catastrophic equivalent of spending one's days in crowded, unwholesome and hideous places, doing fatiguing, monotonous work, with only betting, cinemas, a yearly visit to Blackpool, the daily pub and weekly chapel for spiritual refreshment. And the war's spectacular sudden violation of all legitimate claims upon existence is but the cataclysmal heaping up, nations rearing on to each other like express trains in collision, of what is accepted as normal when spread out in every-day recurrence. Both signify that larger and larger masses of mankind have been compressed into an automatic mechanism which checks the play of preference, and imposes dull or deluded acquiescence in what is abhorrent to one's instincts.

As was already reiterated by Ruskin and Morris, the streets and factories of our cities, and the desecrated landscape surrounding them, are an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual disgrace. Not a symbol merely, but a specimen and a proof, of the paralysis of will and judgment now exhibiting its acute and paroxysmal phase in the material and mental happenings of this war.

This is not saying that our times are worse than any previous ones. Let me repeat what I remarked at the beginning of this note, that such pitting of Past against Present or Present against Past is among the futile exercises wherewith our friend Clio helps us to work off, with no further result, our dissatisfaction or (vide Macaulay's frequent descriptions of his own Golden Age of 1830-50) our silly self-satisfaction. It does not matter whether the Past is better than the Present or vice versa. What does is the recognition that the Present is just as bad as it happens to be; and of the share which the Past with its heredities, bodily and social, has had in producing the Present's good and bad points; for only through such recognition can we add our knowledge and our choice and our effort to the other factors determining the Future.

This is why, though rarely agreeing with the Muse of History, I have made use of her to point out that the enormity of our war is part and parcel of the enormity of our previous peace.

I use the work Enormity advisedly; because, while implying what is painful and against the grain of life, it emphasizes the question of scale, of size, numbers, pace, the element of

mere addition and multiplication, which gives to all modern evil its particular vast and crushing unwieldiness; and that immense balance of waste over benefit, with which our war is smiting even the dullest imagination. Now this question. of scale strikes me as all important, for the sudden enlargement therein, the unprecedented, unexpected, uncompensated increase in geographical extension, impact of force, swiftness of communication, hence material and mental exploitation and all we proudly call " power over nature and "human organization," has been quite disportionate to any increase in the spiritual capacity of dealing with all these things, meaning by spiritual the power of preference, understanding, and purpose. And this disproportion may, for aught we know, and as our war seems rather to show, be horribly on the increase with the further increase of what is called applied science, meaning science applied to material powers (not necessarily material welfare !) but not at all applied to man's powers of thinking and choosing. Indeed many of our professional guides and philosophers have been remarking on this disproportion, though not including reference to themselves and their teachings and preachings, which I should like to insist upon. For this modern and perhaps growing disproportion, like most others in human affairs, rests on the simple basis that some things pay and others don't; and that, as man requires to live on bread before he can live on higher nutriment, those things which pay will, at any given time, tend to engross all efforts; while those which don't will, like the persons who starve upon them, tend to be discarded. As illustration of this and of the causes of our own so different state of affairs, let me remind the reader (without one moment's suggestion that early Hellas may have been a pleasanter place than latter-day Britain !) that in the palmy days of Heraclitus and Empedocles, their contemporary Croesus did not owe his famous millions to any application of physics and chemistry to geological discoveries in Asia Minor, for the sufficient reason that no one had so far even heard of any of such sciences; while on the other hand (and the ears of priests and magistrates not having yet grown sensitive to heresy) there was a deal of kudos to be got, let alone no end of entertainment, out of

