ership, for the most part, and more easily corrected than perversity
in the ranks. So the reign of democracy was successful enough while
society kept the simpler state.

But that simpler state is gone. We who are beyond middle age may say
that we have seen it disappear. We have witnessed a miraculous
transformation of the earth and of the people who dwell on it. We have
seen the passing of Aladdin, who rubbed his magical electric lamp as he
went calling Afreets from the air to be the common servants of man. A
change has been wrought within fifty years that is measureless, not only
in itself, but in its effects on the human race. The people who whisper
in each other's ears across a continent; who know at noon-time in
Nebraska what happened in the morning at Samarcand; the people to whom a
hundred leagues are neighborhood, and a thousand but easy distance; for
whom there is little mystery left on the face of the earth, nor anything
hidden from their eyes; these people of our day are not in the likeness
of the men and women who ambled horseback or rode in coaches from town
to town, and who were content with a weekly mail. The fitting and
furniture of mind that would make a safe member of society and a good
citizen out of the man of small horizons, who lived the narrower life of
a generation or two ago, are perilously scant for these times.

It is true that all the wonderful quickening of life which has occurred
carries something of education in itself, and that men learn by living
under the conditions of the present day; but the learning caught in that
way is of the dangerous kind. It is the delusive knowledge of the
surface of things; the deceitful lore which breeds mischievous beliefs
and makes them fanatical. It goes but a little way, if at all, toward
the saving of society, as against the unrest, the discontent, the
desire, which torment such an age of revolution as ours.

And the threatening fact is this: that ignorant opinions have acquired
at the present day a capacity for harm enormously increased over that of
the elder times. They share the magnified potency that is given to all
things, good or ill, by the science of the modern man. Its million
tongues are lent to them for propagation; but that is a matter of small
seriousness compared with the boundless ease of combination which it
offers to them at the same time. It is in that appalling facility of
alliance and organization, which present conditions have given