les, and they are permeating
these peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants of
our present state. With the spread of these conveniences there is no
corresponding spread of Christianity. These people will not always
remain in the ring fence of their present regions; their superseded
princes, and rulers, and public masters, and managers, will presently
come to swell the shareholding mass of the appropriating Empire.
Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into these districts, and under
the influence of their customs, intermarriages and interracial reaction
will increase; in a world which is steadily abolishing locality, the
compromise of local concessions, of localized recognition of the "custom
of the country," cannot permanently avail. Statesmen will have to face
the alternative of either widening the permissible variations of the
marriage contract, or of acute racial and religious stresses, of a vast
variety of possible legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body of
self-respecting people, outside the law and public respect, a body that
will confer a touch of credit upon, because it will share the stigma of,
the deliberately dissolute and criminal. And whether the moral law
shrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness--as in religious matters the
Church of England, for example, has shrivelled to the proportions of a
mere sectarian practice--or whether it broadens itself to sustain
justice in a variety of sexual contracts, the nett result, so far as our
present purpose goes, will be the same. All these forces, making for
moral relaxation in the coming time, will probably be greatly enhanced
by the line of development certain sections of the irresponsible wealthy
will almost certainly follow.

Let me repeat that the shareholding rich man of the new time is in a
position of freedom almost unparalleled in the history of men. He has
sold his permission to control and experiment with the material wealth
of the community for freedom--for freedom from care, labour,
responsibility, custom, local usage and local attachment. He may come
back again into public affairs if he likes--that is his private concern.
Within the limits of the law and his capacity and courage, he may do as
the imagination of his heart directs. Now, such an experimental and
imperfect creature as man, a creature urged by such imperious passions,
so weak in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receives
such absolute freedom a