teachings and discussions such as laid the foundations, once for all, of scientific thought. Now, in our days, matters are exactly reversed. For in our days it happens that the application of science to material concerns enormously enriches the Croesuses who buy up or exploit what we call "inventions," meaning machines and drugs and such like; while, on the other hand, the application of science, that is of the methods of thinking which science has elaborated, to concerns of the mind, no less obviously diminishes the emoluments and reputable leisure of those whom the theological and scholastic past has bequeathed as the guardians and trustees of our spiritual welfare. This being the case for over a century and a half, and sempre crescendo, science, we remark with pride, has been busy transforming the world in such a way that our own great-grandfathers, let alone those Ionian and Sicilian Sages and Croesus King of Lydia, would scarcely recognize it. For there is nothing, almost, we cannot do, on earth, on water, or in air, excepting do the work and live in the way which we should like. Transformation of the world? Á three-hour journey by the Midland, or Great Central Railway, even a tram-excursion into Greater London, leaves no doubt of that, particularly after looking over the English water-colour landscapes of early Turner days. And our life, as we add with even sincerer pride, is transformed no less. Indeed the vast majority of lives now crowded into those ever-increasing rows of airless, viewless, joyless streets, have, for the last hundred years, themselves come into being by the creative fiat of applied science's beneficent and increasing demand for labour in the collieries and mills, and other bouillons de culture where (however unsuspected by those industrious generations themselves) our teeming contemporary Homunculi are produced, just as Goethe's imaginary specimen Homunculus was generated in Faust's crucible. And since I have mentioned Goethe, let me exemplify the prodigious increase of scale, size, numbers, and particularly pace, due to thelucrative character of science when applied solely to material objects, by pointing out that we moderns should require to symbolize Time the Bringer-of-Change is an Express-driver, a Chauffeur, and latterly an Airman; whereas, writing in the days

of Watt and Arkwright, he found nothing more expressive of the furious speed of Kronos than to compare him with a postillion bobbing six miles an hour in front of a post-chaise.

All this amounts to saying that machinery has grown; and mankind grown not so much with, meaning proportionately, as into it. Mankind's thought and imagination and will and effort have grown, precisely fitted, to that machinery's requirements; grown thanks to machines themselves, to telegraphs, telephones, marconigrams, and even those latest mechanical toys which display to all belligerent stay-at-homes bowdlerized battles and film-faked atrocities almost at the very minute of their taking place. Nor by positive methods only, but by more potent negative ones of omission and suppression : ideas, wishes, facts allowed diffusion only in so far as their diffusion increases, without producing friction, the immeasurable, complicated automatism of our thoroughly mechanized existence.

And here some of my friends will at once recognize in this description the apocalyptic monster Capitalism. Alas, that is not what I am alluding to. I say " alas," for Capitalism, the entirely wicked and marvellously simple monster they talk about, would long ago have had its neck wrung, belonging as it does to the race of dragons made of printed paper. Whereas the automatic monster I am describing could flourish equally under, say, the scientific socialism of the Webbs; and will, unfortunately, survive, by dint of applied science and scientific organization, through a great number of political transformations, using them up, indeed, like the much-boomed transformation of the France of the Monarchy into the France of the Third Republic, and the England of Cobbett into the England of the Harmsworths. I even suspect that the very belief in what those friends of mine call Capitalism, and the belief that you need only seize the accursed Jabberwok by the neck, and after a brief snick-a-snack of Democracy's worple-blade, that mankind will arise free and rejoicing-I even suspect that this cry against Capitalism, though undoubtedly beneficial as representing criticism and revolt, is largely machine-made-another shoddy, standardized product of that application of Science to material problems only, and to

those, above all, which pay. However this may be, and however stupid and wasteful the War of Classes which will replace this present War of Nations, I return to my contention that the latter-I mean the War of Nations-is of the same origin and the same substance as the horrible houses in which most men and women at present live, the factories they overwork in, the public-houses and betting-sports in which they take their recreation: the expression, not of alert preferences and intelligent effort, but of machine-made acquiescence. And the war, with its unanimity of wasteful sacrifice, has shown that the multitude have as little outlook into Reality as they have view from their windows; and that it is no easier for them to unclog their minds than to wash their bodies. For in a civilization like ours you can only hear what has been previously read; you can only read what has been printed and published; you can print and publish only what has sufficient appeal to be sold off quickly and in larger and larger editions; just as you can only elect political representatives who have organizations behind them; neither more nor less than you can eat and drink only what the other kind of caterers find it remunerative to sell you. And all of them, caterers and catered for, financiers as well as proletarians, journalists and readers, governments and governed, teachers and taught, are all equally the variously specialized interlocking and standardized parts of that vast automatism which has resulted less from human preference and purpose than from the suddenly discovered economic fatalities of chemical substances and mechanical processes.

In this automatism, in all other respects more like a machine than a living organism, there lurks, however, the saving grace of sensitiveness to pain and pleasure; and hence the power of adaptation. This being so, we may be sure that, even at this moment, there is evolving some small unsuspected organ or quality, most likely a by-product, even as the human hand and jaw and hence the human brain were once by-products of adaptations in lower creatures; some unseen factor destined to alter for the better this dreadful latter-day organism wherein man's muscles and man's mind, and the sinews and food and lubricants of machines, are interlocking