and it is conceivable
that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale,
though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community
made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the
human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With
society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and
geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with
all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is
simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the
delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the
thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush
of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the
eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot
out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the
jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli
and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits
of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link
imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more
ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the
quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but
even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come
many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and
exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they
exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed
1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which
degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of
industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance,
capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized
education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches
"run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity
agents."

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society
with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social
group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding
stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local
trade or craft guild and to his parish