nt chapter. In the course
of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take a few concrete
glimpses of households, costumes, conveyances, and conveniences of the
coming time, but only as incidental realizations of points in this
general thesis. And now, assuming, as we must necessarily do, the
soundness of these earlier speculations, we have arrived at a stage when
we may consider how the existing arrangements for the ostensible
government of the State are likely to develop through their own inherent
forces, and how they are likely to be affected by the processes we have
forecast.

So far, this has been a speculation upon the probable development of a
civilized society _in vacuo_. Attention has been almost exclusively
given to the forces of development, and not to the forces of conflict
and restraint. We have ignored the boundaries of language that are flung
athwart the great lines of modern communication, we have disregarded the
friction of tariffs, the peculiar groups of prejudices and irrational
instincts that inspire one miscellany of shareholders, workers,
financiers, and superfluous poor such as the English, to hate,
exasperate, lie about, and injure another such miscellany as the French
or the Germans. Moreover, we have taken very little account of the fact
that, quite apart from nationality, each individual case of the new
social order is developing within the form of a legal government based
on conceptions of a society that has been superseded by the advent of
mechanism. It is this last matter that we are about to take into
consideration.

Now, this age is being constantly described as a "Democratic" age;
"Democracy" is alleged to have affected art, literature, trade and
religion alike in the most remarkable ways. It is not only tacitly
present in the great bulk of contemporary thought that this "Democracy"
is now dominant, but that it is becoming more and more overwhelmingly
predominant as the years pass. Allusions to Democracy are so abundant,
deductions from its influence so confident and universal, that it is
worth while to point out what a very hollow thing the word in most cases
really is, a large empty object in thought, of the most vague and faded
associations and the most attenuated content, and to inquire just
exactly what the original implications and present realities of
"Democracy" may be. The inquiry will leave us with a very different
conception of the nature and future of this sort of po