church: the essence of wholesome
association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he
knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their
first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals
whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of
personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to
the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which
covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential
matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He
votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he
knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another
group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the
United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds
himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if
he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps,
except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or
in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he
find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind
and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of
potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human
animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and
quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.

Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural
associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are
unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the
club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate
interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and
regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not
vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the
neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into
classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of
"class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this
imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human
scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money,
manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a
human unit or an essenti