not entirely, south of the St. Lawrence. Inevitably, I think, that region must become the intellectual, political, and industrial centre of any permanent unification of theEnglish-speaking states. There will, I believe, develop about thatcentre a great federation of white English-speaking peoples, afederation having America north of Mexico as its central mass (afederation that may conceivably include Scandinavia) and its federalgovernment will sustain a common fleet, and protect or dominate oractually administer most or all of the non-white states of the presentBritish Empire, and in addition much of the South and Middle Pacific, the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and the larger part ofblack Africa. Quite apart from the dominated races, such anEnglish-speaking state should have by the century-end a practicallyhomogeneous citizenship of at least a hundred million sound-bodied andeducated and capable _men_. It should be the first of the three powersof the world, and it should face the organizing syntheses of Europe andEastern Asia with an intelligent sympathy. By the year 2000 all itscommon citizens should certainly be in touch with the thought ofContinental Europe through the medium of French; its English languageshould be already rooting firmly through all the world beyond itsconfines, and its statesmanship should be preparing openly and surely, and discussing calmly with the public mind of the European, and probablyof the Yellow state, the possible coalescences and conventions, theobliteration of custom-houses, the homologization of laws and coinageand measures, and the mitigation of monopolies and special claims, bywhich the final peace of the world may be assured for ever. Such asynthesis, at any rate, of the peoples now using the English tongue, Iregard not only as a possible, but as a probable, thing. The positiveobstacles to its achievement, great though they are, are yet trivial incomparison with the obstructions to that lesser European synthesis wehave ventured to forecast. The greater obstacle is negative, it lies inthe want of stimulus, in the lax prosperity of most of the constituentstates of such a union. But such a stimulus, the renascence of EasternAsia, or a great German fleet upon the ocean, may presently supply. 

Now, all these three great coalescences, this shrivelling up andvanishing of boundary lines, will be the outward and visibleaccompaniment of that inward and social reorganization which it is themain object of these Anticipations to display. I have sought to showthat in peace and war alike a process has been and is at work, a processwith all the inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force, whereby the great swollen, shapeless, hypertrophied social mass ofto-day must give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized, educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republicdominating the world. It will be none of our ostensible governments thatwill effect this great clearing up; it will be the mass of power andintelligence altogether outside the official state systems of to-daythat will make this great clearance, a new social Hercules that willstrangle the serpents of war and national animosity in his cradle. 

Now, the more one descends from the open uplands of wide generalizationto the parallel jungle of particulars, the more dangerous does the roadof prophesying become, yet nevertheless there may be some possibility ofspeculating how, in the case of the English-speaking synthesis at least, this effective New Republic may begin visibly to shape itself out andappear. It will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization ofintelligent and quite possibly in some cases wealthy men, as a movementhaving distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most ofthe existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as anincidental implement in the attainment of these aims. It will be veryloosely organized in its earlier stages, a mere movement of a number ofpeople in a certain direction, who will presently discover with a sortof surprise the common object towards which they are all moving. 

Already there are some interesting aspects of public activity that, diverse though their aims may seem, do nevertheless serve to show thepossible line of development of this New Republic in the coming time. For example, as a sort of preliminary sigh before the stirring of alarger movement, there are various Anglo-American movements and leaguesto be noted. Associations for entertaining travelling samples of theAmerican leisure class in guaranteed English country houses, forbringing them into momentary physical contact with real titled personsat lunches and dinners, and for having them collectively lectured byrespectable English authors and divines, are no doubt trivial thingsenough; but a snob sometimes shows how the wind blows better than aserious man. The Empire may catch the American as the soldier caught theTartar. There is something very much more spacious than such things asthis, latent in both the British and the American mind, and observable, for instance, in the altered tone of the Presses of both countries sincethe Venezuela Message and the Spanish American War. Certain projects ofa much ampler sort have already been put forward. An interestingproposal of an interchangeable citizenship, so that with a change ofdomicile an Englishman should have the chance of becoming a citizen ofthe United States, and an American a British citizen or a voter in anautonomous British colony, for example, has been made. Such schemeswill, no doubt, become frequent, and will afford much scope fordiscussion in both countries during the next decade or so. [47] TheAmerican constitution and the British crown and constitution have to bemodified or shelved at some stage in this synthesis, and for certaintypes of intelligence there could be no more attractive problem. Certaincurious changes in the colonial point of view will occur as thesediscussions open out. The United States of America are rapidly taking, or have already taken, the ascendency in the iron and steel andelectrical industries out of the hands of the British; they aredeveloping a far ampler and more thorough system of higher scientificeducation than the British, and the spirit of efficiency percolatingfrom their more efficient businesses is probably higher in their publicservices. These things render the transfer of the present mercantile andnaval ascendency of Great Britain to the United States during the nexttwo or three decades a very probable thing, and when this isaccomplished the problem how far colonial loyalty is the fruit of RoyalVisits and sporadic knighthoods, and how far it has relation to theexistence of a predominant fleet, will be near its solution. Aninteresting point about such discussions as this, in which indeed in allprobability the nascent consciousness of the New Republic will emerge, will be the solution this larger synthesis will offer to certainmiserable difficulties of the present time. Government by the elect ofthe first families of Great Britain has in the last hundred years madeIreland and South Africa two open sores of irreconcilable wrong. Thesetwo English-speaking communities will never rest and never emerge fromwretchedness under the vacillating vote-catching incapacity of BritishImperialism, and it is impossible that the British power, havingembittered them, should ever dare to set them free. But within such anampler synthesis as the New Republic will seek, these states couldemerge to an equal fellowship that would take all the bitterness fromtheir unforgettable past. 

Another type of public activity which foreshadows an aspect under whichthe New Republic will emerge is to be found in the unofficialorganizations that have come into existence in Great Britain to watchand criticize various public departments. There is, for example, theNavy League, a body of intelligent and active persons with a distinctlyexpert qualification which has intervened very effectively in navalcontrol during the last few years. There is also at present a vastamount of disorganized but quite intelligent discontent with the tawdryfutilities of army reform that occupy the War Office. It becomesapparent that there is no hope of a fully efficient and well-equippedofficial army under parliamentary government, and with that realizationthere will naturally appear a disposition to seek some way to militaryefficiency, as far as is legally possible, outside War Office control. Already recruiting is falling off, it will probably fall off more andmore as the patriotic emotions evoked by the Boer War fade away, and notrivial addition to pay or privilege will restore it. Elementaryeducation has at last raised the intelligence of the British lowerclasses to a point when the prospect of fighting in distant lands underunsuitably educated British officers of means and gentility with adefective War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost much of itsromantic glamour. But an unofficial body that set itself to theestablishment of a school of military science, to the sane organizationand criticism of military experiments in tactics and equipment, and tothe raising for experimental purposes of volunteer companies andbattalions, would find no lack of men.... What an unofficial syndicateof capable persons of the new sort may do in these matters has beenshown in the case of the _Turbinia_, the germ of an absolute revolutionin naval construction. 

Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spiritin which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in anotherline of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently bemuch more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that toorganize and control public education is beyond the power of ademocratic government. The meanly equipped and pretentiously conductedprivate schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapableyoung men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education isno matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working uponparental ignorance and social prejudice. The necessary condition to theeffective development of the New Republic is a universally accessible, spacious, and varied educational system working in an atmosphere ofefficient criticism and general intellectual activity. Schools alone areof no avail, universities are merely dens of the higher cramming, unlessthe schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and lecturers are in touch withand under the light of an abundant, contemporary, and fully adultintellectuality. At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmastersentrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of thenext decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolatedcreatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and broughtup under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot ofthe Thirty-nine Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers andeven less intelligent men than many Board School teachers. There is, however, urgent need of an absolutely new type of school--a school thatshall be, at least, so skilfully conducted as to supply the necessarytraining in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and thenecessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisureof the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by theignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equallymanifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happyfastness for those precociously brilliant creatures--creatures whosebrilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutionalunsoundness of mind--who can "get in" before the portcullis of thenineteenth birthday falls. These new educational elements may eithergrow slowly through the steady and painful pressure of remorselessfacts, or, as the effort to evoke the New Republic becomes moreconscious and deliberate, they may be rapidly brought into being by theconscious endeavours of capable men. Assuredly they will never bedeveloped by the wisdom of the governments of the grey. It may bepointed out that in an individual and disorganized way a growing senseof such needs is already displayed. Such great business managers as Mr. Andrew Carnegie, for example, and many other of the wealthy efficientsof the United States of America, are displaying a strong disinclinationto found families of functionless shareholders, and a strong dispositionto contribute, by means of colleges, libraries, and splendidfoundations, to the future of the whole English-speaking world. Ofcourse, Mr. Carnegie is not an educational specialist, and his goodintentions will be largely exploited by the energetic mediocrities whocontrol our educational affairs. But it is the intention that concernsus now, and not the precise method or effect. Indisputably these richAmericans are at a fundamentally important work in these endowments, andas indisputably many of their successors--I do not mean the heirs totheir private wealth, but the men of the same type who will play their_rôle_ in the coming years--will carry on this spacious work with awider prospect and a clearer common understanding. 

The establishment of modern and efficient schools is alone notsufficient for the intellectual needs of the coming time. The school anduniversity are merely the preparation for the life of mental activity inwhich the citizen of the coming state will live. The three years ofuniversity and a lifetime of garrulous stagnation which constitutes themind's history of many a public schoolmaster, for example, and most ofthe clergy to-day, will be impossible under the new needs. Theold-fashioned university, secure in its omniscience, merely taught; theuniversity of the coming time will, as its larger function, criticizeand learn. It will be organized for research--for the criticism, thatis, of thought and nature. And a subtler and a greater task before thosewho will presently swear allegiance to the New Republic is to aid andstimulate that process of sound adult mental activity which is thecardinal element in human life. After all, in spite of the pretentiousimpostors who trade upon the claim, literature, contemporary literature, is the breath of civilized life, and those who sincerely think and writethe salt of the social body. To mumble over the past, to live on theclassics, however splendid, is senility. The New Republic, therefore, will sustain its authors. In the past the author lived within the limitsof his patron's susceptibility, and led the world, so far as he didlead it, from that cage. In the present he lives within the limits of aparticularly distressful and ill-managed market. He must please andinterest the public before he may reason with it, and even to reach thepublic ear involves other assiduities than writing. To write one's bestis surely sufficient work for a man, but unless the author is preparedto add to his literary toil the correspondence and alert activity of abusiness man, he may find that no measure of acceptance will save himfrom a mysterious poverty. Publishing has become a trade, differing onlyfrom the trade in pork or butter in the tradesman's carelessbook-keeping and his professed indifference to the quality of his goods. But unless the whole mass of argument in these Anticipations is false, publishing is as much, or even more, of a public concern than education, and as little to be properly discharged by private men working forprofit. On the other hand, it is not to be undertaken by a government ofthe grey, for a confusion cannot undertake to clarify itself; it is anactivity in which the New Republic will necessarily engage. 

The men of the New Republic will be intelligently critical men, and theywill have the courage of their critical conclusions. For the sake of theEnglish tongue, for the sake of the English peoples, they will setthemselves to put temptingly within the reach of all readers of thetongue, and all possible readers of the tongue, an abundance of livingliterature. They will endeavour to shape great publishing trusts andassociations that will have the same relation to the publishing officeof to-day that a medical association has to a patent-medicine dealer. They will not only publish, but sell; their efficient book-shops, theirefficient system of book-distribution will replace the present haphazarddealings of quite illiterate persons under whose shadows people in theprovinces live. [48] If one of these publishing groups decides that abook, new or old, is of value to the public mind, I conceive thecopyright will be secured and the book produced all over the world inevery variety of form and price that seems necessary to its exhaustivesale. Moreover, these publishing associations will sustain spaciouslyconceived organs of opinion and criticism, which will begin by beingpatiently and persistently good, and so develop into power. And the moredistinctly the New Republic emerges, the less danger there will be ofthese associations being allowed to outlive their service in a state ofossified authority. New groups of men and new phases of thought willorganize their publishing associations as children learn to talk. [49]

And while the New Republic is thus developing its idea of itself andorganizing its mind, it will also be growing out of the confused andintricate businesses and undertakings and public services of the presenttime, into a recognizable material body. The synthetic process that isgoing on in the case of many of the larger of the businesses of theworld, that formation of Trusts that bulks so large in Americandiscussion, is of the utmost significance in this connection. Conceivably the first impulse to form Trusts came from a mere desire tocontrol competition and economize working expenses, but even in its veryfirst stages this process of coalescence has passed out of the region ofcommercial operations into that of public affairs. The Trust developsinto the organization under men far more capable than any sort of publicofficials, of entire industries, of entire departments of public life, quite outside the ostensible democratic government system altogether. The whole apparatus of communications, which we have seen to be of suchprimary importance in the making of the future, promises to pass, in thecase of the United States at least, out of the region of scramble intothe domain of deliberate control. Even to-day the Trusts are taking overquite consciously the most vital national matters. The American iron andsteel industries have been drawn together and developed in a manner thatis a necessary preliminary to the capture of the empire of the seas. That end is declaredly within the vista of these operations, withintheir initial design. These things are not the work of dividend-huntingimbeciles, but of men who regard wealth as a convention, as a means tospacious material ends. There is an animated little paper published inLos Angeles in the interests of Mr. Wilshire, which bears upon itsforefront the maxim, "Let the Nation own the Trusts. " Well, under theirmantle of property, the Trusts grow continually more elaborate andefficient machines of production and public service, while the formalnation chooses its bosses and buttons and reads its illustrated press. Imust confess I do not see the negro and the poor Irishman and all theemigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the AmericanAbyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party of which Mr. Wilshiredreams, and with a little demonstrating and balloting taking over thefoundry and the electrical works, the engine shed and the signal box, from the capable men in charge. But that a confluent system ofTrust-owned business organisms, and of Universities and re-organizedmilitary and naval services may presently discover an essential unity ofpurpose, presently begin thinking a literature, and behaving like aState, is a much more possible thing.... 

