Certain interesting side questions I may glance at here, only for the
present, at least, to set them aside unanswered, the reaction, for
example, of this probable development of a great mass of educated and
intelligent efficients upon the status and quality of the medical
profession, and the influence of its novel needs in either modifying the
existing legal body or calling into being a parallel body of more expert
and versatile guides and assistants in business operations. But from the
mention of this latter section one comes to another possible centre of
aggregation in the social welter. Opposed in many of their most
essential conditions to the capable men who are of primary importance in
the social body, is the great and growing variety of non-productive but
active men who are engaged in more or less necessary operations of
organization, promotion, advertisement, and trade. There are the
business managers, public and private, the political organizers,
brokers, commission agents, the varying grades of financier down to the
mere greedy camp followers of finance, the gamblers pure and simple, and
the great body of their dependent clerks, typewriters, and assistants.
All this multitude will have this much in common, that it will be
dealing, not with the primary inexorable logic of natural laws, but with
the shifting, uncertain prejudices and emotions of the general mass of
people. It will be wary and cunning rather than deliberate and
intelligent, smart rather than prompt, considering always the appearance
and effect before the reality and possibilities of things. It will
probably tend to form a culture about the political and financial
operator as its ideal and central type, opposed to, and conflicting
with, the forces of attraction that will tend to group the new social
masses about the scientific engineer.[28]...

Here, then (in the vision of the present writer), are the main social
elements of the coming time: (i.) the element of irresponsible
property; (ii.) the helpless superseded poor, that broad base of mere
toilers now no longer essential; (iii.) a great inchoate mass of more or
less capable people engaged more or less consciously in applying the
growing body of scientific knowledge to the general needs, a great mass
that will inevitably tend to organize itself in a system of
interdependent educated classes with a common consciousness and aim, but
which may or may not succeed in doing so; and (iv.) a possibly