ry is going to
the devil."

Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced
upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed
internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke
up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes,
again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak,
inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as
in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic
development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the
chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically,
ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or
plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a
while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is
produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new
order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise;
till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the
most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as
exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a
particular butterfly.

Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general and
Britain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. And
they will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Laws
and faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a new
heaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strange
that people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, when
the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatter
yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your
particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any
more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All
alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put the
Constitution into the melting-pot," said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect
his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble
opinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, and
even beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremely
like it, may with great probability be the final outcome of that
particular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable,
and in any case the melting is general, not s