In its more developed phases I seem to see the New Republic as (if I mayuse an expressive bull) a sort of outspoken Secret Society, with whicheven the prominent men of the ostensible state may be openly affiliated. A vast number of men admit the need but hesitate at the means ofrevolution, and in this conception of a slowly growing new social orderorganized with open deliberation within the substance of the old, thereare no doubt elements of technical treason, but an enormous gain in thethoroughness, efficiency, and stability of the possible change. 

So it is, or at least in some such ways, that I conceive the growingsense of itself which the new class of modern efficients will develop, will become manifest in movements and concerns that are nowheterogeneous and distinct, but will presently drift into co-operationand coalescence. This idea of a synthetic reconstruction within thebodies of the English-speaking States may very possibly clothe itself inquite other formulæ than my phrase of the New Republic; but the need iswith us, the social elements are developing among us, the appliances arearranging themselves for the hands that will use them, and I cannot butbelieve that the idea of a spacious common action will presently come. In a few years I believe many men who are now rather aimless--men whohave disconsolately watched the collapse of the old Liberalism--will beclearly telling themselves and one another of their adhesion to this newideal. They will be working in schools and newspaper offices, infoundries and factories, in colleges and laboratories, in countycouncils and on school boards--even, it may be, in pulpits--for the timewhen the coming of the New Republic will be ripe. It may be dawning evenin the schools of law, because presently there will be a new andscientific handling of jurisprudence. The highly educated and efficientofficers' mess will rise mechanically and drink to the Monarch, and sitdown to go on discussing the New Republic's growth. I do not see, indeed, why an intelligent monarch himself, in these days, should notwaive any silliness about Divine Right, and all the ill-bred pretensionsthat sit so heavily on a gentlemanly King, and come into the movementwith these others. When the growing conception touches, as in America ithas already touched, the legacy-leaving class, there will be fewer newAsylums perhaps, but more university chairs.... 

So it is I conceive the elements of the New Republic taking shape andrunning together through the social mass, picking themselves out moreand more clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and thewretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute aninformal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will beinfluencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators andcontrolling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, atany sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of itscardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest statement, theclearest and simplest method, is inevitably associated with theconceptions of that science upon which the New Republic will arise. There will be a time, in peace it may be, or under the stresses ofwarfare, when the New Republic will find itself ready to arrive, whenthe theory will have been worked out and the details will be generallyaccepted, and the new order will be ripe to begin. And then, indeed, itwill begin. What life or strength will be left in the old order toprevent this new order beginning?

FOOTNOTES:

[47] I foresee great scope for the ingenious persons who write soabundantly to the London evening papers upon etymological points, issuesin heraldry, and the correct Union Jack, in the very pleasing topic of apossible Anglo-American flag (for use at first only on unofficialoccasions). 

[48] In a large town like Folkestone, for example, it is practicallyimpossible to buy any book but a "boomed" novel unless one hasascertained the names of the author, the book, the edition, and thepublisher. There is no index in existence kept up to date that suppliesthese particulars. If, for example, one wants--as I want (1) to read allthat I have not read of the work of Mr. Frank Stockton, (2) to read abook of essays by Professor Ray Lankaster the title of which I haveforgotten, and (3) to buy the most convenient edition of the works ofSwift, one has to continue wanting until the British Museum Librarychances to get in one's way. The book-selling trade supplies noinformation at all on these points. 

[49] One of the least satisfactory features of the intellectualatmosphere of the present time is the absence of good controversy. Tofollow closely an honest and subtle controversy, and to have arrived ata definite opinion upon some general question of real and practicalinterest and complicated reference, is assuredly the most educationalexercise in the world--I would go so far as to say that no person iscompletely educated who has not done as much. The memorable discussionsin which Huxley figured, for example, were extraordinarily stimulating. We lack that sort of thing now. A great number of people are expressingconflicting opinions upon all sorts of things, but there is a quiteremarkable shirking of plain issues of debate. There is no answeringback. There is much indirect answering, depreciation of the adversary, attempts to limit his publicity, restatements of the opposing opinion ina new way, but no conflict in the lists. We no longer fight obnoxiousviews, but assassinate them. From first to last, for example, there hasbeen no honest discussion of the fundamental issues in the Boer War. Something may be due to the multiplication of magazines and newspapers, and the confusion of opinions that has scattered thecontroversy-following public. It is much to be regretted that the lawsof copyright and the methods of publication stand in the way ofannotated editions of works of current controversial value. For example, Mr. Andrew Lang has assailed the new edition of the "Golden Bough. " Hiscriticisms, which are, no doubt, very shrewd and penetrating, ought tobe accessible with the text he criticizes. Yet numerous people will readhis comments who will never read the "Golden Bough;" they will accepthis dinted sword as proof of the slaughter of Mr. Fraser, and many willread the "Golden Bough" and never hear of Mr. Lang's comments. Whyshould it be so hopeless to suggest an edition of the "Golden Bough"with footnotes by Mr. Lang and Mr. Fraser's replies? There are all sortsof books to which Mr. Lang might add footnotes with infinite benefit toevery one. Mr. Mallock, again, is going to explain how Science andReligion stand at the present time. If only some one would explain inthe margin how Mr. Mallock stands, the thing would be complete. Such abook, again, as these "Anticipations" would stand a vast amount ofcontroversial footnoting. It bristles with pegs for discussion--vacantpegs; it is written to provoke. I hope that some publisher, sooner orlater, will do something of this kind, and will give us not only thetext of an author's work, but a series of footnotes and appendices byreputable antagonists. The experiment, well handled, might provesuccessful enough to start a fashion--a very beneficial fashion forauthors and readers alike. People would write twice as carefully andtwice as clearly with that possible second edition (with footnotes by Xand Y) in view. Imagine "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture" as itmight have been edited by the late Professor Huxley; Froude's edition ofthe "Grammar of Assent;" Mr. G. B. Shaw's edition of the works of Mr. Lecky; or the criticism of art and life of Ruskin, --the "Beauties ofRuskin" annotated by Mr. Whistler and carefully prepared for the pressby Professor William James. Like the tomato and the cucumber, every bookwould carry its antidote wrapped about it. Impossible, you say. But isit? Or is it only unprecedented? If novelists will consent to theillustration of their stories by artists whose chief aim appears to beto contradict their statements, I do not see why controversial writerswho believe their opinions are correct should object to the checking oftheir facts and logic by persons with a different way of thinking. Whyshould not men of opposite opinions collaborate in their discussion?

IX

THE FAITH, MORALS, AND PUBLIC POLICY OF THE NEW REPUBLIC

If the surmise of a developing New Republic--a Republic that mustultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developingamidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations andinstitutions--be indeed no idle dream, but an attainable possibility inthe future, and to that end it is that the preceding Anticipations havebeen mainly written, it becomes a speculation of very great interest toforecast something of the general shape and something even of certaindetails of that common body of opinion which the New Republic, when atlast it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we havesupposed this New Republic will already be consciously and pretty freelycontrolling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes, its broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determinethat still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but theopening phase. There are many processes, many aspects of things, thatare now, as it were, in the domain of natural laws and outside humancontrol, or controlled unintelligently and superstitiously, that in thefuture, in the days of the coming New Republic, will be definitely takenin hand as part of the general work of humanity, as indeed already, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the control ofpestilences has been taken in hand. And in particular, there are certainbroad questions much under discussion to which, thus far, I havepurposely given a value disproportionately small:--

While the New Republic is gathering itself together and becoming awareof itself, that other great element, which I have called the People ofthe Abyss, will also have followed out its destiny. For many decadesthat development will be largely or entirely out of all human control. To the multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations therewill have been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, andcollectively those masses will propound the general question, "What willyou do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?"If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with thisriddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx willguard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsiblewealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, thespreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsiblewealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work out, solong as there is such a thing as irresponsible wealth pervading thesocial body. That too the New Republic must in its very developmentovercome. In the preceding chapter it is clearly implicit that I believethat the New Republic, as its consciousness and influence developtogether, will meet, check, and control these things; but the broadprinciples upon which the control will go, the nature of the methodsemployed, still remain to be deduced. And to make that deduction, it isnecessary that the primary conception of life, the fundamental, religious, and moral ideas of these predominant men of the new timeshould first be considered. 

Now, quite inevitably, these men will be religious men. Beingthemselves, as by the nature of the forces that have selected them theywill certainly be, men of will and purpose, they will be disposed tofind, and consequently they will find, an effect of purpose in thetotality of things. Either one must believe the Universe to be one andsystematic, and held together by some omnipresent quality, or one mustbelieve it to be a casual aggregation, an incoherent accumulation withno unity whatsoever outside the unity of the personality regarding it. All science and most modern religious systems presuppose the former, andto believe the former is, to any one not too anxious to quibble, tobelieve in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of the future, like many of the saner men of to-day, having so formulated theirfundamental belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presumeto no possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will haveno positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in"that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (notdefined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will contentthemselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of anobstinately anthropomorphic theology, [50] they will regard the whole ofbeing, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation ofGod to their souls, and they will set themselves simply to thatrevelation, seeking its meaning towards themselves faithfully andcourageously. Manifestly the essential being of man in this life is hiswill; he exists consciously only to _do_; his main interest in life isthe choice between alternatives; and, since he moves through space andtime to effects and consequences, a general purpose in space and time isthe limit of his understanding. He can know God only under the semblanceof a pervading purpose, of which his own individual freedom of will is apart, but he can understand that the purpose that exists in space andtime is no more God than a voice calling out of impenetrable darkness isa man. To men of the kinetic type belief in God so manifest as purposeis irresistible, and, to all lucid minds, the being of God, save as thatgeneral atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended purpose in which ourindividual wills operate, is incomprehensible. To cling to any beliefmore detailed than this, to define and limit God in order to take holdof Him, to detach one's self and parts of the universe from God in somemysterious way in order to reduce life to a dramatic antagonism, is notfaith, but infirmity. Excessive strenuous belief is not faith. By faithwe disbelieve, and it is the drowning man, and not the strong swimmer, who clutches at the floating straw. It is in the nature of man, it is inthe present purpose of things, that the real world of our experience andwill should appear to us not only as a progressive existence in spaceand time, but as a scheme of good and evil. But choice, the antagonismof good and evil, just as much as the formulation of things in space andtime, is merely a limiting condition of human being, and in the thoughtof God as we conceive of Him in the light of faith, this antagonismvanishes. God is no moralist, God is no partisan; He comprehends andcannot be comprehended, and our business is only with so much of Hispurpose as centres on our individual wills. 

So, or in some such phrases, I believe, these men of the New Republicwill formulate their relationship to God. They will live to serve thispurpose that presents Him, without presumption and without fear. For thesame spacious faith that will render the idea of airing their egotismsin God's presence through prayer, or of any such quite personalintimacy, absurd, will render the idea of an irascible and punitiveDeity ridiculous and incredible.... 

The men of the New Republic will hold and understand quite clearly thedoctrine that in the real world of man's experience, there is Free Will. They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of hisexistence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that aconflict between motives that have different moral values constantlyarises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is sopuzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will knowthat in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as newsprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. Inthe abstract world of reasoning science there is no green, no colour atall, but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certainreaction of molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecularconsequences in the nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In theabstract world of reasoning science, moreover, there is a rigid andinevitable sequence of cause and effect; every act of man could beforetold to its uttermost detail, if only we knew him and all hiscircumstances fully; in the abstract world of reasoned science allthings exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite time. But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasonedscience, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinatescheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this worldof men and women, in this world where the grass is green and desirebeckons and the choice is often so wide and clear between the sense ofwhat is desirable and what is more widely and remotely right. In thisworld of sense and the daily life, these men will believe with anabsolute conviction, that there is free will and a personal moralresponsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen purpose which isthe sufficient revelation of God to them so far as this sphere of beinggoes.... 

The conception they will have of that purpose will necessarily determinetheir ethical scheme. It follows manifestly that if we do reallybelieve in Almighty God, the more strenuously and successfully we seekin ourselves and His world to understand the order and progress ofthings, and the more clearly we apprehend His purpose, the more assuredand systematic will our ethical basis become. 

If, like Huxley, we do not positively believe in God, then we may stillcling to an ethical system which has become an organic part of our livesand habits, and finding it manifestly in conflict with the purpose ofthings, speak of the non-ethical order of the universe. But to any onewhose mind is pervaded by faith in God, a non-ethical universe inconflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the Agnostic, is asincredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god withhoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believecompletely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. Theethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to theways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of thingscondemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is nowrevealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice uponwhich it was originally based. If the universe is non-ethical by ourpresent standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstructour ethics. To hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with oldhabits and traditions and sentiments may be, is to fall short of faith. 

