bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and
then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation
enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has
now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and
nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is
conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by
efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of
propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A
good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no
reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since
reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it
will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for
it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with
society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome
society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations
of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and
the segregation and unification of industries and the division of
labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family,
through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and
self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying
force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be
a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of
a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent,
and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common
lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been
recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became
operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two
centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral
practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and
towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction
of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually
materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature.
Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of
human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the
elimination of private property and the negation of sacred
i