y as So-and-so's Hundred
Thousand Copy Success. Instead of "everyone" talking of the Great New
Book, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly admitting they don't
read that sort of thing. One gets used to literary booms just as one
gets used to motor cars, they are no longer marvellous, universally
significant things, but merely something that goes by with much
unnecessary noise and leaves a faint offence in the air. Distinctly we
segregate. And while no one dominates, while for all this bawling there
are really no great authors of imperial dimensions, indeed no great
successes to compare with the Waverley boom, or the boom of Macaulay's
History, many men, too fine, too subtle, too aberrant, too unusually
fresh for any but exceptional readers, men who would probably have
failed to get a hearing at all in the past, can now subsist quite
happily with the little sect they have found, or that has found them.
They live safely in their islands; a little while ago they could not
have lived at all, or could have lived only on the shameful bread of
patronage, and yet it is these very men who are often most covetously
bitter against the vulgar preferences of the present day.

V

THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY

In the preceding four chapters there has been developed, in a clumsy
laborious way, a smudgy, imperfect picture of the generalized civilized
state of the coming century. In terms, vague enough at times, but never
absolutely indefinite, the general distribution of the population in
this state has been discussed, and its natural development into four
great--but in practice intimately interfused--classes. It has been
shown--I know not how convincingly--that as the result of forces that
are practically irresistible, a world-wide process of social and moral
deliquescence is in progress, and that a really functional social body
of engineering, managing men, scientifically trained, and having common
ideals and interests, is likely to segregate and disentangle itself from
our present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been
pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing
variety of morals, _menages_, occupations and types, at present so
mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the
promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness
into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted
colours will be greatly repeated in this prese