physical units of the community.
But you forget that some millions will remain behind, who cannot flee.
Have you no obligations to these?

'Besides this, you do not seem to perceive that the ultimate drift of
the new gospel is toward anarchy. The return to nature is practically
a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they
grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England
return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat
upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content.
There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops
capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself
new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You
save yourself from the collisions of life; but it is in such collisions
that the finest fires are struck out of the heart of humanity. Again,
I say, any course of action must be judged by its collective effect
before it can be rightly understood. It is not the individual that
counts, but the race. A good for the individual is not permissible
unless it is a good also for the race. I do not admit that your new
way of life is an entire good for you, for I believe you must in time
suffer from your isolation; but even if I did admit it, I should deny
your right to it, if in its large effects it means an ill for the race.
Would you venture to say that the race would profit by it if your
example were largely imitated? I think you dare not say so much, for
you must be aware that the general desertion of cities would mean the
decay of commerce and of the arts, the arrest of progress, and national
disintegration. And if your own personal example would bear only evil
fruit were it elevated to a law of life, it stands condemned.

'For my own part, I am where you left me. I am in the same
rooms--dull, stuffy, inconvenient--you know all about them. I breathe
quantities of bad air every day, and see a hundred things that distress
me. I go three nights a week to the room in Lucraft's Row; struggle
with the young barbarians of the slums, and am content if I see but a
few signs of order evolving themselves out of chaos. A week ago I was
knocked down by a ruffian, who came next day to apologise on the
three-fold ground that he was drunk, that he did not know it was me he
struck, and that if he had known he never would have done it. My
ruffian was very penitent. He has since