Now, so far as the intellectual life of the world goes, this presenttime is essentially the opening phase of a period of ethicalreconstruction, a reconstruction of which the New Republic will possessthe matured result. Throughout the nineteenth century there has beensuch a shattering and recasting of fundamental ideas, of thepreliminaries to ethical propositions, as the world has never seenbefore. This breaking down and routing out of almost all the cardinalassumptions on which the minds of the Eighteenth Century dwelt securely, is a process akin to, but independent of, the development of mechanism, whose consequences we have traced. It is a part of that process ofvigorous and fearless criticism which is the reality of science, and ofwhich the development of mechanism and all that revolution in physicaland social conditions we have been tracing, is merely the vast imposingmaterial bye product. At present, indeed, its more obvious aspect on themoral and ethical side is destruction, any one can see the chips flying, but it still demands a certain faith and patience to see the form thatensues. But it is not destruction, any more than a sculptor's work isstone-breaking. 

The first chapter in the history of this intellectual development, itsdefinite and formal opening, coincides with the opening of thenineteenth century and the publication of Malthus's _Essay onPopulation_. Malthus is one of those cardinal figures in intellectualhistory who state definitely for all time, things apparent enough aftertheir formulation, but never effectively conceded before. He broughtclearly and emphatically into the sphere of discussion a vitallyimportant issue that had always been shirked and tabooed heretofore, thefundamental fact that the main mass of the business of human lifecentres about reproduction. He stated in clear, hard, decent, andunavoidable argument what presently Schopenhauer was to discover andproclaim, in language, at times, it would seem, quite unfitted fortranslation into English. And, having made his statement, Malthus leftit, in contact with its immediate results. 

Probably no more shattering book than the _Essay on Population_ has everbeen, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism ofthe Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear asdaylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthlygolden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until theproblems of human increase were manfully faced. It proffered nosuggestions for facing them (in spite of the unpleasant associations ofMalthus's name), it aimed simply to wither the Rationalistic Utopias ofthe time and by anticipation, all the Communisms, Socialisms, andEarthly Paradise movements that have since been so abundantly audible inthe world. That was its aim and its immediate effect. Incidentally itmust have been a torturing soul-trap for innumerable idealistic butintelligent souls. Its indirect effects have been altogether greater. Aiming at unorthodox dreamers, it has set such forces in motion as havedestroyed the very root-ideas of orthodox righteousness in the westernworld. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almostsimultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, that train of thoughtthat found expression and demonstration at last in the theory of naturalselection. As that theory has been more and more thoroughly assimilatedand understood by the general mind, it has destroyed, quietly butentirely, the belief in human equality which is implicit in all the"Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essentialequality, distorted only by tradition and early training, by theartifices of those devils of the Liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft" and"priestcraft, " an equality as little affected by colour as the equalityof a black chess pawn and a white, we discover that all men areindividual and unique, and, through long ranges of comparison, superiorand inferior upon countless scores. It has become apparent that wholemasses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim uponthe future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities ortrusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that theircharacteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in thecivilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts anddemoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to theirlevel, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenthcentury, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, havebogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist hasshirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism isa thing of the past, it is no longer a doctrine, but a faction. Theremust follow some newborn thing. 

And as effectually has the mass of criticism that centres about Darwindestroyed the dogma of the Fall upon which the whole intellectual fabricof Christianity rests. For without a Fall there is no redemption, andthe whole theory and meaning of the Pauline system is vain. Inconjunction with the wide vistas opened by geological and astronomicaldiscovery, the nineteenth century has indeed lost the very habit ofthought from which the belief in a Fall arose. It is as if a hand hadbeen put upon the head of the thoughtful man and had turned his eyesabout from the past to the future. In matters of intelligence, at least, if not yet in matters of ethics and conduct, this turning round hasoccurred. In the past thought was legal in its spirit, it deduced thepresent from pre-existing prescription, it derived everything from theoffences and promises of the dead; the idea of a universe of expiationwas the most natural theory amidst such processes. The purpose theolder theologians saw in the world was no more than therevenge--accentuated by the special treatment of a favoured minority--ofa mysteriously incompetent Deity exasperated by an unsatisfactorycreation. But modern thought is altogether too constructive and creativeto tolerate such a conception, and in the vaster past that has opened tous, it can find neither offence nor promise, only a spacious scheme ofevents, opening out--perpetually opening out--with a quality of finalpurpose as irresistible to most men's minds as it is incomprehensible, opening out with all that inexplicable quality of design that, forexample, some great piece of music, some symphony of Beethoven's, conveys. We see future beyond future and past behind past. It has beenlike the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious, before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes notthe narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky, ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of spaceand time. At first the dawn is cold--there is, at times, a quality ofterror almost in the cold clearness of the morning twilight; butinsensibly its coldness passes, the sky is touched with fire, andpresently, up out of the dayspring in the east, the sunlight will bepouring.... And these men of the New Republic will be going about in thedaylight of things assured. 

And men's concern under this ampler view will no longer be to work outa system of penalties for the sins of dead men, but to understand andparticipate in this great development that now dawns on the humanunderstanding. The insoluble problems of pain and death, gaunt, incomprehensible facts as they were, fall into place in the giganticorder that evolution unfolds. All things are integral in the mightyscheme, the slain builds up the slayer, the wolf grooms the horse intoswiftness, and the tiger calls for wisdom and courage out of man. Allthings are integral, but it has been left for men to be consciouslyintegral, to take, at last, a share in the process, to have wills thathave caught a harmony with the universal will, as sand grains flash intosplendour under the blaze of the sun. There will be many who will neverbe called to this religious conviction, who will lead their little liveslike fools, playing foolishly with religion and all the great issues oflife, or like the beasts that perish, having sense alone; but those who, by character and intelligence, are predestinate to participate in thereality of life, will fearlessly shape all their ethical determinationsand public policy anew, from a fearless study of themselves and theapparent purpose that opens out before them. 

