ople of the year 2000--or thereabouts--from the reaction of
these classes we have attempted to define.

To begin with, it may prove convenient to speculate upon the trend of
development of that class about which we have the most grounds for
certainty in the coming time. The shareholding class, the rout of the
Abyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to the
varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most
typical portion of the central body, the section containing the
scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we can
postulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways of
thought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they will
radiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even,
I think, deduce some conception of the home in which a fairly typical
example 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, should
imply now, and certainly will imply in the future, that he has received
an education of a certain definite type; he will have a general
acquaintance with the scientific interpretation of the universe, and he
will have acquired certain positive and practical habits of mind. If the
methods of thought of any individual in this central body are not
practical and positive, he will tend to drift out of it to some more
congenial employment. He will almost necessarily have a strong
imperative to duty quite apart from whatever theological opinions he may
entertain, because if he has not such an inherent imperative, life will
have very many more alluring prospects than this. His religious
conclusions, whatever they may be, will be based upon some orderly
theological system that must have honestly admitted and reconciled his
scientific beliefs; the emotional and mystical elements in his religion
will be subordinate or absent. Essentially he will be a moral man,
certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered
way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies
to thought and work--that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If
sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,--a
point we must leave open here--it will appear without any trappings of
sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's
sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to th