strike a
contemporary if he or she could be transferred to the new order we are
trying to evolve.

[26] Chapman & Hall.

It would be a world and a life in no fundamental respect different
from the world of to-day, made up of the same creatures as ourselves,
as limited in capacity if not in outlook, as hasty, as quick to take
offence, as egotistical essentially, as hungry for attention, as
easily discouraged--they would indeed be better educated and better
trained, less goaded and less exasperated, with ampler opportunities
for their finer impulses and smaller scope for rage and secrecy, but
they would still be human. At bottom it would still be a struggle for
individual ends, albeit ennobled individual ends; for self-gratification
and self-realization against external difficulty and internal
weakness. Self-gratification would be sought more keenly in
self-development and self-realization in service, but that is a change
of tone and not of nature. We shall still be individuals. You might,
indeed, were you suddenly flung into it, fail to note altogether for a
long time the widest of the differences between the Socialist State
and our present one--the absence of that worrying urgency to earn,
that sense of constant economic insecurity, which afflicts all but the
very careless or the very prosperous to-day. Painful things being
absent are forgotten. On the same principle certain common objects of
our daily life you might not miss at all. There would be no slums, no
hundreds of miles of insanitary, ignoble homes, no ugly
health-destroying cheap factories. If you were not in the habit of
walking among slums and factories you would scarcely notice that. Din
and stress would be enormously gone. But you would remark simply a
change in the atmosphere about you and in your own contentment that
would be as difficult to analyze as the calm of a Sunday morning in
sunshine in a pleasant country.

Let me put my conception of the Socialist world to a number of typical
readers, as it were, so that they may see clearly just what difference
in circumstances there would be for them if we Socialists could have
our way now. Let me suppose them as far as possible exactly what they
are now save for these differences.

Then first let us take a sample case and suppose yourself to be an
elementary teacher. So far as your work went you would be very much as
you are to-day; you would have a finer and more beautiful school-room
perhaps, bet