Very much of the cry for faith that sounds in contemporary life soloudly, and often with so distressing a note of sincerity, comes fromthe unsatisfied egotisms of unemployed, and, therefore, unhappy andcraving people; but much is also due to the distress in the minds ofactive and serious men, due to the conflict of inductive knowledge, withconceptions of right and wrong deduced from unsound, but uncriticised, first principles. The old ethical principles, the principle ofequivalents or justice, the principle of self-sacrifice, the variousvague and arbitrary ideas of purity, chastity, and sexual "sin, " camelike rays out of the theological and philosophical lanterns men carriedin the darkness. The ray of the lantern indicated and directed, and onefollowed it as one follows a path. But now there has come a new view ofman's place in the scheme of time and space, a new illumination, dawn;the lantern rays fade in the growing brightness, and the lanterns thatshone so brightly are becoming smoky and dim. To many men this is nomore than a waning of the lanterns, and they call for new ones, or atrimming of the old. They blame the day for putting out these flares. And some go apart, out of the glare of life, into corners of obscurity, where the radiation of the lantern may still be faintly traced. But, indeed, with the new light there has come the time for new methods; thetime of lanterns, the time of deductions from arbitrary first principlesis over. The act of faith is no longer to follow your lantern, but toput it down. We can see about us, and by the landscape we must go. [51]

How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new timeand in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose that thesemen of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own?Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer, I believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin, that the scheme of being, in which we live is a struggle of existencesto expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and topropagate and increase themselves. But, being men of action, they willfeel nothing of the glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexuallyvitiated shareholder, Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. Thefinal object of this struggle among existences they will not understand;they will have abandoned the search for ultimates; they will state thisscheme of a struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote andspacious to enclose and explain all their possible activities. They willseek God's purpose in the sphere of their activities, and desire nomore, as the soldier in battle desires no more, than the immediateconflict before him. They will admit failure as an individual aspect ofthings, as a soldier seeking victory admits the possibility of death;but they will refuse to admit as a part of their faith in God that anyexistence, even if it is an existence that is presently entirely erased, can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the existences thatsurvive; it will be justified for ever in the modification it hasproduced in them. They will find in themselves--it must be remembered Iam speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men asa whole--a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put inorder, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They willall be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directnessand an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frameof their ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape theschemes of their individual wills, will be the elaboration of thatfuture world state to which all things are pointing. They will notconceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequentstagnation, but as a world state of active ampler human beings, full ofknowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations, the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of to-day, butstill struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrowrestrictions and for still more spacious objects than our vistas haverevealed. For that as a general end, for the special work thatcontributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and thelimiting rules of their lives. 

It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system, reconstructed in thelight of modern science and to meet the needs of such temperaments andcharacters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together and develop, will give very different values from those given by the existing systems(if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters ofconduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are veryclearly shown to be two--birth and death. All life is the effort of thething born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evadedeath, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping orrestriction, and to attain to effective procreation, to the victory ofanother birth. Procreation is the triumph of the living being overdeath; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, it is not onlyin his child but in the dissemination of his thought, the expression ofhis mind in things done and made, that his triumph is to be found. Andthe ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical systemwhich will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favourthe procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful inhumanity--beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and agrowing body of knowledge--and to check the procreation of base andservile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is meanand ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do thelatter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And themethod that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardiceand feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, themethod that has only one alternative, the method that must in some casesstill be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision deathis no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseriesof life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of thebitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly andpointless things.... 

The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and thealternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, andefficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and sillycreatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefullyhappy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, bornof unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheerincontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have littlepity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding ofsuch people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing inthe world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominableproceeding. Procreation is an avoidable thing for sane persons of eventhe most furious passions, and the men of the New Republic will holdthat the procreation of children who, by the circumstances of theirparentage, _must_ be diseased bodily or mentally--I do not think it willbe difficult for the medical science of the coming time to define suchcircumstances--is absolutely the most loathsome of all conceivable sins. They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of thepopulation--the small minority, for example, afflicted withindisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mentaldisorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving forintoxication--exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, andon the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foreseeany reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when thatsufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a gravecriminal is also insane will be regarded by them not as a reason formercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how they can thinkotherwise on the principles they will profess. 

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing orinflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of thepossibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that willmake killing worth the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith tokill, and they will have no superstitions about death. They willnaturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseasedor helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than acrime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men raised above abrutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as infinitelyworse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added toits natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of aman's actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seemsto prove him unfitted for free life in the world, consider himcarefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killingwill be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be madepainful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrentpunishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrentwill neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of thelife by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but goodscientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yeteven the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation of thesoul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderlyworld-state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the use ofdeterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children orwomen, perhaps, or for very cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, themen of the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least duringthe ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since mostacts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture norexasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I aminclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming timewill be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will haveanother aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain _for thesake of the pain_ is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafeand demoralizing for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under theseemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. Therulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers, warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. Peoplewho cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling thelives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment evento-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of theiropinions. 

And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years willdeal simply and logically not only with the business of death, but withbirth. At present the sexual morality of the civilized world is the mostillogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insaneprohibitions, foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possibleto imagine. Our current civilization is a sexual lunatic. And it haslost its reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth ofthings, largely through the difficulties that have stood in the way, anddo still, in a diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sanediscussion of the matter as a whole. To approach it is to approachexcitement. So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexuallives that to mention the very word "sexual" is to set them stirring, tobrighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with aflavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets andhiding our shames. One of the most curious revelations of this factoccurred only a few years ago, when the artless outpourings in fictionof certain young women who had failed to find light on problems thatpressed upon them for solution (and which it was certainly theirbusiness as possible wives and mothers to solve) roused all sorts ofrespectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now, there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for thepreservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression ofmatter that is merely intended to excite than at present obtains, andthe chief of these reasons lies in the need of preserving the young froma premature awakening, and indeed, in the interests of civilization, inpositively delaying the period of awakening, retarding maturity andlengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as possible. But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; innocence is reallyno more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and thebashfulness that hampers this discussion, that permits it only in afurtive silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames andcruelties, in miserable households and pitiful crises, in the productionof countless, needless, and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carryour decency so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in anon-natural way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with amystic religious quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakednesscould possibly be. 

The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business of the sexualrelations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people of theemergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value ofsexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which willconstitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we candissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questionsbecome of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment atchess, or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then thequestion of sexual relationships would be entirely on all fours with, and probably very analogous to, the question of golf. In each case itwould be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far thething was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressivebad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied mancontinually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspringwould be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied manwho devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links. But no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives of other humanbeings--the golfer must employ his caddie. It is entirely the matter ofbirths, and a further consideration to be presently discussed, thatmakes this analogy untrue. It does not, however, make it so untrue as todo away with the probability that in many cases the emergent men of thenew time will consider sterile gratification a moral and legitimatething. St. Paul tells us that it is better to marry than to burn, but tobeget children on that account will appear, I imagine, to these comingmen as an absolutely loathsome proceeding. They will stifle no spread ofknowledge that will diminish the swarming misery of childhood in theslums, they will regard the disinclination of the witless "Society"woman to become a mother as a most amiable trait in her folly. In ourbashfulness about these things we talk an abominable lot of nonsense;all this uproar one hears about the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfitand the future of the lower races takes on an entirely differentcomplexion directly we face known, if indelicate, facts. Most of thehuman types, that by civilized standards are undesirable, are quitewilling to die out through such suppressions if the world will onlyencourage them a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they donot desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dreadit. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that the menof the New Republic will deliberately shape their public policy alongthese lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and allplaces where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a landlegislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatteron the move; they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out ofa child, so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculationfor the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a childthe first charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world. Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by the products ofthe security it creates. The development of science has lifted famineand pestilence from the shoulders of man, and it will yet lift war--forsome other end than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finally crueland horrible reproduction. 

