Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours.  In questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose, attacking precisely the two institutions which are today—­or at all events have been until very recently—­held in most conspicuous honour by the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature, and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited catastrophe.  In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly mastered, has got far beyond his depth.  I say man has mastered these energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate past.  They now have mastered him.  It is the old story of the Frankenstein monster over again.  Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.  There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of death.  An isolated individual here and there may become super-man, perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale, though hardly.  If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe.  With society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush of primordial things, and where once was the white man’s city is now the eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the jackal and the python come again into their heritage.