Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek beauty in himself and in his way of living.  He will be temperate rather than harshly abstinent, and he will keep himself fit and in training as an elementary duty.  He will not be a fat or emaciated person.  Fat, panting men, and thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly be considered good citizens any more than dirty or verminous people.  He will be just as fine and seemly in his person as he can be, not from vanity and self-assertion but to be pleasing and agreeable to his fellows.  The ugly dress and ugly bearing of the “good man” of to-day will be as incomprehensible to him as the filth of a palaeolithic savage is to us.  He will not speak of his “frame,” and hang clothes like sacks over it; he will know and feel that he and the people about him have wonderful, delightful and beautiful bodies.

And—­I speak of the ideal common citizen—­he will be a student and a philosopher.  To understand will be one of his necessary duties.  His mind, like his body, will be fit and well clothed.  He will not be too busy to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush about to get ignorantly and blatantly rich.  It follows that, since he will have a mind exercised finely and flexible and alert, he will not be a secretive man.  Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity; men and women need to be educated, and he will be educated out of these vices.  He will be intensely truthful, not simply in the vulgar sense of not misstating facts when pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific man or the artist, and as scornful of concealment as they; truthful, that is to say, as the expression of a ruling desire to have things made plain and clear, because that so they are most beautiful and life is at its finest....

And all that I have written of him is equally true and applies word for word, with only such changes of gender as are needed, to the woman citizen also.

SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES

The present time is harvest home for the prophets.  The happy speculator in future sits on the piled-up wain, singing “I told you so,” with the submarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole successfully achieved.  In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapes attention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keeping pace with the crop of consummations.  The present trend of scientific development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; its promises lack the elementary breadth of that simpler time.  Once you have flown, you have flown.  Once you have steamed about under water, you have steamed about under water.  There seem no more big things of that kind available—­so that I almost regret the precipitance of Commander Peary and Captain Amundsen.  No one expects to go beyond that atmosphere for some centuries at least; all the elements are now invaded.  Conceivably man may