No doubt the sentimentalist and all whose moral sense has beenvigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadfulsuggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed"of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of theruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminatingevil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and toooften fearfully miserable children. _That_ is something more than asentimental horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to-day, the spectacle of a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man, quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married tosome underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman, and guilty of the lives of ten or twelve ugly ailing children, isregarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and the two parentsconsider their reproductive excesses as giving them a distinct claimupon less fecund and more prosperous people. Benevolent persons throwthemselves with peculiar ardour into a case of this sort, and quitepassionate efforts are made to strengthen the mother against furthereventualities and protect the children until they attain to nubileyears. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is presentlydistracted by a new case.... Yet so powerful is the suggestion ofcurrent opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what ahorrible and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point ofview of social physiology, appears. 

And directly such principles as these come into effective operation, andI believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of thehuman history beginning, there will recommence a process of physical andmental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the averageman, that has virtually been in suspense during the greater portion ofthe historical period. It is possible that in the last hundred years, inthe more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity haspositively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers, seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an atmosphere ofmystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of theirresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide ofmiserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps halfthe population of the world, in every generation, restrained from ortempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weakand sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animatethe predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and Ihave little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned andachieved. 

If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future, on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under nocircumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, morethan the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning, the raw material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is notonly a sound strong body but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is afabric of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine ofmore or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training andan æsthetic culture. He is the child not only of parents but of a homeand of an education. He has to be carefully guarded from physical andmoral contagions. A reasonable probability of ensuring home andeducation and protection without any parasitic dependence on peopleoutside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a moralbirth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, thissweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the lateMr. Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated--but, so far as I canunderstand him, did not. But whether it works out to the taking over ofthe permanent monogamic marriage of the old morality, as a goingconcern, is another matter. Upon this matter I must confess my views ofthe trend of things in the future do not seem to be finally shaped. Thequestion involves very obscure physiological and psychologicalconsiderations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries intothese matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hardto come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be pairedoff in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamichomes for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certainfreedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit, this might beso. But I am convinced that a large proportion of married couples in theworld to-day are not completely and happily matched, that there is muchmutual limitation, mutual annulment and mutual exasperation. Home withan atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it isthe interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of allthese things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples isuniversally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice)should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of twochildless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit anampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economicdisadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminineprofession, while only for an incidental sort of man is marriage asource of income, and further by the fact that most women have a periodof maximum attractiveness after which it would be grossly unfair to castthem aside. From the point of view we are discussing, the efficientmother who can make the best of her children, is the most important sortof person in the state. She is a primary necessity to the comingcivilization. Can the wife in any sort of polygamic arrangement, or awoman of no assured status, attain to the maternal possibilities of theideal monogamic wife? One is disposed to answer, No. But then, on theother hand, does the ordinary monogamic wife do that? We are dealingwith the finer people of the future, strongly individualized people, whowill be much freer from stereotyped moral suggestions and much lessinclined to be dealt with wholesale than the people of to-day. 

I have already shown cause in these Anticipations to expect a period ofdisorder and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am inclined tothink that, when the New Republic emerges on the other side of thisdisorder, there will be a great number of marriage contracts possiblebetween men and women, and that the strong arm of the State will insistonly upon one thing--the security and welfare of the child. Theinevitable removal of births from the sphere of an uncontrollableProvidence to the category of deliberate acts, will enormously enhancethe responsibility of the parent--and of the State that has failed toadequately discourage the philoprogenitiveness of the parent--towardsthe child. Having permitted the child to come into existence, publicpolicy and the older standard of justice alike demand, under these newconditions, that it must be fed, cherished, and educated, not merely upto a respectable minimum, but to the full height of its possibilities. The State will, therefore, be the reserve guardian of all children. Ifthey are being undernourished, if their education is being neglected, the State will step in, take over the responsibility of theirmanagement, and enforce their charge upon the parents. The firstliability of a parent will be to his child, and for his child; even thedues of that darling of our current law, the landlord, will stand secondto that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and theState to the child and the future runs quite counter to the generalideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under themost pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-dayare, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result, though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priestand moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast multitude oflittle souls into this world, for whom there is neither sufficient food, nor love, nor schools, nor any prospect at all in life but theinsufficient bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religionand purity to the sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops, who have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know nothing of theindescribable bitterness of a handicapped entry into this world, to drawa complacent contrast with irreligious France. It is a result that mustnecessarily be recognized in its reality, and faced by these men whowill presently emerge to rule the world; men who will have neither theplea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor dogmatic revelation toexcuse such elaborate cruelty. 

And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality of humanbirth, the New Republicans will see to it that the children who do atlast effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. Thehalf-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds andpropounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to-daymust needs entrust the intelligences of their children; theseheavy-handed barber-surgeons of the mind, these schoolmasters, withtheir ragtag and bobtail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will besucceeded by capable, self-respecting men and women, constituting themost important profession of the world. The windy pretences of "formingcharacter, " supplying moral training, and so forth, under which theeducationalist of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of hisproper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will nolonger be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted tosubordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of hispupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training, beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capableperson doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that hisutmost province is only a part of the educational process, that equallyimportant educational influences are the home and the world of thoughtabout the pupil and himself. The whole world will be thinking andlearning; the old idea of "completing" one's education will havevanished with the fancy of a static universe; every school will be apreparatory school, every college. The school and college will probablygive only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so, thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide andreasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, atraining in the use of those stores of fact that science has made. Soequipped, the young man and young woman will go on to the technicalschool of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporarypractice for their special efficiency, and to the literature ofcontemporary thought for their general development.... 

And while the emergent New Republic is deciding to provide for theswarming inferiority of the Abyss, and developing the morality andeducational system of the future, in this fashion, it will be attackingthat mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and sothreatening under present conditions. The attack will, of course, bemade along lines that the developing science of economics will trace inthe days immediately before us. A scheme of death duties and of heavygraduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes, with, perhaps, in addition, a system of terminable liability for borrowers, will probably suffice tocontrol the growth of this creditor elephantiasis. The detailedcontrivances are for the specialist to make. If there is such a thing asbitterness in the public acts of the New Republicans, it will probablybe found in the measures that will be directed against those who areparasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic, upon the social body, eitherby means of gambling, by manipulating the medium of exchange, or by suchinterventions upon legitimate transactions as, for example, the legaltrade union in Great Britain contrives in the case of house property andland. Simply because he fails more often than he succeeds, there isstill a disposition among sentimental people to regard the gambler orthe speculator as rather a dashing, adventurous sort of person, and tocontrast his picturesque gallantry with the sober certainties of honestmen. The men of the New Republic will be obtuse to the glamour of suchromance; they will regard the gambler simply as a mean creature whohangs about the social body in the hope of getting something fornothing, who runs risks to filch the possessions of other men, exactlyas a thief does. They will put the two on a footing, and the generousgambler, like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectualprovision for his little weakness, will cease to complain that his worstenemy is himself. And, in dealing with speculation, the New Republicwill have the power of an assured faith and purpose, and the resourcesof an economic science that is as yet only in its infancy. In suchmatters the New Republic will entertain no superstition of _laissezfaire_. Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, andas liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalentbut imperfect machine. 

