For our ability to exchange our manufactures for food will grow
steadily less, as the self-indulgent and 'work-shy' labourer succeeds in
gaining his wishes. If the coal begins to give out, the retreat will
become a rout.

We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began
with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of
industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. Within 200
years, it may be--for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents
which will retard the flow of the stream--the hideous new towns which
disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have
been reclaimed for the plough. Humanitarian legislation, so far from
arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same
may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters. It is indeed
instructive to observe how cupidity and sentiment, which (with
pugnacity) are the only passions which the practical politician needs to
consider, usually defeat their own ends. The working man is sawing at
the branch on which he is seated. He may benefit for a time a minority
of his own class, but only by sealing the doom of the rest. A densely
populated country, which is unable to feed itself, can never be a
working-man's paradise, a land of short hours and high wages. And the
sentimentalist, kind only to be cruel, unwittingly promotes precisely
the results which he most deprecates, though they are often much more
beneficial than his own aims. The evil that he would he does not; and
the good that he would not, that he sometimes does.

For, much as we must regret the apparently inevitable ruin of the upper
and upper middle classes, to which England in the past has owed the
major part of her greatness, we cannot regard the trend of events as an
unmixed misfortune. The industrial revolution has no doubt had some
beneficial results. It has founded the British Empire, the most
interesting and perhaps the most successful experiment in government on
a large scale that the world has yet seen. It has foiled two formidable
attempts to place Europe under the heel of military monarchies. It has
brought order and material civilisation to many parts of the world which
before were barbarous. But these achievements have been counterbalanced
by many evils, and in any case they have done their work. The
aggregation of mankind in large towns is itself a misfortune; the life
of great cities is wholesome neith