emark in the official empire of China, is to be traced in a
greater or lesser degree in the nominal organization and public
tradition 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 on
a conception of a number of comparatively small, internally homogeneous,
agricultural states, a bunch of pre-Johannesburg Transvaals,
communicating little, and each constituting a separate autonomous
democracy of free farmers--slaveholding or slaveless. Every country in
the world, indeed, that is organized at all, has been organized with a
view to stability within territorial limits; no country has been
organized with any foresight of development and inevitable change, or
with the slightest reference to the practical revolution in topography
that the new means of transit involve. And since this is so, and since
humanity is most assuredly embarked upon a series of changes of which we
know as yet only the opening phases, a large part of the history of the
coming years will certainly record more or less conscious endeavours to
adapt these obsolete and obsolescent contrivances for the management of
public affairs to the new and continually expanding and changing
requirements of the social body, to correct or overcome the traditions
that were once wisdom and which are now obstruction, and to burst the
straining boundaries that were sufficient for the ancient states. There
are here no signs of a millennium. Internal reconstruction, while men
are still limited, egotistical, passionate, ignorant, and ignorantly
led, means seditions and revolutions, and the rectification of frontiers
means wars. But before we go on to these conflicts and wars certain
general social reactions must be considered.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[21] To these two primary classes the more complicated societies have
added others. There is the priest, almost always in the social order of
the pre-railway period, an integral part, a functional organ of the
social body, and there are the lawyer and the physician. And in the
towns--constituting, indeed, the towns--there appear, as an outgrowth of
the toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's direct
control, the craftsman, the merchan