Most uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry, leading not to wealth, but to that awful waste of wealth which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed—­not hands alone, but land, machinery, and, most of all, hearts.  Those who still practise these frontier morals are like criminals, who, according to the new science of penology, are simply reappearances of old types.  Their acquisitiveness once divine like Mercury’s, is now out of place except in jail.  Because out of place, they are a danger.  A sorry day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way when the new people rise to rush into each other’s arms, to get together, to stay together and to live together.  The labour movement halts because so many of its rank and file—­and all its leaders—­do not see clearly the golden thread of love on which have been strung together all the past glories of human association, and which is to serve for the link of the new Association of Friends who Labour, whose motto is ‘All for All.’”

The establishment of the intricate co-operative commonwealth by a rush of eighty million flushed and shiny-eyed enthusiasts, in fact, is Lloyd’s proposal.  He will not face, and few Americans to this day will face, the cold need of a great science of social adjustment and a disciplined and rightly ordered machinery to turn such enthusiasms to effect.  They seem incurably wedded to gush.  However, he did express clearly enough the opening phase of American disillusionment with the wild go-as-you-please that had been the conception of life in America through a vehement, wasteful, expanding century.  And he was the precursor of what is now a bulky and extremely influential literature of national criticism.  A number of writers, literary investigators one may call them, or sociological men of letters, or magazine publicists—­they are a little difficult to place—­has taken up the inquiry into the condition of civic administration, into economic organisation into national politics and racial interaction, with a frank fearlessness and an absence of windy eloquence that has been to many Europeans a surprising revelation of the reserve forces of the American mind.  President Roosevelt, that magnificent reverberator of ideas, that gleam of wilful humanity, that fantastic first interruption to the succession of machine-made politicians at the White House, has echoed clearly to this movement and made it an integral part of the general intellectual movement of America.

It is to these first intimations of the need of a “sense of the State” in America that I would particularly direct the reader’s attention in this discussion.  They are the beginnings of what is quite conceivably a great and complex reconstructive effort.  I admit they are but beginnings.  They may quite possibly wither and perish presently; they may much more probably be seized upon by adventurers and converted into a new cant almost as empty and fruitless as the old.  The fact remains that,