roletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the
popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to
conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as
great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the
proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that
what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class
existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture.
Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to
give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the
civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social
gains of the future.

The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by
its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from
certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the
principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured
households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for
decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and
exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will
alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the
streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the
cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.

For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the
landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins
with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance.
This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the
ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however,
that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the
war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the
shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially
the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with
the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a
rational character and of the influence of higher types.

A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by
effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious
community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
household has to pi