machine.  We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky.  And so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno’s lilies are in flower, and does little more than bless the work of its committees.  And even these committees are less originative and more expressive of the general thought than they were at first.  It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities of the world.  Continually we are less personal.  Every good thought contributes now, and every able brain falls within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers together into one purpose the energies of the race.

Section 10

It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in which ‘politics,’ that is to say a partisan interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men.  We seem to have entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and discredited thing.  Contentious professions cease to be an honourable employment for men.  The peace between nations is also a peace between individuals.  We live in a world that comes of age.  Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble adventure.

There is no natural life of man.  He is, and always has been, a sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a palimpsest of inherited dispositions.  It was the habit of many writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities.  How wrong that was the history of the decades immediately following the establishment of the world republic witnesses.  Once the world was released from the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion to make things.  The world broke out into making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making.  This phase of history, which has been not inaptly termed the ‘Efflorescence,’ is still, to a large extent, with us.  The majority of our population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration, decoration, and refinement.  There has been an evident change in the quality of this making during