The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has produced the conditions they would redeem.  Socialism is now as completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in its scope and methods.  Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in its operations.  Secular reformers must organize vast committees with intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by “drives” for money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land.  Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn’t always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic “nation-wide” terms and is “put across” by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate “teams” of propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising.  A good deal can be bought this way, but it will not “stay bought,” for no reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for it vitiates every institution we have.  Here, where I am dealing with society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations of every sort.  It will reverse the whole system of specialization and the segregation and unification of industries and the division of labour.  It will build upward from the primary unit of the family, through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying force which links together a federation of states.  In general it will be a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent, and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and towards the unit of human scale.  In every case however, the introduction of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature.  Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the elimination