geneous body--big men and
little men, indeed, but with no dividing lines--of more or less expert
mechanics and engineers, with a certain common minimum of education and
intelligence, and probably a common-class consciousness--a new body, a
new force, in the world's history.

For this body to exist implies the existence of much more than the
primary and initiating nucleus of engineers and skilled mechanics. If it
is an educated class, its existence implies a class of educators, and
just as far as it does get educated the schoolmasters will be skilled
and educated men. The shabby-genteel middle-class schoolmaster of the
England of to-day, in--or a little way out of--orders, with his
smattering of Greek, his Latin that leads nowhere, his fatuous
mathematics, his gross ignorance of pedagogics, and his incomparable
snobbishness, certainly does not represent the schoolmaster of this
coming class. Moreover, the new element will necessarily embody its
collective, necessarily distinctive, and unprecedented thoughts in a
literature of its own, its development means the development of a new
sort of writer and of new elements in the press. And since, if it does
emerge, a revolution in the common schools of the community will be a
necessary part of the process, then its emergence will involve a
revolutionary change in the condition of classes that might otherwise
remain as they are now--the older craftsman, for example.

The process of attraction will not end even there; the development of
more and more scientific engineering and of really adaptable operatives
will render possible agricultural contrivances that are now only dreams,
and the diffusion of this new class over the country side--assuming the
reasoning in my second chapter to be sound--will bring the lever of the
improved schools under the agriculturist. The practically autonomous
farm of the old epoch will probably be replaced by a great variety of
types of cultivation, each with its labour-saving equipment. In this, as
in most things, the future spells variation. The practical abolition of
impossible distances over the world will tend to make every district
specialize in the production for which it is best fitted, and to
develop that production with an elaborate precision and economy. The
chief opposing force to this tendency will be found in those countries
where the tenure of the land is in small holdings. A population of small
agriculturists that has really got itsel