s. But it has Trusts; and it has millionaires whose factories,
fenced in by live electric wires and defended by Pinkerton retainers
with magazine rifles, would have made a Radical of Reginald Front de
Boeuf. Would Washington or Franklin have lifted a finger in the cause
of American Independence if they had foreseen its reality?

No: what Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon could not do with all the physical
force and moral prestige of the State in their hands, cannot be done by
enthusiastic criminals and lunatics. Even the Jews, who, from Moses to
Marx and Lassalle, have inspired all the revolutions, have had to
confess that, after all, the dog will return to his vomit and the sow
that was washed to her wallowing in the mire; and we may as well make up
our minds that Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spite
of "movements" and all revolutions, until his nature is changed. Until
then, his early successes in building commercial civilizations (and such
civilizations, Good Heavens!) are but preliminaries to the inevitable
later stage, now threatening us, in which the passions which built the
civilization become fatal instead of productive, just as the same
qualities which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destruction
when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear
head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of
selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of
degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants,
varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations
relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when
selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty
pugnacity and greed have ceased to act as selective agents and have
begun to obstruct and destroy, rushes downwards and backwards with a
suddenness that enables an observer to see with consternation the upward
steps of many centuries retraced in a single lifetime. This has often
occurred even within the period covered by history; and in every
instance the turning point has been reached long before the attainment,
or even the general advocacy on paper, of the levelling-up of the mass
to the highest point attainable by the best nourished and cultivated
normal individuals.

We must therefore frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is
capable of net progress. There will always be an illusion of progress,
because w