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it dealwith the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tacklethat alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly notas races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, thoughprobably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-statewith a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certainstandard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will havecast aside any coddling laws to save adult men from themselves. [52] Itwill tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester, no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnantplague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenshipit will let come--white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will bethe test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is saidthat the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. Ifthere are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for thelegislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason forthe special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurabletendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolishthe Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasiansolicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude peopletake up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewishfaces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jewasserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singulartactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jewsare intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, andcunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jewis mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner thanthe average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness heis simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers withthose of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but sodo the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality todread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediævalism, asentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the presentprogress of things. He was the mediæval Liberal; his persistentexistence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days oftheir ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping"nationalisms, " and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming ofthe world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of theJew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probablylose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease tobe a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for therest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellowpeople, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?

Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take itthey will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I seeit, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of thefuture, it is their portion to die out and disappear. 

The world has a purpose greater than happiness; our lives are to serveGod's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but worksthrough him to greater issues.... This, I believe, will be thedistinctive quality of the New Republican's belief. And, for thatreason, I have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief inhuman immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any_post mortem_ state of rewards and punishments because of his faith inthe sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reactionbetween this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives. Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tendin practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, toa greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may findthat issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at presentwe have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, therelevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortalityof our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future ofour race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitiousAnticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow andtroubled pool. 

For that future these men will live and die. 

FOOTNOTES:

[50] As, for example, that God is an omniscient mind. This is the lastvestige of that barbaric theology which regarded God as a vigorous butuncertain old gentleman with a beard and an inordinate lust for praiseand propitiation. The modern idea is, indeed, scarcely more reasonablethan the one it has replaced. A mind thinks, and feels, and wills; itpasses from phase to phase; thinking and willing are a succession ofmental states which follow and replace one another. But omniscience is acomplete knowledge, not only of the present state, but of all past andfuture states, and, since it is all there at any moment, it cannotconceivably pass from phase to phase, it is stagnant, infinite, andeternal. An omniscient mind is as impossible, therefore, as anomnipresent moving body. God is outside our mental scope; only by faithcan we attain Him; our most lucid moments serve only to render clearerHis inaccessibility to our intelligence. We stand a little way up in ascale of existences that may, indeed, point towards Him, but can neverbring Him to our scope. As the fulness of the conscious mental existenceof a man stands to the subconscious activities of an amoeba or of avisceral ganglion cell, so our reason forces us to admit other possiblemental existences may stand to us. But such an existence, inconceivablygreat as it would be to us, would be scarcely nearer that transcendentalGod in whom the serious men of the future will, as a class, believe. 

[51] It is an interesting byway from our main thesis to speculate on thespiritual pathology of the functionless wealthy, the half-educatedindependent women of the middle class, and the people of the Abyss. While the segregating new middle class, whose religious and moraldevelopment forms our main interest, is developing its spacious andconfident Theism, there will, I imagine, be a steady decay in thevarious Protestant congregations. They have played a noble part in thehistory of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulæand organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity--thattouch of contempt for the unsubstantial æsthetic, which has alwaysdistinguished Protestantism--is naturally repellent to the irresponsiblerich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face ofProtestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against theself-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich as aclass and the people of the Abyss, so far as they move towards anyexisting religious body, will be attracted by the moral kindliness, thepicturesque organization and venerable tradition of the Roman CatholicChurch. We are only in the very beginning of a great Roman Catholicrevival. The diversified countryside of the coming time will show many asplendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace, towering amidstthe abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving platformsof the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that willadorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, all glorious with bannersand censer-bearers, and the meek blue-shaven priests and barefooted, rope-girdled, holy men. And the artful politician of the coming days, until the broom of the New Republic sweep him up, will arrange themiraculous planks of his platform always with an eye upon the priest. Within the ample sheltering arms of the Mother Church many eccentriccults will develop. The curious may study the works of M. Huysmans tolearn of the mystical propitiation of God, Who made heaven and earth, bythe bedsores of hysterical girls. The future as I see it swarms withDurtals and Sister Teresas; countless ecstatic nuns, holding their Makeras it were _in deliciæ_, will shelter from the world in simple butcostly refuges of refined austerity. Where miracles are needed, miracleswill occur. 

Except for a few queer people, nourished on "Maria Monk" and suchlikeanti-papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants leftamong the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main currentwill probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of thefaith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish asTheosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whitesof her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James inhuman immortality, and I do not see why that lady should stick at onedogma amidst the present quite insatiable demand for creeds. Shintoismand either a cleaned or, more probably, a scented Obi, might in vigoroushands be pushed to a very considerable success in the coming years; andI do not see any absolute impossibility in the idea of an after-dinnerwitch-smelling in Park Lane with a witchdoctor dressed in feathers. Itmight be made amazingly picturesque. People would attend it with an airof intellectual liberality, not, of course, believing in it absolutely, but admitting "there must be Something in it. " That Something in it!"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God, " and after that he isready to do anything with his mind and soul. It is by faith wedisbelieve. 

And, of course, there will be much outspoken Atheism and Anti-religionof the type of the Parisian Devil-Worship imbecilities. Young men ofmeans will determine to be "wicked. " They will do silly things that willstrike them as being indecent and blasphemous and dreadful--black massesand suchlike nonsense--and then they will get scared. The sort of thingit will be to shock orthodox maiden aunts and make Olympus ring withlaughter. A taking sort of nonsense already loose, I find, among veryyoung men is to say, "Understand, I am non-moral. " Two thoroughlyrespectable young gentlemen coming from quite different circles haverecently introduced their souls to me in this same formula. Both, Irejoice to remark, are married, both are steady and industrious youngmen, trustworthy in word and contract, dressed in accordance withcurrent conceptions, and behaving with perfect decorum. One, no doubtfor sinister ends, aspires to better the world through a Socialisticpropaganda. That is all. But in a tight corner some day that sillylittle formula may just suffice to trip up one or other of these men. Tomany of the irresponsible rich, however, that little "Understand, I amnon-moral" may prove of priceless worth. 

[52] _Vide_ Mr. Archdall Read's excellent and suggestive book, "ThePresent Evolution of Man. "

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