Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn’t going to be so prosperous as the nineteenth.  Perhaps, instead of going resistlessly onward, we are going to have a set-back.  Perhaps we are going to be put back to learn over again under simpler conditions some of those necessary fundamental lessons our race has learnt as yet insufficiently well—­honesty and brotherhood, social collectivism, and the need of some common peace-preserving council for the whole world.

THE IDEAL CITIZEN

Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and sevens.  No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole range of human possibility and conduct.  As a consequence, we bring up our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may do, doomed to lives of compromise and fluctuating and inoperative opinion.  Ideals and suggestions come and go before their eyes like figures in a fog.  The commonest pattern, perhaps—­the commonest pattern certainly in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those places and occasions when morality is sought as an end—­is a clean and able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies, temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry, and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but not adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to his wife and children, and kind without extravagance to all men.  Everyone feels that this is not enough, everyone feels that something more is wanted and something different; most people are a little interested in what that difference can be, and it is a business that much of what is more than trivial in our art, our literature and our drama must do to fill in bit by bit and shade by shade the subtle, the permanent detail of the answer.

It does very greatly help in this question to bear in mind the conflict of our origins.  Every age is an age of transition, of minglings, of the breaking up of old, narrow cultures, and the breaking down of barriers, of spiritual and often of actual interbreeding.  Not only is the physical but the moral and intellectual ancestry of everyone more mixed than ever it was before.  We blend in our blood, everyone of us, and we blend in our ideas and purposes, craftsmen, warriors, savages, peasants, and a score of races, and an endless multitude of social expedients and rules.  Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers.  You will find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles,