stead literary society--I forget
the name--and read some time in October 1914. It was printed the
following year in the _International Journal of Ethics_.

BEFORE THE WAR

[Sidenote: _Cambridge Magazine May 1917_]

It is to me a strange thing that since the beginning of the war
Utopia-building has gone on more merrily than ever. Almost every one has
a scheme for social reconstruction; and of these schemes, though most
are of that familiar kind which discovers in compulsory
strike-arbitration the true and only panacea, some are in themselves
attractive enough, being more or less intelligent attempts to combine
Socialist economics with the maximum of personal liberty. And yet I can
take no interest in any of them, though my apathy, I know, vexes my
friends who complain that in old days, before the war, no castle-builder
was more reckless than I.

Very true: but things have changed since then. Before the war England
was immensely rich; and the upper classes, before the war, were
beginning to find barbarism boring. Consequently the lower and
lower-middle, as they got money and pushed up towards the light, entered
a world that could afford to be liberal, about which floated, vaguely
enough, ideas that in time might have been turned to good account. That
is where the Edwardian-Georgian age differed most hopefully from the
Victorian. In Victorian days when a man became rich or ceased to be
miserably poor he still found himself in a society where money-making
was considered the proper end of existence: intellectually he was still
in the slums. In the spring of 1914 society offered the new-comer
precisely what the new-comer wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less
a perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish
no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a
mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth.
Not, I suppose, since 1789 have days seemed more full of promise than
those spring days of 1914. They seem fabulous now, and a fairy-tale
never comes amiss.

The generation that takes its first look at the world in the years that
follow the war will hardly be persuaded that in the years that just
preceded it the governing class was drifting out of barbarism. Yet so it
was. The brighter and better educated, at any rate, were beginning to
discover that clever people are more entertaining than stupid ones, and
that social experiment is as good an