Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the quantitative standard.  It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but even of civilization itself.  Out of this same gross scale of things come many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed 1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance, capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized education, “metropolitan” newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches “run on business methods” and recruited by advertising and “publicity agents.”

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding stream of grain.  Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local trade or craft guild and to his parish church:  the essence of wholesome association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he knows personally—­and preferably so well that he calls them all by their first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them.  He belongs to the “local” of a union which is a part of a labour organization which covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away.  He votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the United States, for President.  If he goes to church in a city he finds himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if he mixes in “society” he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps, except his own neighbourhood.  Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status.  He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.