, and establish conditions and influences that
make more easy the finding of the right way.

Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of
a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything
of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy
which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and
potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses
them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In
questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism
and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose,
attacking precisely the two institutions which are today--or at all
events have been until very recently--held in most conspicuous honour by
the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for
my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature,
and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore
absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the
matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with
politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate
problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human
scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of
immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the
quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative
standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited
catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have
in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution
which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others
of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very
energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly
mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these
energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate
past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the
Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.
There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of
death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man,
perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul,