and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built
up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines
where the handicraft should function. It becomes necessary--let us
say--to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million
dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years)
and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can
meet this demand. Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should
be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many
other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.

For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward
from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of
creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small
and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter
downward from above. This is the only true democracy, and the thing we
call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best
energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have
inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating,
tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the
sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society. Neither the
vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice
can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established
in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.

If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in
which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of
social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and
self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of
labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a
much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what
organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It
is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life
itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate
the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative
values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights
and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and
jealously preserving, or passionat