would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto
flowed.

[Sidenote: Is current civilisation a good?]

Civilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with a
certain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way of
defending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good.
In one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to a
more simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracy
has fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age than
in an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal and
material, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easily
shared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead of
dividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking.
The necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in a
sparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted
not only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even in
our society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship which
the civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should
triumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishing
the amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury,
many instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced.
We might see the means of communication, lately so marvellously
developed, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting in
harbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while a
rural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, would
spread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling them
seats of Babylonian servitude and folly.

Such anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is no
probability that a reaction against material progress should set in in
the near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and population
continues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose that
these tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment in
civilisation is the last the world will see?

[Sidenote: Horrors of materialistic democracy.]

If social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth and
proposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnace
at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By
whom would the pr